BarbaraLippert of Adweek likes the new Starbucks spots from Wieden + Kennedy.

"Ski Lift" is abstract, but still warm. It features cool, switched-on music ("I Love NYE," by Badly Drawn Boy) and even offers a little breather when it comes on, like staring inside a snow globe, or, um, taking a coffee break in a cozy, welcoming café.

Given that Caribou Coffee is a Starbucks competitor in several states, I find this particular heart-warmer kind of interesting.

Although I'm very fuzzy on how the compensation models are set up, I've been intrigued by agencies like Anomaly that have pursued other means of revenue than writing ads.

This story in Adweek mentions that Anomaly has lost Virgin America, but because of the unusual business arrangement, things sound complicated:

Virgin America's split with the incumbent will take effect in January, said Jason DeLand, a partner at Anomaly.

"We decided to amicably part ways and wish them nothing but luck. We loved working on the business with them," said DeLand. "The split was due, though, to taking away key business model opportunities where Anomaly could profit in a entrepreneurial way."

Previously, Anomaly got a portion of the revenue generated by the sale of certain Virgin America products, on-board entertainment and entertainment sponsorships that the independent shop developed, DeLand said.

Can anyone shed some light on this? Does this mean Anomaly no longer will get money for "products" or other things they've created? Can you cut off a relationship like that just as easily as firing an agency?

This issue fits perfectly with the compensation issues I wrote about recently. If ad agencies get more involved in other parts of a client's business, to the point of creating things that have a longer shelf-life than ads, who controls the revenue? If clients like Virgin America can pull the plug on an agency without warning, It certainly sounds like ad agencies would be discouraged from doing deals like this in the future.

According to Stuart Elliott, WNBC-TV in New York is daring to run spirits ads.

The decision is a small but significant sign of changing attitudes toward advertising of products that many consider contentious. From 1948 until 1996, no TV station or network accepted liquor ads although distilled spirits were advertised in newspapers, magazines and billboards.

Today, hundreds of television stations and networks carry commercials for distilled spirits. But the four biggest broadcast networks, including NBC, do not. They remain skittish about critics who contend that opening television — still the most powerful advertising medium — to the marketers of distilled spirits will more readily expose those pitches to children and teenagers.

The commercials on WNBC, Channel 4, began appearing last Friday, without fanfare. Plans call for the spots to run through the new year on news, talk and sports programs. The spots are being sponsored by the Bacardi North America division of Bacardi & Company and feature brands like Bacardi rum and Grey Goose vodka.

So what's a responsible partent to do? How about treating the remote like a loaded gun in the house?

Rob Walker discusses the absense of a design imperative in MySpace's offering.

When I first looked at MySpace, my reaction was: “What a mess. It’s just (visual) noise.” In fact I think I reacted to it much like parents reacted to some of the music I listened to when I was a kid: That it wasn’t music at all, just noise.

Now what’s interesting about that to me is that, from my point of view, it most certainly was music. It was not “noise” in the way they meant, at all. They just didn’t get it. We differed.

And since I first looked at MySpace, I’ve wondered if something analogous isn’t going on. It looks like visual noise to me, but maybe I just don’t get it. The people who made MySpace a hit originally were largely members of a generation that I’m not in. Maybe MySpace spoke to them in a graphic/visual language that not only made sense to them, but pleases them — the same way the Ramones or the Clash pleased me, but agitated my parents.

One can manipulate the code and make MyMessySpace more orderly, but 99,9% of the templates available for free on third party sites contribute to the MySpace look and feel, as opposed to redefining it in a cleaner, more Facebook-like manner.

For more on this topic, see Danah Boyd's field research.

This month's Fast Company has quite the puff piece on Publicis and its assorted ventures, including Digitas, Droga5, and how it's all coming together.

Here's a choice nugget you may not have known about Digitas and its CEO, David Kenny:

Kenny has focused on transformative, systemwide initiatives since arriving at Publicis. In May, he rolled out a digital production company called Prodigious Worldwide, which uses workers in low-cost countries like Costa Rica and Ukraine to build the thousands of iterations of ads that clients of all the Publicis agencies use to reach consumers on cell phones, computers, and, eventually, TV. According to Prodigious president Corey Torrence, that effort is already saving participating agencies between 30% and 60% on production costs. Then, in June, Kenny convened a family gathering in Paris to discuss how Publicis could win in digital as a group. Tom Eslinger, Saatchi's worldwide creative director for interactive, sat in on the meeting and has since used Prodigious to build the back end of a variety of labor-intensive interactive campaigns. "I've got more heavy-duty stuff coming down the pipeline, on a scale bigger than we would do in-house," he says. "Now I don't have to have people crunching out 300 Web pages or 50 banner ads."

I guess it's a new iteration of French colonialism, getting third-world peons to tackle the gruntwork. Is any other agency outsourcing its work like that on such a mass scale?

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in the tech sector with a popular following thanks to his A VC blog, thinks Apple brand is bruised and on the road to worm-ridden.

I am afraid to upgrade to a new version of iTunes because it might make my music and video unusable or it might brick my iPhone. I am afraid to upgrade to Leopard because it might brick my MacBook.

I have a brand new iPhone sitting right next to me on my desk that I can't figure out how to unlock and jailbreak now that it comes pre-loaded with 1.1.2 firmware. So it just sits there on my desk making me hate Apple more every day.

Apple is an old school company. Instead of forcing Verizon to open up like Google does, they make a sick consumer unfriendly deal with AT&T here in the states and then proceed to replicate it around the world.

I must admit, I love the Mac OS and iTunes but I've never purchased an iPod and I do not want the iPhone although I do want mobile internet. When Google provides one next year, I'll opt for it. And I'm open to considering a Zune.

The New York Times explores the cultural and anthropologic modes found in online social networks.

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons and ritual objects to cement their social ties. On Facebook, people accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls and hula girls.

In other words, useless online trinkets equals a hand made spear? Uh, bullshit. The value in the online trinket is purely symbolic, a slight recognition that you exist and are important to someone. A spear on the other hand, is a prized tool that helps ensure one's very survival.

On a mostly unrelated note, how smart was DDB to name their interactive practice, Tribal DDB?

According to The New York Times, Dr. Martens are looking to rebound from a bad ad campaign and slumping sales.

After Dr. Martens ran advertisements that depicted dead rock stars like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Joe Strummer of the Clash wearing its shoes in heaven, the musicians’ survivors (who had not granted permission) and fans were outraged. The outcry was so great that the British company that makes the shoes, AirWair International, issued an apology and fired its advertising agency, the London office of Saatchi & Saatchi, part of the Publicis Groupe.

But now the brand has a new campaign, a new agency and fresh ambitions for a comeback.

The campaign, by Exposure Communications of London, features young models wearing Docs with grunge- and punk-inflected outfits and expressions of bored disaffection; the spots are appearing in the United States, Britain, France and Germany in publications like Teen Vogue, Spin and British GQ.

The article also mentions that Dr. Martens provides gratis to musicians, including Avril Lavigne, Gallows and the Misshapes. I don't blame the brand for doing so, but I will ask, "How rock and roll is that?"

I spotted this nugget from Chris Tingom at BrainFuel.

Like some bored copywriter did with this Spirit Airlines e-mail blast.

I laughed.

Anyone ever try to pull something like this on an unsuspecting client?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight has been attending English classes at Stanford.

Knight graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1962 and has given over $100 million to the school since then.

One of the tidbits in the article I found particularly interesting is the way he reads The Sun Also Rises.

One of Mr. Knight's homework assignments suggested he had a penchant for Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, about American expatriates, known for its thrilling bullfighting scenes set in Spain. "Writing 12 drafts and discussing them with Scott Fitzgerald did not hurt this book," wrote Mr. Knight. "Love stories are what the public wants more than any other type of story, but they are the most difficult to write. Even for Hemingway."

But Mr. Knight took exception to the book's unadorned dialogue, prose that he says might have used a bit more narration from Mr. Hemingway's pen. Mr. Knight also seems to disdain Brett Ashley, the book's femme fatale who is "central to everything," but "had nothing endearing about her except her beauty."

I see Lady Ashley a bit differently. To me, she exemplifies the modern woman's struggle for a post-Victorian identity, and ranks as one of the first "do-me" feminists in literary history.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Nestlé USA will start selling two types of Jamba Juice fruit drinks at grocery stores in eight Western U.S. states next year in a move that will advance Nestlé's push into ready-to-drink beverages.

For Jamba Inc., operator of the Jamba Juice chain, the licensing deal will mark the juice brand's first foray beyond its retail stores. "We've always felt the Jamba Juice brand was highly extendable," says Paul Clayton, chief executive of Jamba Juice, based in Emeryville, Calif. "It was just a matter of us finding the right partner."

Nestlé USA, a unit of Nestlé SA, Vevey, Switzerland, will manufacture and distribute the drinks. Nestlé may eventually sell Jamba Juice beverages in other countries, where the company now mostly sells powdered drinks.

MySpace announced the launch of MySpace Transmissions today, a new music program that lets recording artists create and distribute exclusive video content. The concept brings the online community behind the scenes and into the recording studio with their favorite artists.

“Transmissions takes our existing music programming to the next level by creating a unique way to expose users to exclusive content while empowering artists and labels with a new way to generate revenue on MySpace,” said Josh Brooks, VP of Programming and Content for MySpace. “We’re committed to working with all stakeholders in the industry to develop monetization structures that work for labels, bands, and fans. Stay tuned—this is the tip of the iceberg in the evolution of MySpace Music.”

[via BusinessWire]

Creature, the Seattle agency that creates things and reinterprets advertsing, has come up with some quirky materials to support Microsoft's new Windows Home Servers.

Their Stay at Home Servers campaign includes online films, a microsite, banners and a children’s book, Mommy, Why is there a Server in the House?.

The campaign draws a parallel between the server and a father who chooses to stay at home, which is quick shorthand for what the product is, and a way to talk to the target in terms they understand – the conflict between work and home.

Nokia is morphing into a media business, according to The New York Times.

Next year the handset maker will team with Universal Music Group, and other labels that opt in, to offer consumers free music.

Under the agreement, Universal will let users download its entire catalog at no cost for 12 months, and keep the songs at the end of that time. Users will be able to download the songs to new Nokia phones or to their computers via mobile or fixed-line broadband connections.

Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Jupiter Research said, “What is bold and strategically important about this is that they are tacitly accepting that they will never get digital youth to pay for music.”

It's also clear Nokia will fight Apple head-on by trying to loosen Cupertino's hold on the digital music business, and by providing viable alternatives to the iPhone.

Ad Age looks at two agencies opening outposts in San Francisco—Olson and R/GA.

image courtesy of Flickr user, http2007

Harold Sogard, vice chairman, Goodby Silverstein said, "I welcome R/GA to the center of true creativity."

Olson CEO John Olson said, "We, for one, like it there. The people who share our beliefs are there and the talent vein is so rich."

I hear that.

Dell will spend $4.5 billion over three years with holding company WPP, which will "go into business" with Dell by creating a new agency brand that will ultimately be available to other clients.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

One condition laid down by Dell in the review was that the companies vying for its business figure out a way to foster more collaboration between the people who create ads for TV and print and the other experts who do things such as research consumer behavior or craft Web ads. To address that, WPP Group has agreed to create a new agency that will eventually oversee all of these tasks.

In an interview, Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, said it would take WPP and Dell roughly three to six months to build the new firm, which will start with about 1,000 employees. He declined to say how much WPP would spend to create the agency, whose code name was Project DaVinci. He said it would be staffed with a combination of existing WPP employees and new hires.

The computer-maker joins a growing list of big-name advertisers such as Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Unilever that have expressed frustration with the way the ad and marketing firms are structured. Many marketers say that getting different companies to work together -- even ones owned by the same ad holding company -- is tough. They say ad executives too often push agendas that will most help their own bottom lines and tend to favor certain types of media, such as TV.

I don't know if WPP and Deell's "Project DaVinci" is the answer, but I do know agency execs of all sorts and sizes need to find an answer. We've danced around this integrated marketing thing for over a decade with few notable realizations of the concept. Now, with the rise of digital, the so-called "line" that agencies either fall below or rise above is a non-topic. There is no line today. It's been obliterated, like several other sacred cows. Which is great news for those willing to accept the changes and move forward. Wherever there's disruption, there's also opportunity.

If you're sick and tired of pharmaceutical ads on TV, wait 'til you get a load of the next trend: marketing medical devices directly to consumers. From The New York Times:

The Cypher television spot might be mystifyingly vague to viewers who have never heard of stents, which are implanted in blood vessels to prop them open after blockages have been cleared. Cypher was designed for the vital network of arteries that keep the heart nourished with oxygen. The aim in using it is lasting relief from chest pains and shortness of breath, the symptoms of clogged coronary arteries known as angina.

A Cypher stent flashes across the screen during the spot, but there is no indication of its actual size or how it is implanted. Instead, Cordis strikes two themes: Cypher relieves pain and other angina symptoms (so talk to your doctor about it) and, when it comes to coronary stents, Cypher is the most studied and widely used.

Not surprisingly, the campaign has stirred criticism among doctors who oppose direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs and devices, and especially among doctors who contend that stents are being implanted too often in patients who might do better with other treatments.

“It’s deplorable,” said Dr. William E. Boden, a professor of medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “You’ve got to wonder whether it’s a sign of desperation.”

Uh, it's not a sign of desperation, it's a sign of the times. There is big money in medical treatments, and doctors associated with certain devices often get big kickbacks from their manufacturers. So it's to the manufacturer's advantage to get their brand name out to the public.

Today's Yahoo! home page prominently features an ad for American Express starring Tina Fey.

I'd say she's got one less thing to worry about, given that's she raking in some nice endorsement cash while she and other, more starving WGA writers are on strike.

video courtesy of YouTube user, Michael Wesch

When I was in Cambridge last month, I picked up the hardbound first edition of David Weinberger's new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. I just started reading it, so I'll need to circle back in order to offer deeper analysis, but I can say "so far so good."

Here's a pickup from his chapter "Social Knowing" that grabbed me:

In a miscellaneous world, an Oz-like authority that speaks in a single voice with unshakable confidence is a blowhard. Authority now comes from enabling us inescapably fallible creatures to explore the differences among us, together.

Even if you don't invest in Weinberger's book, the above nugget might help as you plan and implement work for your clients, especially when that work has a digital element or base.

I don't believe it will be easy for marketers (and their agencies) to stop acting like blowhards, but in the context of democratized content, false or single-source authority is so much more conspicuous than it ever was.

So if an agency monolith like Publicis can outsource production work in the new world-new media-order, what about the rest of the creative jobs in advertising?

At some point, when marketers ultimately look at the efficiencies they’ve achieved with third-world interactive servants, they may decide to that the writing and the art direction doesn’t matter so much as long as they’re mashed up quickly. The best and brightest will give way to the fastest and cheapest.

If you think your job in advertising is immune to outsourcing, consider this: Many oft-quoted ad gurus are fixated on “engaging in a dialogue” with consumers. But every company already dedicates a portion of its budget to engaging its customers in a two-way dialogue. It’s called the customer service hotline. And despite its importance to customers, I leave it to you to decide where that call center might be located, and how well it works for many companies.

I explore it more in my new column on TalentZoo.com. I think this one is the 100th column I've written over the past 6 years. Good lord.

Someone on the brand team at Dr. Pepper is spending a lot of time on YouTube. And why not? There are learnings to be gleaned and talent to be mined there.

Take singer-songwriter and distinctive vocalist, Tay Zonday. He's already an internet hitmaker, so Dr. Pepper wisely hitched a ride on his wagon, asking him to remake his "Chocolate Rain" vid (which has been viewed more than 11 million times on YouTube) into something the brand could benefit from.

According to the daily (ad) biz, the brand's agency of record, Y&R, did not have a hand in this video production. So ad peeps are not just being outsourced to India and other low-wage nations. Strategies are being written by the brand team and execution is being handed off to DIY consumers and culture makers.

Isn't disruption fun?

Kenneth Hein, writing for Brandweek offers us a new term for the advertising lexicon: Visual Vampire.

Wendy’s red wig-clad ads are hard to miss. However, new research shows that the characters in pony-tailed toupees greatly overshadow the products featured in the same ads.

“It is a visual vampire. There is high engagement, but when they show the food it drops like a rock,” said Lee Weinblatt, CEO of PreTesting, Tenafly, N.J.

When consumers are interested in something, their eyes vibrate faster. This is called saccadic eye movement. Special eye-movement recorders that have the ability to record not only where one looks, but the rate of saccadic motion and fixation as well.

The majority (68%) of viewers of the Wendy’s ad were riveted when the wig was on screen, but when hamburgers were shown it fell to 24%.

It's been my experience when talking to interactive shops and looking at their work that they're more focused on executing ideas rather than brand-building strategies and initiatives that can be used across all media. They're good at what they do, but it's a niche, and they're not scrambling to hire the right people to change that.

A new survey reported in Adweek seems to support that:

Digital agencies are improving their skills to help clients strategically, but still fall short in their ability to lead broader marketing and brand strategy, according to a new report by Forrester Research.

That inability means Web agencies in the near term will continue to be relegated to the role of implementer, while a client's traditional shop takes the lead, said Brian Haven, a Forrester analyst.

"The interactive agencies are in a position where all their staff is focused on executing on digital," he said. "They need people who understand that broader relationship between online and offline media."

What that says to me is that interactive shops need to get out and start hiring the right people--people who can crossover to new media, whether their experience reflects it or not. Because it seems to me that if interactive shops did that, they could dominate. After all, most of us are digital immigrants, not digital natives. What do you think? Is this report right or wrong--or both? How can interactive shops start taking the lead?

Ed Cotton of Butler Shine & Stern is asking some pertinent questions.

• Can people stand watching a campaign evolve over time or do you have to have a quick hit?
• Surely, the ever- shrinking window of personal communication must be having an impact of broad scale communication?
• Can we even be bothered to see phases of a campaign build and roll out over a two-month period from tease to reveal and on?

I think there's still penty of room for sustained campaigns to evolve, as long as each new execution delivers a tangible new discovery. For instance, last night I happened to see Gwen Stefani's HP spot. The big idea--that HP gives creative people the tools they need to do their best work--has been established. But each new character HP brings to the table deepens that idea and makes it all the more real. It seems to me that something solid that you can keep coming back to stands out from the pack in our click-click-click-consume-as-much-media-as-you-can world.

According to Adweek, Hill Holliday is stepping up to the advertainment plate by creating a new position for John Dukakis. The former governor's son will be svp, director of branded entertainment for the Boston-based shop.

Baba Shetty, evp, chief media officer at Hill, Holliday, said: "These days we're not just buying media—we're often creating media, and branded entertainment is an increasingly important part of the mix."

I'm wondering...does your agency have a branded entertainment or content team? Are you about to create one? Do you have a solid grasp on how content differs from advertising, and why it's important for agencies to be in this business (again)?

Second Life? What's that?

Coca-Cola is going another way with their new virtual world called "Metro CC."

According to The New York Times, Coke is introducing its online island within a larger virtual world site called there.com that tries to filter out unsavory content. The company that operates there.com, Makena Technologies, uses software to censor user postings for foul language and employs a team of people to filter out content that might infringe on copyrights or fall outside a PG-13 rating. Makena, of San Mateo, Calif., says that these practices make its site desirable to advertisers.

According to Network World, technology is only as perfect as those who build it.

Case in point: Microsoft recently added a Santa bot to Windows Live Messenger, so users could insert Santa into their IM buddy list. But sadly, Santa began to waver off topic telling children: “It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else....”

Microsoft says, "...as soon as we were alerted, we took steps to mitigate the issue, including the removal of language from the agent’s automated script. We were not completely satisfied with the result of these actions, and have decided to discontinue the automated Santa Claus agent."

Every month, Steve McKee of McKee Wallwork Cleveland writes a column in Businessweek that puts in simple terms what real CEOs and marketing folks ought to know about advertising.

This month, he takes on testing:

Think about how a focus group works—people are invited in, fed a meal, and paid an incentive to offer insights and opinions that the sponsoring marketer can use. The pressure is on to contribute something of value. For someone to admit that they simply like an ad or to admit that it might influence them to buy something is rare. Instead, participants tend to understate how much they are affected by advertising and be overly critical of the ads themselves.

But the desire to contribute isn't the only problem. Even if people in focus groups wanted to give an honest opinion, they may not be able to. People just aren't able to articulate or even understand all the ways advertising affects them.

Marsha Lindsay, a graduate lecturer at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the executive committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, explains the problem this way: "Copy testing and other research based on explicit learning cannot accurately predict ads' success because consumers can't tell us 'the truth' about how ads affect them. That learning often lies buried in their subconscious."

I'm glad BusinessWeek gives McKee a forum. I wish more general business publications would follow suit and open themselves up to valuable marketing insight.

Eyebrows were raised earlier this year when Nike awarded a piece of its business to CP+B. After all, Nike's top of mind presence can be traced directly to the decades of outstanding work from Wieden + Kennedy. I guess, loyalty doesn't mean much when you have shoes to sell.

According to The Wall Street Journal, CP+B hoped to break away from all that history.

"We didn't want it to feel like a Nike commercial in the beginning. We wanted the consumer to say: 'What is this?'" says Alex Bogusky, a chief creative officer at Crispin Porter.

The commercials will air on ABC Family, MTV, ESPN and Comedy Central, among other channels. Print ads are set to run in specialty magazines including Runner's World and Shape.

I have a lot of respect for Crispin, but I don't see a breakthrough idea at work in the spot above. Instead, I see them leaning on high production values to carry the day. So, the spot is not only un-Wieden, it's un-Crispin.

Tiny Gigantic points to a motherload of executions from Japan's "smoking manners" campaign.

Here's one that speaks to me:

Legendary San Francisco ad man, Rich Silverstein, has teamed with Huffington Post to offer poster-sized reminders of the times we're living through.

The 24" x 36" lithograph posters come in three versions: Villains of the GOP, Worst Events of the Bush Years, and Slogans of the Bush Years. They go for $20 each -- or one can buy all three for $50 (plus shipping and handling).

Limited Edition Silkscreens of each, signed by Arianna Huffington, are also available for $50 each (plus s/h).

All proceeds (minus printing and processing costs) will go toward putting these powerful reminders of the Bush years on buildings in New York, Los Angeles and Washington. The image above is a rendering of what they might look like in the cityscape.

Webmaster Radio
Publishing Writing and Advertising Director of Cultural Radar for Crispin Porter and Bogusky John Winsor discusses his background in publishing and writing books to joining the advertising firm Show Host: Katie Kempner Show:  The Hook Channel:  Advertising

Find out more about John Winsor.

I really don't have a strong opinion on branded entertainment on TV--it's really nothing new. But this story in the New York Times, written by Louise Story, certainly has a odd tone to it:

One of the more popular tricks — oops, I meant to say tactics — advertisers are using today is branded entertainment, which ranges from plopping a Pepsi can into a scene to writing entire television scripts based around Oreo cookies. They like this approach so much that they’re increasing the money they spend on so-called product integrations at double-digit rates, making it one of the faster growth areas for an otherwise stalled television industry.

But does product integration dupe consumers? The Federal Communications Commission is considering investigating this question, and the commissioners may add it to their public agenda as early as Tuesday.

Is this a news story or an editorial? Is there a difference anymore? Does the New York Times have an obligation to report a story about branded entertainment without the writer insisting that it's a "trick" intended to "dupe" consumers? What's the...uh...story with Story?

Agency Spy (which has been acquired by Media Bistro) points to a Seattle Times story on Avenue A/Razorfish.

Employees at interactive advertising agency Avenue A | Razorfish had a couple of questions on their minds when they heard this spring that their parent company, aQuantive, was to be acquired by Microsoft:

Do we get to keep our Macs? And will we be getting the same benefits as Microsoft employees?

The Macs stayed.

But employees at the agency, headquartered in Seattle and with offices around the world, just found out that they're not in line for the Microsoft benefits.

The Times reporter also spoke to a separate source about agency compensation, in general terms.

In general, entry-level compensation in the advertising industry "has really slipped behind other industries," said Elizabeth Zea, partner at Gilbert and Company, a New York-based management consultancy and executive recruiting firm focused on marketing companies.

Starting salaries in the Teach For America program and the Internal Revenue Service — let alone consumer packaged goods, management consulting or investment banking — are higher than pay for average entry-level assistant account executives. Those jobs pay about $28,000 to $35,000 a year, Zea said.

According to Adweek, network TV isn't delivering the eyeballs marketers are paying for.

NBC has quietly begun reimbursing advertisers for fourth-quarter prime-time ratings shortfalls, averaging about $500,000 per advertiser, according to media buyers, marking the first time in years a network has taken such a step to compensate marketers for ratings deficiencies.

Among the Big Four networks, NBC has the most serious ad shortfall, as its prime-time ratings are down most dramatically. Meanwhile, none of its new series this season have caught on with viewers. Compounding buyers' angst about NBC: the net's plan to add more reality shows.

"NBC used to be the upscale, quality network," said Laura Caraccioli-Davis, evp, Starcom Entertainment. "We have come to expect quality, iconic programming. Maybe they are searching for the reality hit they don't have, their own American Idol. But too much reality just doesn't play well with advertisers."

Ad Age reports that McDonald's has found another way to reach their best customers.

The Golden Arches picked up the $1,600 cost of printing report-card jackets for the 2007-2008 school year in Seminole County, Fla., in exchange for a Happy Meal coupon on the card's cover. With 27,000 elementary school kids taking their report-card jackets home to be signed three or four times a year, that's less than 2 cents per impression.

Children who earn all A's and B's, have two or fewer absences or exhibit good behavior are entitled to a free happy meal at a local McDonald's -- so long as they present their report card.

Designer, Debbie Millman, calls the move, "yet another reason why civilization is doomed."

I'll just add that this wouldn't happen if we funded our schools properly. But since we have other priorities, schools are woefully underfunded and that opens them up to finding funding where they may.

According to Ad Age, unique visitors to package-goods brand websites soared 10% compared with a year ago in the third quarter to 66.4 million. The tally is double the 5% rise in the U.S. internet users to 181.9 million.

The traffic increase appears to come primarily from a surge in online display advertising from package-goods players. Mars' Uncle Ben's site, for example, which cracked the industry's top 10 last quarter, did so primarily by using targeted banner ads on Oprah.com and FoodNetwork.com. UncleBens.com traffic surged more than 1,700% from a year ago.