Dove continues its Campaign for Real Beauty with the above clip, showing just how much makeup and retouching is done for models these days. You can decide for yourself whether the message in the spot is meaningful, hypocritical, or both. As for ruining the illusion, I'm still recovering from the shock of the Yasmine Bleeth mug shot. …
Albany Taxi Drivers Welcome Visitors To “Tech Valley”
Taxi drivers in Albany, NY have been enlisted in a word-of-mouth marketing campaign to pitch the area as a tech-savvy market to visitors. The program is a joint effort of Albany-Colonie Regional Chamber of Commerce, Capitaland Taxi and Albany International Airport. It makes perfect sense to utilize these drivers, for word-of-mouth comes naturally to them. My only question is do they somehow qualify their riders prior …
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High Life For Men Again (Distributors Breathe Easy)
When I used to work on a big beer account, I was never comfortable with our need to target beer distributors first and consumers second. The thinking was no floor space means no beer sales, which does make sense despite being counter-intuitive for a creative. At any rate, beer distributors have a huge say when it comes to critiquing brand advertising. According to Ad Age, Miller distributors are pleased with new …
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AdPulp Born On 10.16.04
“AdPulp is the most accessible and populist ad blog. Therefore, it's also probably the most successful.” –Vinny Warren Two years ago today, we started posting our opinions about the industry that sustains us in this space. So much has happened since then... We've made over 3000 posts. You've made close to 4000 comments on our posts. The site has logged over one million unique visits, and we have nearly 1000 …
Om’s Impact At Business 2.0 Still Being Felt After His Exit
I Want Media interviewed Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner in connection with the M-Squared conference in San Francisco. I've asked all of my journalists to create a blog. It's an experiment in response to a lot of thinking I've been doing about Om Malik and the great success we had with him while he was on staff full time. I loved the daily interactions he was having with his community of readers. It made him …
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Caught In The PR Crossfire
There's a bloatospheric storm brewing over Wal-Mart's "fake" blog, Wal-Marting Across America. John at Biz Hack calls it a "flog," otherwise known as a stealth PR blog. Bottom line, it lacks transparency—the very thing Wal-Mart's PR agency likes to trumpet. And it's not just Edelman on the line, here. Editor & Publisher reports on the real world repercussions now faced by one of the two floggers. A photographer for …
The Last Retainer
Pat D'Amico, business development partner at Psynchronous Communications and former SVP/Group Director at Arnold Worldwide, calls his own fiction "a bitterly funny account of the rat-eat-rat world of advertising" in our comments. So let's look at the man's prose, offered semi-anonymously on a Blogspot site: Tracy DelAngelis was in the late stages of making a name for herself at Shaughnessy + Greene, which at …
Dialogue Marketing Trumps Monologue Marketing Everytime
Friend of AdPulp (FOP), Tom Asacker wrote something I like a lot. Don't look for breakthrough insights in outdated processes like "inventory control" and "advertising." Instead, study those businesses that actually broke with conventional wisdom and discovered new ways to get closer and closer to the customer. And for the record, I am not saying "don't advertise." Not advertising is like winking at a beautiful …
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Hugh’s Give And Take
I haven't peered into MacLeod's Gaping Void in a while. Let's take a look, shall we? I was in the pub the other evening, trying to explain the difference between Web 1.0 ["Dotcom"] vs Web 2.0 ["Blogs & Social Media"] to a web neophyte friend of mine. The short answer: "Dotcom was about 'taking'. Web 2.0 is about 'giving'." The architecture of Web 2.0 is about people giving away their stuff i.e. "sharing". Whether its …
Why Confine Storytelling To Books?
Toronto Star looks at Cathy's Book, a great example of an interactive book. In the tradition of Griffin & Sabine — the series of books that contained packages of letters that became best-sellers in the 1990s — Cathy's Book includes a sleeve of letters, invitations, pictures and other ephemera that are actually clues to help readers solve the mystery of what happened to Cathy's boyfriend. But Cathy's Book takes that …
