To paraphrase a old saying, reading about beer is like dancing about architecture. But Bill Yenne's Guinness: The 250 Year Quest For The Perfect Pint makes a fun read, especially when you're sitting at a bar on a Sunday afternoon and the Falcons are playing like a Pop Warner team. From the beginnings of Arthur Guinness, an Irish brewer in the mid-1700's, through the present day, Yenne talks about how Guinness has …
A Two-Fer Of Columns
Looking for some very light reading for the weekend? Check out A Carbon-Neutral Pile of Manure, my new column on Talent Zoo which takes a look at brands desperate to greenwash themselves. Why? Money is green. Or vice versa. If you live in Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, or other Midwest cities, you can head to the bookstore and grab a copy of Create Magazine, whose Sept/Oct Midwest edition has a column of mine entitled …
Mute Buttons Collar The Truth
Joe The Peacock is funny. And when someone funny is forced to endure mindless babble on a conference call, they tend to a) pass out, or b) make a note of it. Joe The Peacock made note of it. Here are some of the things he thought, but could not say (without the invention of a mute button) on a recent call. God, I wish I'd been paying attention in college when they went over the definition of "synergistic" in English …
Big Money In Sales
Fortune reports that the job du jour is online ad sales rep. In fact, the field is so hot, journalist Jessi Hempel was offered a "mid-six-figure" salary by a CEO to defect while reporting the story. Hiring a sales director "is the single biggest challenge that we have faced," says Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.tv, a video-sharing site. Kaplan says she spends as much as six hours a day searching for the right …
Bob Garfield’s Not Feeling Comcastic
Ad Age critic Bob Garfield has taken his personal crusade against Comcast into the blogosphere with a new site called Comcast Must Die. Here's part of the site intro: Actually, I have no deathwish for Comcast or any other gigantic, blundering, greedy, arrogant corporate monstrosity, What I do have is the earnest desire for such companies to change there ways. This site offers an opportunity -- for you to vent your …
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From Nowhere To Everywhere In The Span Of A Decade
USA Today looks at the growing proliferation of, and resistance to, electronic mail. Today about 150 engineers at chipmaker Intel will kick off "Zero E-mail Fridays." E-mail-free Fridays already are the norm at cell carrier U.S. Cellular and at order-processing company PBD Worldwide Fulfillment Services in Alpharetta, Ga. Prominent techies are tackling the problem individually by declaring "e-mail bankruptcy" — …
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We Are Arrogant
According to Ad Age, We Are Gigantic, a MDC Partners-backed ad shop born earlier this year out of the now-defunct Margeotes Fertitta Powell, is being sued by Gigantic Marketing, a two-year-old New York-based marketing firm. I can't argue the merits of the case (please use our comments area if you can), but I will offer this. When Ad Age calls you up for an interview, don't say this: "We don't really know who this …
Focus Groups Reveal Brutal Truth: Cast A Chimp
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