In today's Chicago Sun-Times, Lewis Lazare highlights a letter he received from a local post-production veteran: Copywriters were hired for the number of tattoos and piercings on their bodies rather than writing skill or cleverness. Chicago agencies brought people in from the West Coast and London to give their places a cool vibe, not to sell a client's products. Now the entire scene is disintegrating because …
AgencyScoop Gives You…The Scoop On Agencies
While doing a Google search on a recruiter I used to know, I stumbled on to AgencyScoop. It's an interesting site, I'm just beginning to delve into it, but it seems to be a place where folks can comment on agencies, recruiters, jobs, etc. It was started by Jason Culbertson, who says: This site was created as a result of my own struggles trying to get a foot into the advertising industry. As I looked around I found …
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Amp’d Mobile Tries Not To Die
So what happens when you try to launch a new mobile phone service with edgy ads that say "Try not to die--Amp'd Mobile is coming"? Yeah, you get a lot of edgy cool hip viral buzz--and a whole lot of deadbeat customers. From BusinessWeek: The gold rush of specialized cell-phone companies targeting niche audiences took another hit on June 1 as Amp'd Mobile, an edgy upstart geared to free-spending youths, filed for …
Big Ideas In Bend
After I mentioned the StrawberryFrog ad that ran in Fortune magazine, I got a nice note from Peter Levitan of Ralston360 in Bend, Oregon. Peter mentioned that his agency too believes in promoting itself through ads, and he passed along a few examples that have run in Oregon markets. These ads use traditional print advertising to highlight the agency's non-traditional thinking. Click on them for a larger view. He …
Kurt Cobain Ad Causes More Headaches Across The Pond
Just so Courtney doesn't sue us, I won't show the Doc Martens ad featuring Kurt Cobain in heaven. It was only supposed to be seen in a British music magazine. But the International Herald Tribune has more on what happened next: The trouble began when an employee - disobeying instructions, Saatchi insisted - submitted the images to www.adcritic.com, a U.S.-based ad industry Web site. In the United States, the estates …
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A Little Venting
I guess that when you read a blog called Why Advertising Sucks you know what you're in for, but still it's some good reading. There's a perfectly well-timed and well-crafted rant entry: You won’t matter for however much people insist that you do because no matter what, someone else will do your job and since your full potential shall never be utilized, then no worries, because someone half as good as you can provide …
Google Acquires Companies–And Lots Of Power
This article in the San Francisco Chronicle examines Google's ever-increasing power, particularly in light of the company's planned acquisition of banner-ad and cookie monster DoubleClick: On Monday, Google said the Federal Trade Commission wanted more information about its planned $3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick as part of an antitrust review. A few days earlier, a European Union …
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Julie Roehm Throws Some Gasoline On A Smoldering Fire
In politics, they call it the "Friday night news dump": Release a bunch of documents and news late on a Friday afternoon so no one really notices because, hey, it's the weekend and no one's paying close attention. So what happened this afternoon, right at the start of a 3-day weekend? Ousted senior vice-president of marketing communications, Julie Roehm, responds to Wal-Mart's allegations in a 42-page legal document. …
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