Ad People

Mike Elgan, writing in ComputerWorld, paints a pretty third world picture set against the foreboding first world sky. When your company changes its policy and allows you to telecommute, and when meetings are conducted online instead of in-person, you might be freed to live in another country for a few months, or even a year or two. The financial advantage of this can be enormous. You can take advantage of the digital …

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Ideas can come from anywhere. How many times have you heard that one? Richard Huntington of Adliterate has heard it one too many times and is therefore out to rebut this "pernicious and destructive cliche." Maybe the odd idea can come from anywhere but from whom are breathtaking strategic, creative and executional ideas more likely to come? Who is more likely to be the architect of a ground breaking piece of …

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Last Thursday, as we gathered around our closest friends and family, we hopefully all found many things to be thankful for. Steffan Postaer, for one, used the holiday to reflect on how thankful he is for his career in advertising (which appears to be going quite well). No matter how tawdry and desperate things can get in Ad Land there is simply no other vocation I would prefer. For over 20 years advertising has been …

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The New York Times Magazine conducted a fireside chat with three of digital marketing's poster boys—Lars Bastholm of AKQA; Benjamin Palmer of Barbarian Group; and Robert Rasmussen of R/GA. Jack Hitt, who leads the discussion for the Times wonders if these guys (and other like them) are "potentially presiding over the dissolution of our business, like everybody else in the media." Here's the group's …

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Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo Inc.'s chairman and chief executive, is drinking the Pepsi and then some. WSJ: Which PepsiCo products do you eat and drink? Ms. Nooyi: Most days for breakfast I have a bowl of plain Quaker oatmeal and a glass of Tropicana juice with lots of pulp. At lunch, I have to have Lay's Kettle chips, slightly heated. You heat them for about 10 or 15 seconds. One of my favorite drinks is Mirinda Orange, …

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I’ve been reading Adweek every week for 15 years, ever since I took advantage of its cheap student subscription rate. And back then, it was more valuable than any college class if you wanted to get a feel for the ins-and-outs and weekly machinations of the ad industry and all the agencies in it. Up until a few years ago, Adweek published 6 regional editions—so if you were in the Southeast, you had some national news …

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Few ad guys kick facts as consistently and blatantly as Bob Hoffman. Right now the San Francisco ad man is kicking the hell out of the trade press for reporting an agenda (to keep interactive sexy), rather than the plainly obvious facts before them. Let's listen: Some facts: In the recent election, candidates spent over 2 billion dollars on tv and radio ads. They spent less than 18 million on online ads Proportion of …

Continue Reading about Hoffman Reports. You Decide. →

Bob Hoffman of Hoffman/Lewis and I had breakfast this morning in downtown Portland. One of the things Bob said that really resonates with me is: "There's money to be made in the cracks." So true. Last Wednesday, I had lunch on NW 23rd with another agency principal, Kent J. Lewis of Anvil Media. I don't know if search marketing is "a crack," but no one's turning off the hose in Kent's world. Quite the contrary. …

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