Fuck "Mad Men." I want to watch "The Pitch," and that's precisely what I'll be doing this evening at 8:00 PST. Each episode of this new reality show on AMC matches two agencies against one another as they pitch a client project. Tonight's sneak peak (the show starts in earnest on April 30) pits McKinney against Wong Doody Crandall Wiener. You may have heard that many top dogs in the ad biz didn't bark …
Can “The Crowd” Compete?
Just two and a half years after crowdsourcing agency Victors & Spoils was formed from Crispin's rib in Boulder, Colorado, the company has sold a majority stake to Havas. That's rapid return on investment. Which begs the question what is so special about this agency and its controversial business model? John Winsor, V&S's CEO has one answer. "Collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing are the future of not …
Are You Are Young, Smart and Ambitious? Join The Guild of Meaning Makers
Members of the Four A’s are in Beverly Hills, Calif. this week to confer around the topic of industry transformation. According to The New York Times, recruitment advertising is one notable area where transformation is desperately needed. “The No. 1 thing you hear from students and young people in other fields is, ‘Wow, I didn’t think you could do that in advertising,’ ” said Andrew Benett, global chief …
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The AdPulp Interview: Ad Contrarian Revisited
Bob Hoffman, also known as The Ad Contrarian, has written two books about advertising. His first was self-titled and his second is 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising, which has been getting a solid reception since its release in eBook form last November. I had the opportunity to catch up with Hoffman over beers in Portland recently. He said he enjoyed making books more than blogs, and that he's putting his …
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Directors Are Filmmakers And/Or Hustlers, This One’s A Filmmaker
"I was seduced." -Doug Nichol "Sunshine" is not your typical "making of" video. Rather, it's a dark look at globalization and our role in feeding the machine, from director Doug Nichol. In this short film, which is making the film festival rounds this year, Nichol illustrates what that the phrase "Sunshine" means in China. The staffers at McDonald's agency want "Sunshine people," or people who are very …
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The Rich And Jeff Show Comes To Cable
Rich and Jeff appeared on CNBC today in a segment titled "The Real Mad Men." Aside from the nod to this Sunday's return of the AMC program, the reporters on the show asked about Detroit and Chevy, social media's impact on the business and the challenges faced by HP. It's fun to see these "Real Mad Men" on camera speaking well of their Chevy client, and the OK Go video that they successfully …
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Are Agencies Staffed By Dumbasses, Or Worse?
I typically stay away from content written by anonymous contributors, but Brian Morrissey at Digiday is prompting "Confessions" from people in the industry, and the one I just read from a technology vendor seems to have merit. Agencies talk about being makers. Shouldn’t they have this technology in-house? They can’t do it. It’s the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none thing. Digital marketing is fragmented across …
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Wrong, Wrong, And Wrong Again
As an avid consumer of business journalism, I see way too many shortcomings in the stories I read. Take this morning's example, a piece in The Guardian about how the fictional Don Draper wouldn't thrive in today's multimedia universe. For Matthew Neale, managing director of the global marketing company Golin Harris, the world where ad execs such as Draper and his team were the "exclusive arbiters of …
