From USA TODAY: Colgate on Tuesday became the second multinational corporation in a week to buy a small company with a social responsibility message. It bought 84% of Tom's of Maine, the all-natural personal care brand based in Kennebunk, Maine, for $100 million. Friday, French cosmetics giant L'Oreal bought London-based retailer The Body Shop, a personal care chain known for its avoidance of animal testing and its …
Thousands Pause For Chicken
Wall Street Journal reports that KFC successfully used a form of subliminal advertising to drive traffic to its stores. The fast-food chain's spot was designed to circumvent Madison Avenue's latest nemesis: digital video recorders that make it easy for viewers to skip ads. A single frame contained a code word -- "Buffalo" -- which viewers could use to claim a coupon for a free "Buffalo Snacker" KFC chicken sandwich. …
Two Longhairs Talk Jeans
Commercials Provide “A Totally Anonymous Way To Practice”
Former AdCritic editor, Jim Hanas, provides interesting detail on Capote director Bennett Miller—at 39 the youngest nominee for this year's Best Director Oscar. While covering the advertising business, I became aware of Miller because of his commercials. Between The Cruise and Capote, Miller shot more than a dozen campaigns a year, all in a style that might surprise moviegoers. Working through Hungry Man—the …
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A Little Action On The Side
Jason Fried of 37 Signals likes the side business idea. At SxSW a few weeks ago I spoke about starting a side business instead of quitting your job. Build something on the side. Give it a go and see what happens. If there’s something there, then take it to the next step. It’s hard to point to a business that launched huge and has been successful. Most of the big winners in our industry started really small and grew …
How Often Do You Pay Attention?
Steven Levy of Newsweek brings up a great point about widespread attention deficit disorder, or what he calls continuous partial attention. According to former Apple and Microsoft executive, Linda Stone, CPA stems from our desire to be "a live node on the network." A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger's …
MySpace Too Risqué For Mainstream Marketers
From MediaPost: MySpace has grown to 60 million members, and now accounts for around 12.5 percent of all online display ads. But major brand marketers continue to shun the site. Reasons for avoiding MySpace include concern about its potential for criminal use, especially given recent well-publicized reports about sexual predators searching for victims on the site, as well as fears that user-generated …
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Fresh Squeezed Google Juice
Todd Malicoat presents the top 10 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lies told by ad agencies. 1.You really need metatags …if this was 1999. Now you need social bookmarking, press releases, content syndication, a blog and someone to run it, some viral content as linkbait, and about 500 more good sites linking to yours with your targeted anchor text, but we don’t actually DO any of that yet. See his post for the other …
