Adpulp

Advertising News and Know-How

Advertising News and Know-How

Learn from the Legends

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Directly Speaking, Can We Control Ourselves?

Well, on Monday I wrote of my displeasure with National City Bank. For the bigger implications of this, check out my new column on Talent Zoo: Since I work in the ad industry, I know this wasn't a faceless backroom operation. Someone high up at my bank had the idea to send out unsolicited CheckCards. Someone thought the PINs should be disclosed. Someone had to write and proofread the DM letters. Someone had to …

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And They Won’t Be Driving Away In VWs

Adweek: Havas-owned Arnold will begin laying off staff tomorrow as it prepares to lose its largest account, Volkswagen of America, which last month said it would shift its estimated $400 million account to MDC Partners' Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Sources said the agency would trim between 50 and 80 employees from its Boston headquarters, or 10-15 percent of the staff at that location. VW accounted for about 10 …

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A Hard Look At The Old Soft Sell

San Francisco Chronicle: In most ads, a company is trying to sell you a product, or a brand, or some oxymoronic notion of corporate philosophy (as if the pursuit of profit wasn't credible self-justification in a capitalist marketplace). But flipping through a recent copy of the New Yorker -- the Sept. 5 issue, to be precise -- I came across several ads for leading companies that spoke to a relatively new trend in …

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Where Brands Can Go With Their Blogs

Some smart people have recently asked me pertinent questions about the value of blogs for brands and branded communications. This is a rich topic--one we might spend days exploring at an expensive seminar on a tropical island. For our purposes here, I'll offer a couple of scenarios to consider. Before I do, I'd like to point out that blogs are narrative in structure. As a writer, I can't help but be excited by this …

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Enough With The Branding Already

Fast Company: Branding is the self-help industry of corporate America. Sure, it may be difficult to admit--perhaps even a bit embarrassing--but let's face it: Both branding and self-help have experienced booming growth over the past decade, seemingly in reaction to rising levels of personal and professional insecurity. Both fields are populated with self-anointed experts. And both seem to follow the same publishing …

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Bell Helicopter Blames Someone Else For Its Tasteless Ad

Reuters: Boeing Co. apologised on Friday for a mistakenly published advertisement for its V-22 Osprey aircraft showing troops dropping onto the roof of a mosque in what appears to be a simulated battle scene. The ad, coming amid rising concern among Muslims over U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, prompted immediate complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which demanded the …

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The Wiki Way To Search Engine Optimization

Steve Rubel points to an interesting post on the Socialtext blog. Google is becoming increasingly prone to Wikipedia. This is because Google's PageRank algorithm, the method by which it ranks search pages, inherently succumbs to the basic structure and social structure of wikis. The PageRank algorithm is most famously characterized as valuing links that are highly referred to by other people. It seems that is only …

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