Ernie Schenck reports that recorded music from American pop diva, Christina Aguilera, is being used to torture al Qaeda big wig, Mohammed al Qahtani, into fessing up about 9-11, Osama bin Laden and anything else he knows about the terrorist organization. He says if it was up to him, he'd make the suspected terrorists listen to Coldplay. Way to take the gloves off, Ernie. …
Sundance Content To Go
Ad Age: Podcasting comes home to the mother ship as Apple and the Sundance Channel announce a deal that will make content from the cable network exclusively available as podcast downloads from the Apple iTunes Web site. The partnership with Sundance gives iTunes one of its first exclusive podcast partners and inches Apple's iTunes operations -- originally created as a music distribution hub -- toward becoming a …
Mad Dogs Morph Into Walrus
Adweek: Former Mad Dogs & Englishmen creative director Deacon Webster and 10 staffers have absorbed the defunct shop's last four clients and this week opened under the banner Walrus. With Grand Marnier, Radar magazine, the 21 Club and Wacoal's CW-X Conditioning Wear, Walrus has about $7 million in billings, said Webster, now chief creative officer. Where Mad Dogs concentrated primarily on TV, print and guerilla, the …
Go Steffan Go
Lewis Lazare: Late last week Harris, the city's third-largest financial institution, invited five shops to pitch the bank's ad business. Or more accurately five shops plus one. The plus one, in this instance, is Euro RSCG/Chicago, the corpse that former Leo Burnett creative whiz kid Steffan Postaer is trying to resuscitate. Euro RSCG has joined forces with Arnold Worldwide/ Chicago, the incumbent on the Harris …
Seeing The Che Within
Boing Boing, Gaping Void and Johnnie Moore have all posted on Ben Hammersley's presentation at Reboot in Copenhagen last week. Here's a slide from Ben's Power Point deck. Mr. Moore reports: He gave a great talk called Etiquette and the Singularity, including the notion that the first blogger was Sir Richard Steele back in 1709. Steele wanted to circulate his opinions so started writing a thrice-weekly letter which …
Big Brothers Help Each Other Out
Wired: Microsoft is cooperating with China's government to censor the company's newly launched Chinese-language web portal, a spokesman for the tech giant said. The policy affects blogs created through the MSN Spaces service, said Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director at MSN. Microsoft and its government-funded Chinese business partner work with authorities to omit certain forbidden language, Sohn said, …
Driving The Salami
Veroni's meat wagon comes to us via Flickr user, Myriapod. …
Pop Culturalist As CEO
I don't know how someone as irreverent as Steven Grasse of Gyro got past my radar, but he did. Until now. Now, I know there is at least one kook running a major agency today. There may be hope for our kind yet. Here are some excerpts from an Adweek piece on Grasse that ran last fall: In addition to doing ads for clients such as Puma, RJ Reynolds and Virgin Records, Grasse, 40, has turned his avocations into …
