People backed their not new cars away from their houses with upside down mortgages over the holiday weekend and went shopping. Let's hear it for America! The National Retail Federation's 2008 Black Friday Weekend survey--which measured Friday and Saturday, and used estimates for Sunday--indicates that some 172 million Americans shopped in stores and Web sites over Thanksgiving weekend, an increase from last year's …
Our Cognitive Wiring Needs A Tune Up
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -Albert Einstein I was reading my signed copy of Tom Asacker's new book, A Little Less Conversation: Connecting with Customers in a Noisy World, on the plane from Houston this morning. The opening passage in Chapter 3 reached out and grabbed me: The ideas that you've been exposed to about business, that it's all about …
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Spotlight On NW Creative: Taxi Cafe
Taxi is one of Canada's premier creative companies. As such, they're not satisfied with merely making ads. It's 2008 after all, and "the agency" as we know it is rapidly morphing into something new—part media arts studio, part brand incubator. Which is why I'm grateful to Ed Cotton at Influx Insights for finding this article on Taxi Cafe in Vancouver, BC. Cotton sees the agency's move into retail as a way for ad …
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Just Don’t Lose Your Phone In America
iJustine (Justine Ezarik) and Karen Nguyen are internet famous. With that fact in mind, AT&T hoped to borrow some of the ladies' equity to sell more phones, but Ad Age, for one, isn't impressed. So far, AT&T and its vloggers have published 11 episodes, produced by Tremor Media, but it's hard to imagine anyone watching more than one, if that. The series is heavy on AT&T, but light on storyline, unless you find it …
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Dash Distributes Power of the Press
Six Apart Vice President, Anil Dash, is upset by all the layoffs in the media sector and he hasn't been sleeping well. So, he came up with an idea that helps struggling journos and Six Apart's reputation. According to The New York Times, the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In …
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BLOG.WK.COM
I noticed that there's a new player atop the Alltop Marketing page, adjacent to AdPulp, interestingly enough. Oh, and they're from Portland... On November 14, W+K Portland dropped their studio blog in favor of an agency wide blog. The W+K blog began three years ago as a fun side project in the Studio. And it was great and we all loved it. But the WWW is a cruel place and our blog quickly grew into a giant ugly …
Paulson Park at Citi Field
Daniel Gross, the Moneybox columnist for Slate, business columnist for Newsweek, and author of Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy questions the wisdom of stadium naming rights in this time of publicly funded bank bailouts. Citi Field is also a tough one. In 2006, Citi signed a $400 million, 20-year deal to name the Mets' new stadium after the company. It's hard to walk away from signed contracts. And if Citi …
Digital Knights Profiled In Sunday Glossy
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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