Eyebeam Contagious Media Conference This Saturday

Eyebeam's Contagious Media Showdown conference is this Saturday. The conference will have keynotes by Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and the Yes Men and workshops by the people who created the Rejection Line, Black People Love Us, The Nike Sweatshop Email, Blogdex, and Fundrace. CP+B will also be looking at books if conference participants want to interview. The full day of workshops costs $20 and people can RSVP here.

Carl's Jr. Paris Hilton Spot Too Hot For TV

Oh the things we do to perpetuate the publicity of marketers smart enough to realize their hot ads will never run in the first place. It's only a matter of time before this one's floating all over the web, released "by mistake." Perhaps it already has been. We're talking about a new commercial for burger chain Carl's Jr. starring Paris Hilton doing her sexy thing as we've all seen her do before. Trouble is, she's just too hot in that Rick Solomon, military green video sort of way and networks are not too happy to air it.

The ad shows plenty of Hilton washing a car with water hoses gushing forth wantonly while the heiress slathers white stuff...um...soap all over the place. Somewhere in the spot, she's eating a big ass BBQ Six Dollar Burger. It's all just the next logical step from the company that brought us the Straw Girl and the writhing mechanical bull commercial.

'The Apprentice' Trounced by 'Survivor'

Because of a Presidential press conference last Thursday night, CBS's Survivor was pushed back one hour placing it squarely against the other Mark Burnett reality show, NBC's The Apprentice. In a serious ass kicking, Survivor pulled 21.2 million viewers to The Apprentice's 12.4 million. Boo Hoo, Donald.

Agency Revenue Up 8.6 Percent

Ad Age has released its annual Agency Report indicating U.S. agency revenue grew 8.6 percent to $17.59 billion. Fifty Seven percent of that figure was generated by the four agency holding companies; Omnicom, WPP, Interpublic and Publicis.

Paris Hilton Frolics With Oraguntans to Promote Zoo

Two year old, cash-strapped Parrot Jungle Island in Pinecrest, Florida needed all the help it could getting the word out it's more than just a place to see parrots. The zoo cum destination has expanded from a gigantic bird cage into a full blown jungle paradise. So, when Paris Hilton's people called wondering if the heiress and reality TV star could spend a day with the birds, Parrot Jungle Island said sure but asked Hilton to hang with the orangutans instead. It was ll part of the park's efforts to increase awareness of it broader, less bird-like offering.

Another Blog Ad Network Planned

Sprouting like flowers on steroids, blog advertising related companies are all the rage now. The latest comes from Roger Simon, Charles Johnson and Marc Danziger who plan to launch a network which would allow placement of ads a large group of blogs rather than the BlogAds service which allows for individual blog selection. While the yet to be named company has not launched nor full details revealed, one wonders why one would take the niche targeting benefits of weblogs, most of which focus on a single topic, and group them all together into yet another massive, nameless, faceless online network. Certainly, there are benefits of scale to advertisers and advantages individual bloggers can realize from this service but the selling point of weblogs in general has been their unique character and voice. Lumping them all into one big ad buy seems counter to what the medium has to offer advertisers. Yet, admittedly, no media buyer wants to mess with thousands of tiny sites when one larger collective will achieve roughly the same objective.

Separately, the three are launching Blog News Service, apparently a news service aggregating blog content. Now the circle is complete. The aggregation and re-reporting of other's content found on most blogs will now be tied up in a bow and spit back as a fancy news service. Intriguing indeed.

Creative Directors Say Basketball Is Boring

Countering the NBA's fancy, action-filled Playoff promotional spots and claiming most basketball games, with lame halfcourt offense and 15 foot bank shots, are boring and unwatchable, quirky Wexley School for Girls Creative Directors Ian Cohen and Cal McAllister have created "To The Bank Y'all," a little video poking fun at the whole scenario. The video focuses specifically on the San Antonio Spurs who, while title winners, Cohen and McAllister claim play a very lame, conservative game. it's amusing enough.

Bicycle Ads The New Human Space Medium

Bike advertising seems to have, suddenly, become as popular as human space advertising. Similar to Bike Ads, Promotion N Motion uses bikes but the three wheeled, backwards tricycle style bikes. Mounted on the bike, above the driver, are large billboard-like banners on which advertisers can place their messaging. Currently Promotion N Motion serves the San Francisco area. Priced at $35 per hour, per bike weekdays and $50 per hour, per bike on weekends, it's quite an economical means to deliver, in a novel manner, a local message.

Technology Campaign Aims to Calm Nerves

In the face of all those high profile, overpriced, try oh-so-hard to be oh-so-cool consumer television campaigns, business to business print campaigns usually get about as much attention as an agency traffic manager. We're doing our part to change that by highlighting a recent print campaign for Tekelec, a telecommunications solutions, network performance management technology and value-added applications company. Oh yes, there's only a few in the world who even know or care what that means but without this type of company, there'd be no functioning networks over which to have that elicit online affair or, on a more more utilitarian note, check email.

With the tagline, "Tools For What's Next," the Tekelec print ads speak to the fast changing world of networking and the company's nimble approach to helping companies react to and plan for fast approaching technologies such as GPRS, 3G, VoIP, IPTV, SIP, LNP, CALEA and IMS. Don't stretch your brain muscle too much, we worked in tech advertising a long time and we still don't know what some of those terms mean. The point of the campaign is that Tekelec does and they're riding the technology wave right along with you. Work was done by Hanft Raboy & Partners. You can see the full sized ads here, here and here. (They're PDF's)

Brand Manager Blog Offers Client Perspective

Thirdway, a consultancy run by former brand managers, has launched a weblog, The ThirdWay Blog, intended to offer commentary from the client side. Heading up the blog is ThirdWay, Inc. President and Adjunct NYU Professor of Marketing David Vinjamuri who spent 15 years working at Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola and DoubleClick, among others. From a brand managers viewpoint, Ninjamuri rates television commercials and discusses what, in his and other writer's opinions works and what doesn't.