As ad:tech kicks off its Chicago conference, changes afoot in the organization's corner office. Susan Bratton, who has been the Programming Chair for many years is shifting her responsibilities and will become Chair Emeritus. Drew Ianni will take the Programming Chair position and be responsible for continuing the expansion of ad:tech.
In a press release, Ianni said, "As ad:tech continues to thrive and grow, we must maintain our reputation as a place people come to learn. The content and programming have to remain on point and of the highest quality. Time is increasingly scarce and valuable, so we must make it worthwhile for industry influencers and leaders to take the time off and attend. ad:tech has achieved its role as the gravitational center of this industry by doing just that, and I intend to keep us here."
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Here I am again in Chicago, a town I've traveled to may times before in my Starcom/Leo Burnett Technology Group days, for the 2006 ad:tech trade show. As usual, the show kicked off with a party for the exhibitors held outside the Sheraton Hotel right next to the river. Of all the U.S.-based ad:tech shows, the Sheraton Chicago is the most beautiful. Next year, that will change but will likely remain just as nice a venue when the show moves to Chicago's Navy Pier next to Lake Michigan which, by the way, I'm looking at right now as I write this. About 3,200 people are expected to attend the show this year. Check out more Exhibitor Party and set up pictures here.
While visiting the Kaiser Family Foundation, New York Senator Hillary Clinton said "At the rate that technology is advancing, people will be implanting chips in our children to advertise directly into their brains and tell them what kind of products to buy." Well, of course we will Hilary. How else are we going to shield kids from your pompous blather and insure our advertising messages get to the central cortex of every child's brain unfettered by your politically-motivated babble?
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- I guess you'd be interested in this if you cared about the St. Louis Blues.We're not and we don't.
- I guess you'd be interested in this if you cared about the World Cup and agencies that like to make footballer action figures.
- I guess you'd be interested in this if you cared about people pulling their intestines out of their abdomens just to deliver a "no guts. no glory" message for the grafika awards show.
- I guess you'd be interested in this if you cared about bikinis and bikes. Not that bikinis and bikes have anything to do with each other aside from the gratuitous combination purely to sell bikes.
In-game advertising company IGA Worldwide and Interpret LLC have announced an in-game ad ratings system using Interpret's Gameasure. Gameasure will provide advertisers such game title, demographics, reach, frequency, duration and deoth of engagement metrics for all of IGA's video games. Ideally, it will best what Nielsen is trying to do for television now and actually provide real ad viewership and interaction data.
BoingBoing points to a Wired Music Blog post that highlights some changes to YouTubes terms and conditions that could give them complete control and ownership over anything that is uploaded to their site. In theory, the blog points out, YouTube could sell any uploaded video or take a musical track and sell it, royalty-free. This change will make certain organizations think twice before handing over all revenue making ability derived from created content. It's nice to get wide distribution of your work but it's also nice to maintain some control over it as well.
AdFreak points to several spoofs of the currently running, weird Snickers campaign. We like "Fatassopolis." AdFreak is looking for other to contribute their Snikerisms so head over to AdFreak or leave them here. We'll collect them all and send them over to the Snickers marketing people to have fun with in the next round off the campaign.
Oh it was only a matter of time before someone, sickened by advertisers' oversimplification of everything, namely Staples' claim that they make business easy, before the Easy Button hacks arrived. Al Cohen, who created the hacke button which spews forth nastyisms, says, "Advertising agencies think that they can cram any amount of factitious crap down the gullible throats of the public. We need to remind them we are a heck of a lot smarter, and can process far more complex equations, just given half a chance." Touche. You can listen to Cohen's creation here but the connection is agonizingly slow. We'll host it elsewhere once we get the entire file.
Here's another one of those commercials that takes far too long to make its point, poorly at best, which, in :30 could have accomplished its goal rather than wastefully taking :90. The spot urges people to despise SUVs by illustrating how fellow office workers despise the guy who owns an SUV. More pompous nattering from Greenpeace.
Sort of like creating a Honda Choir spot on your own, Verizon has launched Beatbox Mixer, a site, created by R/GA, that lets you combine various beatbox clips along with videos of the artists "performing" to support Verizon's "Richer, Deeper, Broader" broadband push. If one is so inclined, one can use the site's tools to create a customized, full blown sound and video extravaganza to play for one's grandmother who will then look at said creator like some sort of gastrointestinal alien was emanating from the bowels of said creator's stomach and quickly call the ambulance thereby calling into question the purpose for creating the thing in the first place.
WTF? Where did that whole grandma thing come from? Who writes this crap? Anyway, we're sure this will appeal the the creative types out there who assume they, like Ashlee Simpson, can slide into fame's limelight on the coat tails of other's talent. And whoa! Where did that nastiness come from? Hmm. Oh wait. It must have been that morning trip to Dunkin where we had our "America Runs on Dunkin" latte and were C blocked from angling our way into a conversation with the beautiful, tiny but oh-so-plentiful up top beauty standing next to us in line.
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