Continuing our quest to open the advertising industry to a more diverse group of people, Adrants along with Business Development Institute and the organizers of Advertising Week 2007 will host Experienced Hire Diversity Recruiting Program during Advertising Week September 25-28, 2007. The event, unlike our two previous diversity in advertising events, will "focus solely on advancing the presence of mid to senior level diversity leaders in the communication industries by offering individual companies the opportunity to exclusively recruit top level experienced professionals through private one and half hour recruiting sessions."
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- Reader's Digest has just announced it will now accept ads on its back cover in January...and cut circulation by 20 percent. Hmm. Guess things aren't going so well.
- Any iPhone spoof that has the copy, "I'm drunk as fuck and I'm driving down the Interstate" is good in our book.
- Uppity blogoshereites aren't taking kindly to McDonald's latest blogging efforts in which the junk food giant has enlisted six "mommy bloggers" to tout the wonders of carrying Big Mac in one hand and a screaming two year old in the other.
- As if teachers haven't yet been disrespected enough, The Learning Annex educational institute has offered Paris Hilton $1 million to teach budding entrepreneurs her secrets behind branding.
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For Wednesday's Keynote Roundtable, held the second day of ad:tech Miami, Advertising Age's Laurel Wentz gathered together a collection of the finest minds in the Hispanic and Latin American market places to discuss the changing relationship between consumers, content and control. On the panel were MTV Networks VP of Digital Media Luis Goicouria, VOY Group Chairman and CEO Fernando Espuelas, Batanga Chairman and CEO Rafael Urbina-Quintero and NBC Universal, Telemundo Network Group Senior VP Digital Media Peter Blacker.
Among all members of the panels, the overriding acknowledgment that consumers have the keys to content kingdom was agreed to though not to the exclusion of well-produced content. Content is still king as has been said. It's simply being created and consumed very differently than it was just three or five years ago. The panelists agreed the explosion of consumer generated media has forever changed the media landscape and will continue to do so in ways even the best minds can't yet imagine.
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This entry can alternatively be called, "Why American Airlines Sucks."
Before leaving ad:tech I had a conversation with a blogger who lamented learning little of value at the conference. He wasn't the only one who complained; surface-skimming conversation with a few girls at last night's Batanga party betrayed a pattern.
I hate to file yet another complaint into the ether. But after some serious thought, it occurred to me that you can't really learn about how people are communicating - manipulating brands, and media, in the process - unless you're sharing their space, communicating right along with them. That's not the kind of thing you can really be taught at a seminar.
Which leads me to why American Airlines sucks.
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CNN's Alberto Padilla interviews Shawn Gold of MySpace! I braced myself for the inevitable ripped-off feeling as, having started 15 minutes late, they wasted another 15 minutes playing getting-to-know-you on session time. What a jam-packed half-hour it was that awaited me.
(If you're wondering what the image is at left, it's Gold's current MySpace profile picture.)
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Wired conducted coverage of a Web game called Fatworld, which aims - with the couch potato's favorite active medium - to lend insight on the "politics of nutrition."
Fatworld, which comes out this fall, was put together by Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech professor who likes designing snarky little games that illuminate harsh realities. In Fatworld, gamers that make less-than-fantastic health choices can watch their characters bloom with food allergies, heart disease, diabetes and, predictably, death.
Other Bogost games sound equally awe-inspiring. In one called Disaffected!, which came out last year, players pose as Kinko's employees struggling to meet print orders while lazy colleagues make paper-filing errors.
Per a Bogost user review: "I could actually feel myself getting angry and depressed and my sense of self-worth going right through the floor."
Wow. Sounds suspiciously like life. We'll stick with collecting Sheeple blood, thanks.
What's going on with this banner ad for EMC? The guy leading that team of dogs looks less like a picturesque Jack London hero and more like, well, a jewel thief.
Probably not the best foot to put forward if you're a document protection firm.
This effort is meant to illustrate how the XBox 360 connects to Windows Media Center. When selected, it plays a little video featuring a domestic scenario between the chunky but fancy-free gamer and his out-of-touch girlfriend. Imaginatively, follow-up creative and the website say, "XBox connects to Windows Media Center."
You know that South Park episode where Cartman impersonates Jennifer Lopez with his hand, and then she takes over? This image reminds us of that. We can already imagine the slew of would-be witty gamers blaming wasted days on malicious thumbs.
We'd do the same thing to justify our Candystand abuse and Sheeple harassment (yeah, we're still stuck on that), but unfortunately it's pretty clear that, far from hard-partying alter-egos with fangs, our fingers are all pedants.
If I can put forth what might be construed as a stereotype in the nicest possible manner, Hispanic and Latin America women most certainly know how to accentuate what they've got and have no problem dressing in a way that flaunts it beautifully. Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's the culture. Maybe it's something else but it's nothing like New York. Now there's nothing wrong with the way New York women dress, mind you, but the thread count to flesh ratio in Miami is far, far lower than it is in New York.
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Somebody tell me why everyone at ad:tech Miami has a Blackberry, and nobody seems capable of switching off their festive little ringtones during the sessions.
While the speakers for Publishing in the Digital Age: Feast or Famine? make product pitches in polite succession (how different from the debate and discourse at previous ad:techs!), I finally locate the take-away: Internet publishers are sitting amidst a feast.
(Note pirate - get it? Like online piracy? - feasting at left.)
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