Late last Thursday night, Time-Warner reached an agreement with Google whereby the search giant to soon rule the world would pay $1 billion for a five percent stake in AOL. The deal is a blow to, dare we say, old school, Microsoft which had, for a long time, been in talks with AOL regarding a content deal that would have involved Time-Warner's print, television and online properties and Microsoft's search and ad operations. The deal was sealed during the Time Warner Christmas party with Microsoft's execs in one conference room, Google's in another and Time-Warner execs running between the two.
Friend and fellow industry mate Rick Bruner has created the perfect holiday gift for your favorite spammer. In appreciation for all those thought spammers who have dramatically increased the size of man's manhood the world over, Bruner created a T-shirt with the slogan, "$pam made my p3n1s bigger." You can also get the message on teddy bears, dog t-shirts, thongs and lots of other styles.
Be sure to buy one for every spammer that spams you each day. That ought to make Mr. Bruner a very rich man.
While we absolutely can not play this game, we thought there'd be a few of you out there that could. Norfolk-based interactive agency Drew Media has created The Incident before Christmas, an online game where players help a drunk Santa pick up all the packages he's dropped due to his altered state of mind. Perhaps those of you with faster fingers will fare better than we.
Here's a beautifully simple holiday card from Connecticut-based agency Adams & Knight. Rather than go the goofy, silly, humorous route (not that that's all bad), the agency chose to highlight what the shop actually does: make advertising.
Here's something you don't see all the time. To promote its branding service Gulp & Go, PR agency Antonia created a video that likens its approach to branding to, well, a foot. Oddly, it all makes a convincing argument.
Ad Age has been doing some important journalism this week reporting on the holiday swag it has been receiving from PR and media companies. We do miss our time toiling in the media prisons departments of agencies where we'd generally receive more gifts in one year what most people would hope to receive in five but we sure don't miss the slave labor hard work and long hours put in to get those gifts pump out 300 version of a media plan for whiny account managers and self-important clients.
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Illustrating how ads embed themselves in culture, Canada's ihaveanidea.org and agency Taxi have created three very funny, insiderish videos that show the cultural power, well, at least to those of us in the industry, of popular ad campaigns.
Spoofing its own "UnAustralian" ad featuring Sam Kekovich, BMF Australia, in its Christmas card, tells advertisers to "increase the size of your budgets, decrease the size of your Legos logos, make better ads and make sure you put me in them." While we have no idea what the Legos (note, he said Legos, not Lego), reference means, Kekovich says he's sick of watching bad advertising such as singing families in breakfast commercials and women having orgasms to sell shampoo and says "you don't have to make ads dull enough to sedate hyperactive Australian Idol contestants just to sell your products."
To explain the power of good advertising, Kekovich tells marketers, "Take my lamb ad. it won loads of awards and sold shitloads of lamb." And to those in charge of business, Kekovich says, "the research-driven, penny-pinching, logo-loving CEOs out there may disagree with me but they can get stuffed." Such a delightful, however very true, holiday greeting. Give it a watch.
Chicago-based Wrapped Exposure has launched and offers outdoor advertisers a fleet of ad-wrapped vehicles. While acknowledging he's competing with the big OOH boys, Founder Pete Wilson hopes to urge local and national advertisers to give his medium a shot. Remember, David did beat Goliath.
Perhaps in an effort to put all that obsessive body curvature-related press insanity behind her, actress Lindsay Lohan has, reportedly, signed a marketing deal with fashion label Chanel and has been photographed by Karl Lagerfeld. Displaying a keen sense of awareness regarding the purpose of the photo shoot, Lohan said, "I'm shooting with Karl Lagerfeld! It's amazing. I'm so excited. I think it's for a magazine." Yes, Lindsay, that's where fashion advertising usually appears.
