Joe Jaffe of Life After the 30-Second Spot and Across the Sound fame has launched a new marketing company icalled Crayon which will make its debut inside Second Life this Thursday. The company intends to be a bit different than your typical marketing firm focusing on social media and the tenets Jaffe set forth in his book. Joining with Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson from For Immediate Release and CC Chapman from Accident Hash and Managing the Gray, Jaffe will dive head first into the world of conversational marketing and his belief that companies which refuse to believe marketing is a conversation rather than a one way information dump are doomed to die.
In yet another version of the eBay forehead/pregnant belly advertising thing, the very cute Leah Culver is asking for donations to retire her six year old G3 iMac and buy new MacBook Pro. In return, she promises to etch the names/brands of those who donate onto her new laptop for all to see in the San Francisco area for as long as the new computer lasts. She's already raised $2,687.44 which would appear to be enough to buy the MacBook but she's still selling adspace. Leah, tell us when you sell out, buy the computer and design the laptop cover. We'd love to see it. (Photo by Tantek)
This sounds fake, looks fake, feels fake an probably is fake. Hopefully, it's not another Agency.com Subway video disaster in the making. Posted in the Adrants forum and on YouTube is a video taken, apparently, by a client's cell phone camera which shows the agency bashing the client while she was out of the room (she left her camera phone on as she left). The text of the conversation, which you can read here on a blog called The Disgruntled Client seemingly set up simply to trash this client's agency, seems contrived and fake.
Some Adrants forum members have doubted the purity of this video and the blog surmising it to be just another poor attempt by an oh-so-cool agency to promote themselves using attempts at social media wit. We've sent an inquiry to the blog's owner for clarification but have not yet received a reply. We're leaning toward fake but we'll report back any information, if any, we receive from The Disgruntled Client.
Borat, an anti-Semitic journalist personality invented by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, has riled up Kazakhstan with publicity attempts to generate interest in his upcoming movie. An irate President Nazarbayev, concerned about Westerners taking Borat seriously, assures us all that "contrary to Borat's claims, [Kazakhstan] is not a nation of drunken anti-Semites who treat their women worse than their donkeys." We're not really sure why this kind of thing is a political issue considering Fez has made us laugh over stereotypes for as long as "That 70's Show" has been around, but whatever, every country is different and has the right to decide what kind of news should be a diplomatic priority.
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