For those of you from the cassette tape days, you might find this Valentine's Day card from Exopolis a little bit of fun. Back in the day, kids placed their cassette tape recorders next to their clock radios to record their favorite songs while playing DJ making cheesy mix tapes for their friends. Exopolis has taken that practice digital providing a cassette tape juke box of sorts with classics like Hall & Oates' Kiss on my List and our fave, The Divynls' I Touch Myself.
Last week we told you about Hart + Larson's Ham + Lambert site which promised to show a woman named Andrea watching the Super Bowl and rating the ads. For those of us who only care about the commercials, have ADD and enjoy watching an attractive female rate Super Bowl ads, this is the video for you. Watch Andrea as she has settles in on the comfy sofa, has a beer and some snacks, paints her wall, does other weird stuff and gets up off the couch during ad breaks to rate each commercial with placards using a rating system including "Effective," "Entertaining," "A Waste of $2.5M" a score and commentary. She even does a Half Time show. But the best part is she does it while teasingly undressing and dressing. No, there's no nudity but if you want to watch the game in 14 minutes, DAMN, this is the way to do it.
Expanding its its paid, post-graduate, 18 week intern program, Velocity, which was introduced last year, the Martin Williams agency has expanded its scope beyong the world of account management and will offer college grads interested in creative design and media the chance to dive into the world of advertising. So if any of you are thinking about getting into the ad biz, check this out. Just know that you'll have to pose for staged "candid" videos while you work and write about your experiences in the program's blog.
Hart+Larson, that agency that tried to hire Neil French has launched a weird site that promises to entertain by allowing us to view a certain Andrea as she watches the Super Bowl and view Super Bowl commercial ratings from the "Hart+Larson patented rating system." Whatever.
As a goof, a new business strategy and a statement that isn't far from the truth, Maryland-based ad agency MGH placed an ad this week in the Wall Street Journal with the headline, "Sweatshop conditions at America's advertising/PR agencies must end." The ad claims agency personnel are overworked due to decades old practices of cutting overhead and under staffing, that it's an unseen practice and that it negatively effects clients. All true. However, the ad neglects to mention clients no longer value most agencies as the true business partner they once were and refuse to pay them what they're worth, sloughing them off and just another vendor which can be financially bled dry while the client reaps the rewards and profits the agency created for them. Of course, an ad that spoke that truth wouldn't gain much new business.
To be fair, most agencies are not adapting to clients' needs and have refused to step outside the mold that's been in place for a hundred years. So it's no surprise clients have devalued agencies because, in the eyes of the client, they aren't getting what they want from the agency so they aren't going to pay thereby causing the problem this ad so succinctly points out.
This year, there seems to be a fascination with the flushing of toilets during halftime. Like the obsession with national toilet flush stats following M*A*S*H, Scott tissue will leverage the notion that all 90 million Super Bowl viewers will collectively go to the bathroom at the same time with the launch of Halftime Flush, a site touting the dissolvability of Scott toilet paper. On the site, Mike Ditka lends his intense convicibility to Scott's superior toilet tissue and a game allows visitors to match toilets to their flushing sounds. OK, so bathroom humor is always a good standby but we like VIA's simpler approach to the whole halftime flush thing.
Portland, Boston and New York-based Via has put together a nice Year in Review site that highlights the agency's achievements, the work it did for its clients and the people on the agency that did the work. It's taken the typically boring Case Study section of most agency websites and turned it into a piece of entertainment one would actually enjoy viewing.
We've had the pleasure of working for Bob Brennan but when we learned he would be co-presiding over the $300 million Miller media account review, currently handled by Starcom which Bob Brennan founded and has since left, we couldn't help feeling a bit odd about the whole thing.
It seems to us an account review manage by someone who founded an agency involved in the pitch is about as unbiased as a parent judging their own kid in a ice skating competition. Miller says the review is just part of their normal "best practices policy" but as far as we know, best practices doesn't include nepotism.
AdPulp points us to an ad placed in AdWeek by Exclusive Resorts outlining the success of its recent advertising and thanking its agency, DDB Seattle, for the work it did on the account. AdPulp hopes, as do we, that our industry isn't completely made up of selfless, ego-driven cretins and that this isn't some sort of prank by DDB to achieve a clandestine, third-party high-five by placing the ad itself.
It's sort of pointless for an agency to take legal action against a former employee if they end up going to another agency or starting their own agency and a few clients and former employees follow. First, no one forces an employee or a client to shift from the previous agency to the new agency. Agency people are big enough to make that decision on their own. Second, once a client makes the decision to leave, it's not like legal action is going to make them go back. And when the agency decides to somehow legally force an employee to stay when they've decided to leave and join the new agency, that's kind of pointless too. Short of shackles and a police escort, if someone doesn't want to show up for work, there just not going to.
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