Amielle Lake is the CEO of Tagga, a Vancouver-based company that helps agencies add a strategic mobile component to their campaigns. (Think broad SMS efforts, mobile websites, etc).
The service -- currently live in Canada and the US -- includes reporting and dashboard management, and payment models are flexy.
We sat down yesterday to talk about Tagga in a video interview. As luck would have it, I ended up gleaning a lot more than I expected. Amielle tells this great story about Tagga's birth and the state of agencies at that time; it also turns out she worked in mining and knows French cheese like this. (*crosses fingers*)
Funny what you can find out when the pressure's on (ad:tech was ending, hence the skulky suited man in the BG) and you know your first take MUST be perfect (I don't know how to use my video editing software. But you probably guessed that).
Compulsive Twitterers can hit the Follow button at: @tagga and @amiellel.
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There's decent amount of back and forth talk about a post Alan Wolk had over at Agency Spy. I came away thinking there are a lot of issues at work there lumped together under the single banner of why are ad people so damn angry. In talking offline with a few creatives about it, even more points were raised. At the risk of continuing the separation of church and state between creatives and the rest of the world, the focus for me becomes:
1) Why are anonymous comments overwhelmingly bitter/negative on ad blogs?
(The flipside to why are ad people so damn angry.) Are we talking in the workplace? Or online. Two different things. If I was stuck in a lousy shop, I'd be angry too. I might even go online to vent about it anonymously. What if they're tired of reading fluff pieces about someone they know to be a prick. Sure beats the mall and rifle approach.
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- Toronto-based Expresso is bucking the economic odds and opening an office in Boston. The office will be headed by Managing Director Marta Kagan, formerly VP of Marketing at Viximo.
- Sapient has updated the Coke Happiness site which now includes a game allowing people to take on the persona of Factory workers.
- "The e-mail system, like the phone system, helps with communications both internally (i.e., with Agency employees) and externally (i.e., with clients, vendors and media)." Check out this and other gems from an un-named agency's IT policy.
Continuing his efforts to land his agency a solar account by the end of the year, Captains of Industry Co-Founder Ted Page visits his doctor to discuss the side effects of eating cotton shorts, which he's promised to do if his agency doesn't get a solar account.
In an unscripted video, Page visits Dr. Glenn Rothfeld during which time the doctor talks about the after effects of eating cotton shorts, the fact it could cause a bezoar (hairball), the benefits of cooking the shorts Cajun-style prior to consuming and the fact super models often times consume cotton balls to keep their weight down.
As if there weren't already a plethora of industry award shows, now (not that this is new or anything) we have agencies like Ypung & Rubicon handing out awards to individual agencies within its network for what it dubs great work.
The winner of the agency's annual Idea of the Year Award goes to Shalmor Avnon Amichay/Y&R Interactive Tel Aviv for its work on Orange Time, a site for Orange's entertainment and movie portal.
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You like big butts? Or is it square butts? Yea, we can envision the exact moment this creative epiphany struck someone down in Miami at a place called Crispin Porter + Bogusky when they dreamt up this SpongeBob Square Pants, Sir Mix-a-Lot mashup up featuring bottylicious dancers shaking their (square) asses. (See the :30 here and the full length music video here.)
We can also envision a five year old walking by Burger King and asking, "Mommy, can we go to Burger King and get some square booty?"
And we can envision the looks mommy will get from passersby wondering just what's going on at home.
Seriously? WTF? Creepy King. Square-booty'd women in school uniforms shaking their ass in a classroom-like setting. Ass measuring. Ass touching.
It's like a porn director's wet dream. Not so much for parents with kids. Here come the cause groups.
Yesterday, Barbarian Group celebrated the fifth birthday of Subservient Chicken, it's brilliant creation which allowed people to type instruction into a website and make a guy dressed in a chicken suit do stuff. It was for Burger King and was done in partnership with Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
In a long blog post on the Barbarian Group website, Co-Founder Rick Web discusses how thw Subservient Chicken idea was born, who was involved in its creation, how it was sold to Burger King, how it was produced, how it was launched, how it spread, how it spawned copycats, the awards it won and how it impacted marketing.
Kudos to TBG and CPB for great work. It will forever have its iconic place in the annals of marketing history.
Writing on his blog, Idiot Flags, independent marketing consultant Stephen Ban comments on the closing of JWT's Chicago office and the general demise of ad agencies in general. Some gems:
"Agency networks create "conflict agencies" with new names -- effectively admitting that their brands are meaningless, and rendering the differentiation between and among the original agencies irrelevant"
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By now, you all know Mullen is moving from its majestic estate in the woods on Massachusetts' North Shore into the city of Boston. The agency's new digs will be at 40 Broad Street. While the move will take place soon, you can check in on the status of construction here. Yea, they're just video loops but still. And if you really have nothing else at all to do today, you can jon the agency's Facebook fan page.
We've seen all manner of antics from agencies vying for accounts but we really like this one from Boston's Captains of Industry. In a video, Founder and Creative Director Ted Page sits down to tell inform us if his agency doesn't win a solar energy account in 2009, he will literally eat his shorts on camera and post the video to YouTube.
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