- MEDIA magazine names Al Gore Person of the Year. Huh?
- Without a review, Revlon has moved it $200 million from Carat to Initiative. Well, that's gotta suck for Carat.
- Yet another anti-advertising group fights the proliferation of outdoor advertising. The problem with all these groups though is that they use the same techniques all other advertisers do which simply adds even more to the already ridiculously cacophonous level of marketing litter.
- The Oprah Magazine tops this year's AdWeek Magazine 2007 Hot List. Rounding out the top ten are Real Simple, US, More, Teen Vogue, Glamour, Allure, Wired, Martha Stewart Living and The Economist.
Responding to an article written by Glenn Sacks who claimed an Arnold-created ad for Fidelity in which a father jumps up and down with joy after beating his daughter in ping pong is insensitive to men and cause for Volvo to remove the agency as a contender in its ongoing agency review, Arnold CEO Fran Kelly responded, saying, "On the one hand I feel silly even commenting on a story like this, on the other hand, Arnold is known as an agency with strong values and relationships with our clients and important prospects like Volvo. We take our responsibility to be insightful, honest and aspirational brand communicators seriously. Our track record promoting family vacations for Royal Caribbean, driving down teen smoking rates by 22 percent with 'Truth' and raising funds to help put musical instruments in children's hands via Fidelity's Music Lives program speaks for itself."
While we've had our say on the topic of men portrayed as idiots in advertising, the trend may simply be due to the fact that, in a politically correct society such as ours, there's no one left to offend.
Just what happens when every other agency in a $100 million account pitch, except yours, drops out? Do you open a case of Heineken and celebrate? That's a bit unclear for Berlin Cameron which finds itself in that position right now as every other agency has dropped out of the $100 million Heineken account pitch. Weiden + Kennedy was the latest agency to throw in the towel claiming "a difference in strategic direction" as told to Advertising Age. Berlin Cameron already handles Heineken's Premium Light account but neither Heineken nor Berlin are commenting yet on the status of the pitch.
We seem to have a thing for those fake magazine cover ads and it looks like DDB is using the trick as its last stand for JC Penny before handing over the reigns to Saatch & Saatchi who will give us its "Every Day Matters" love. But, for now, it's still "It's All Inside."
In the March issue of GQ, the cover of another magazine, MANdatory, appears complete with manism headlines such as "There, there. How to tell her what she needs to hear" and "Emotions. Could there be more than two?" It's not terribly creative but it does stand out in a sea of messageless, Dolce & Gabanna-like ads that fill the magazine so we'll give them points for that. It did get us to stop and read it.
Alas, the retailer is due for a squishy Love Marks makeover which, hopefully, doesn't try to make the place more than what it is: a moderately priced department store that sells moderately styled items to moderate people. Everything doesn't need to be high end, ya know.
Because for some strange reason we'd all prefer incestuous think tanks to trolling malls and listening to people chat about which AirMaxes are hype, the same cat who brought us Swivel Media brings us the Experiential Marketing Forum, a global indy forum of marketers and students who'd like to dissect Experiential Marketing (XM).
Here we find a sedate wiki-style space where brilliant minds can discuss the "burgeoning experiential marketing industry," possibly the precursor to a policy-pumping spin-off a la WOMMA. Word of mouth, apparently just one tentacle on the XM octopus, is so yesterday compared to this zany interactive (cough-cough-consumer-generated) brand thing.
Can't wait to see what kind of pop philosophy and patchwork policy rolls out of this bad-boy.
It seems $50 million dollar marketing decisions can now be made on the basis of winning or losing a newspaper's ad popularity contest. Yes, that's right. CareerBuilder has placed its account in review because its ads did not make a top ten appearance in USA Today's Super Bowl ad poll, a tiny survey based on just a few hundred people with absolutely nothing to do with whether or not an ad affected sales.
Cramer-Krasselt President Peter Krikovich is pissed. Livid. Dumfounded. And steaming mad and tells Advertising Age he responded to CareeBuilder's opening a review based on the poll by asking, "You have to be fucking kidding me, right?" The agency has resigned the account and will not participate in the review.
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While there are probably quite a few ads that make us go, "How do they do that?" the question isn't answered often enough to be worth pursuing very far.
Adland, however, posed the question about an ad for Orange entitled Belonging. Oddly enough, it was answered. Sam Akesson of Fallon London confesses, "[Belonging] took A LOT of takes, and we spent about 2 months of rehearsing to get all the choreography and movement right. Basically it involves a lot of people running and jumping into holes..."
We were like WTF until Fallon elaborated with its own version of Making the Video. Way more interesting than anything P. Diddy does behind the scenes of his hitmakers, it probably could still have used a catfight or two. But how often do you get to see people jumping into holes? Not nearly enough.
Ask at Ad-Rag confides, "Belonging doesn't use any CGI. Instead they rely on running away, jumping into holes and the camera's blind spot. I think it's neat." We do too.
In fact, we think behind-the-scenes efforts like this are a great way of building intimacy between brands, audiences and even - yes - agencies. If it worked for Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson, it can work for us too. Creative endeavours make fertile ground for screaming, crying and potential taboo trysts, yeah?
North Carolina-based Woodbine Agency rips into the Ad Club of the Triad's annual ADDY Awards, swooping up 18 Addy's, including 11 Gold and four Silver Addys. Additionally, they won a Best in Show for the Pivotal Decisions campaign they did for Piedmont Federal (which premiered here!).
To celebrate, the formidable bunch tore into what they called "the remains of their competitors" - which they claim was just leftover roast beef but could easily be the devastated flesh of some sadly razed agency exec from elsewhere.
Woodbine has offices in Winston-Salem and Charlotte, the latter of which marks its first year in July. Check out more celebratory meat-grinding here and here.
We pride ourselves on our unsurpassed potty-mouthage, so we feel a little outdone by this new Earth Day campaign that's kind of sponsored by Greenpeace.
The naughty prints are only "kind of" sponsored by Greenpeace because Exit3a copywriter Tom Mullen admits to AdCritic they haven't told the organization about the print series yet. "It's probably not legal, but there's too much paperwork, meetings and phone calls involved to get the campaign approved in time for Earth Day," he explains. "I figure Greenpeace is too busy getting sued by conglomerates to bother suing a few people who are trying to promote the cause. They can always officially deny the vulgarity."
If fortune favours the brave, perhaps that grace extends to those disinclined to ask permission for slapping mom-fucking ads out into the open and signing it Greenpeace.
We call this the conjure-bonds-by-insulting-the-source technique. This strategy occurs on the playground all the time, except it's done in crayon and usually ends in tears or angry phone calls. We have a feeling Greenpeace will be getting a few of the latter.
Just is case you aren't by now completely sick of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Boston Terrorism media orgasm, Brandweek scored an exclusive (did you hear that? exclusive! damn, they're good.) interview with Interference Inc. Founder Sam Ewen whose agency was behind the placement of the moonite/litebrite (or whatever the fuck you want to call them) bombs...oops...guerrilla marketing installations. There's a tease of the interview here which basically reveals nothing we didn't already know. The full interview will be published in Monday's printed Brandweek and online.
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