New York Magazine is reporting what we all already know. New York Magazine tells us Wal-mart has proof Julie Roehm had an affair with Sean Womack, writing us, "Wal-Mart has told New York Magazine exclusively that it has 'irrefutable and admissible evidence' that fired senior vice-president of marketing communications, Julie Roehm, had an affair with Sean Womack, a vice-president who reported to her. Roehm is the subject of an upcoming piece in the magazine by Steve Fishman. Wal-Mart had remained nearly silent since the firing of Roehm and Womack on December 4."
We're not sure we want to know what that "irrefutable and admissible evidence" is because, well, that sort of thing is just gross. Kind of like a President's "fluid" on an intern's dress. Ew. Roehm isn't taking it lying down telling New York Magazine, "I guarantee there is nothing because it didn't happen. I know what they have, and it's not evidence of an affair. It's irrefutable evidence that we're really good friends. He's like a brother to me." Even more ew!
Can we just get past all of this?
- P&G and Unilever has decided to sit out this year's Super Bowl advertising extravaganza and will, instead, allocate dollars to other efforts they feel will provide a better ROI.
- Rather than believing its new operating system is good enough to seel itself, Microsoft is serving up a $500 million worldwide waterfall of advertising.
- A "viral" print ad? Yawn. Snooze. Huh? WTF?
- George is right. The five finalists in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl are quite good. Our money is one Duct Tape of Mouse Trap.
- George also thinks he has the perfect replacement for the Maytag Man. He thinks it's Elmo Blatch (real name: Bill Bolanfder), the guy who killed the Tim Robbin's character's wife.
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Mcrosoft is, of course, pulling out all the stops to launch its new operating system, Vista. As part of the launch today, New Yorkers were greeted with a gigantic billboard outside the Terminal Building. The billboard was not your standard static board but was alive with Cirque du Soleil-style acrobats hanging from ropes while unfurling large tarps in the shape of the Windows logo. TBWA used a similar approach for Adidas in Japan back in the summer of 2003.
Is it just us or are people idiots when it comes to navigating to popular websites? A recent Hitwise study featured on eMarketer found MySpace to be the top search term for 2006. Also on the list are ebay, Yahoo and Mapquest. Are we the only ones that realize all you have to do is add a .com to these popular names rather than search for them? Hmm. I suppose somewhere in the world, there are still people who haven't heard of the Internet either. Oh well. At least Hitwise is making some money with this nonsense.
- FMBQ reports Royce International Broadcasting alleges to the FCC that Entercom, which hopes to acquire 16 CBS radio stations, is "a highly-leveraged criminal enterprise that cannot be relied on to serve the public interest" an wants the sale stopped.
- It seems the idiocy that is the FM radio promotional stunt may come to an end. FMBW repoprts, "After radio contestant Jennifer Strange died from water intoxication - the result of KDND/Sacramento's water-drinking contest Hold Your Wee for a Wii - syndicated radio personality Erich 'Mancow' Muller has announced that he is creating the Foundation For Responsible Radio and calling for an end to 'voyeuristic FM radio stunts.'" Nah. Opie and Anthony are still out there.
- Cynopsis reports the President's State of the Union address was viewed by a combined station total of 45.5 million people, up from 41.7 million in 2006.
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According to Advertising Age, marketing for female arousal sex products will be jumping in '07 with ramped-up campaigns for K-Y Jelly's warming fluid and Zestra's arousal oil.
The act of sex in 2007 sounds like it'll be both exhausting and mildly frustrating. With men on Viagra and women oiling up as if for competitive sports it's a wonder we won't all die of hyper-achieverism come 2008. We hear Microsoft has a cure for that though. More importantly, does this mean our spam rate is going to double?
Just as we thought, the finished product is always better than the boring B-roll. That's quite evident when you compare the original B-roll of this Dale Earnhardt Jr. Budweiser to a short clip of the finished product. Budweiser is working with MWW Group and the two have released short clips of the ads they plan to run in this year's Super Bowl. There's eight in all and you can view them after the jump. Most seem to have promise.
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You know when you watch a friend do something so stupid you wish you were never born so you could never have seen it? That's the feeling that flooded us when we saw Pizza Hut's latest social networking snafu: the uncool-but-cool pizza delivery guy.
Even if you forgive the use of Incubus' Drive, the pretentious article-preceding-name ("The Ted" - why not go all the way and call him The Tedster?) and the awkward "Who I'd like to meat?" joke, you have yet to account for gratuitous use of words like "babe-licious" and "par-tay."
Let's not forget the use of seedy come-ons like "In a court of girls, I'm the prisoner, not the judge ... and I've been very, very bad." The page in general is so wince-worthy that the very thought of pizza afterward made us throw up in our mouths. Way to go, imc2!
For a marketing trend to be legit, Nike jumps on board and makes it legit, letting everybody else make mistakes before it swoops in with its gigantor marketing team and victorious hear-me-roar worldview.
To illustrate, they improved on Dove's decent but docile Real Beauty campaign, not just representing imperfections but embracing them with manic ferocity, even writing little manifestos about the merits of thunder thighs - which would be crazy-lame if done by anybody else but Nike.
So it's apt that they call their take on consumer-generated ads The Second Coming. And instead of begging for whatever you can pull out of your ass (a method yielding only ironic or lackluster results), they've wrapped an iron fist around the potential outcomes.
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We are so sick of all this Julie Roehm crap. Oh wait. No we're not. Are you kidding? Of course we're not. This is great shit to write about. So now she's suing Wal-mart for breach of employment contract and demanding the return of certain files and items from her office such as paint and a step ladder she left in her office. Aside from all the boring legal crap, perhaps the best line in the entire Advertising Age article about this latest chapter in the saga is, "Among the changes Ms. Roehm effected during her 11-month tenure at Wal-Mart: She painted her office." Classic. Priceless. Hilarious.
While she has concerns over what she believes is money owed her according to her contract, when she appeared today at a panel on the worth of Super Bowl advertising, she said her Wal-Mart dismissal was a "blessing." Certainly a strange comment to make on the eve of issuing a lawsuit against the employer that delivered that "blessing." Oh whatever, so the saga continues, wasting bit and bytes off online press space and killing trees all to regurgitate the same old crap: she wasn't a fit for Wal-Mart and they canned her ass. Get over it. Move on.
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