Hasta La Creative!

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — No fewer than four cable networks have changed their looks, logos and even names in the past week, with a fifth to come at month's end. That doesn't even include Oxygen's new placement under the NBC Universal umbrella, which goes into effect this year as well. To help you keep all your cable brands straight, MediaWorks has compiled a quick guide to the new kids on the cable box.

If you see something, say something.

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Creative Director / Copywriter / Art Director: Magnus Olsson
Photographer: Chris Beeldschoon
Illustrator: Simon Spilsbury
Agency Account: Anne Bando, Eva Cortenbach
Agency Producer: Jan Willem Wiesenekker

If you see something, say something.

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Creative Director / Copywriter / Art Director: Magnus Olsson
Photographer: Chris Beeldschoon
Illustrator: Simon Spilsbury
Agency Account: Anne Bando, Eva Cortenbach
Agency Producer: Jan Willem Wiesenekker

It’s getting to the point where when viewing the latest American Apparel ad you begin to wonder if they are even real. That or some art director over there has a constant hard on and can’t create anything that…

Phil was the sun king of the golden age of TV advertising. He made commercials more entertaining than the shows they sponsored and transformed brands into pop icons with global reach. He hired me in 1985 to work on Apple, as I had at Chiat/Day. All of our meetings had been clandestine, in the kind of red-bolstered dark restaurants where industrial salesmen drink and ad people never venture. When I walked into his office in New York for the first time, he said, "If I'd known how tall you are, I never would've hired you." Yeah, he was a giant, but not a tall one.

Sassy bloggers, take note: Gawker might be down to drop you a few thou if you can raise traffic amongst its sites, which include Gizmodo and Defamer. Jason Calacanis, the golden child of Weblogs Inc., looks at the compensation…

Until his death in October, Robert Goulet was the guy who messed with your stuff while you languished in an Emerald Nuts-less, mid-afternoon, low-energy stupor. Deprived of its charismatic star, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners takes the campaign into even stranger territory this year. In the latest spots, Goulet is replaced by the models from the “Addicted to Love” video and by Swiss Family Robinson. Both are at least as mischievous as Goulet was, but maybe not quite as charming.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Warning: When it comes to making ads relevant for multicultural audiences, doing it wrong is worse than not doing it all. A new study from OMD Worldwide found that ethnic groups are turned off by ads that rely on stereotypes and caricatures rather than meaningful cultural cues.

LONDON (AdAge.com) — British retailers, braced for a disastrous Christmas, were instead content with a modest but stronger-than-expected 2.5% increase over December 2006, according to a British Retail Consortium estimate. But the outlook for 2008 is pessimistic.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — I find myself in the unexpected position of wanting to defend "Raw" against detractors who clearly haven't bothered to watch it. So I borrowed a few recent episodes from a torrent site of dubious legality and went to work. What I found was an offering louder, brighter and just plain bigger than the syndicated WWF "Superstars" show I used to watch on Saturday mornings.