Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – Carnival Group Cruises has shortlisted four media agencies to handle its £12m UK media planning and buying business for its multibrand account of P&O Cruises, Princess Cruises, Ocean Village and Cunard.

LONDON – T-Mobile today unveiled the first phone to run on Android, Google’s open source mobile phone software platform.

Google does not set the prices of the search advertising market; its advertisers do. With auction pricing, even a major player can’t control the market.

The small copy on this recruitment advertisement from Nicholson Kovac, says: “We’re not only independent, but we believe in being 98% fat free.”

Kovac has decided to use the unusual tactic of promising zero politics to entice folks to Kansas City. They also boast of a “flat organization chart,” so there are fewer levels of approval. Okay, but come on… Every business (and most certainly those in advertising) have political prisoners. In fact, some NK staffers would patently disagree with the shop’s claim. See here, and here, and here.

Everyone has affairs of state. Without office politics, the operating model becomes a collective. If you’ve been to a liberal arts college and started an art/writing/screen printing collective, then you know it’s all bollocks. Someone is always in charge. Someone is always at the bottom and someone is always bitching and angling. It’s human nature. Deal with it.

This politics free pitch makes no sense considering this idealistic idea of “we-don’t-have-no-stinking-politics” is coming from a shop with the tag line, “Relevant Ingenuity.” Relevant. Ingenuity. How limited and depressing is that?

More: Meet Nitro’s CEO, Chris Clarke

Comments (View)

function() {
links = document.getElementsByTagName(‘a’);
query = ‘?’;
for(var i = 0; i = 0) {
query += ‘url’ + i + ‘=’ + encodeURIComponent(links[i].href) + ‘&’;
}
}
document.write(”);
})();

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — Wieden & Kennedy said it is parting ways with Starbucks, ending a relationship that began in 2004.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — A March cover of New York magazine locating Eliot Spitzer's brain below his waist has nabbed nominations in three different categories, including Cover of the Year, in the third-annual best-covers contest organized by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

LONDON – Express Newspapers classified advertising director Justin Mafham has left after just three months with the company.

LONDON – Coca-Cola GB is targeting women with a mobile portal called the ‘Diet Coke Silver Room’.

The financial mess we’re facing will have lots of consequences for the ad industry. BusinessWeek takes a look at a slowdown affecting one of the hotter sectors in the biz: online advertising.

Even before the financial market malaise took a turn for the worse with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Bank of America’s (BAC) purchase of Merrill Lynch (MER), and the government bailout of AIG (AIG), researchers were cutting back online advertising forecasts. In August, research firm eMarketer cut projections for Internet ad spending this year to $24.9 billion, the second revision of estimates first released in October. The firm expects Internet advertising growth to slow to 17.4% this year fom 25.6% in 2007. Next year, growth will slow even more, to 14.5%. “Online advertising will not grow as fast because of the economic problems,” eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman says.

My clients are nervous all around. Are yours?

A couple of weeks ago, while cruising around Denver for the Democratic National Convention, I ran into Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. The DPA might strike some as simply a pro-marijuana group, but Ethan and th…