Hasta La Creative!

Every advertising awards show season brings with it a crop of scam ads that get entered into shows and win. This year (and it’s still early in the year,) a campaign created by JWT India for Ford got nailed for being fake. The creatives supposedly responsible for the ads were terminated.

Ad Age has been on the story all week.

Not only has the Ford scandal been a ding to JWT India’s reputation, it’s also now leaving the agency without senior creative and account leadership, since these executives –and possibly others under the Blue Hive group at the shop that runs the carmaker’s business– must now be replaced.

Few issues raise the hackles of agency folks like awards shows. Invariably, the bigger (and more international) the show, the higher the stakes are. Because awards shows equal more money, power and stature in our business. It’s the primary metric by which creatives are judged, and unless that changes, scam ads will always exist.

Also, the circle of judges for big shows stays remarkably tight. They all know each other (or of each other) and protect their own. The panels skew overwhelmingly male, so ads that win disproportionately represent male “frat boy” humor. Perhaps it’s time to open up shows like The One Show so that all of its members (a few hundred) can vote on the awards. Or agencies who choose to enter a category can’t have one of its own people judge that category or show. How about a “People’s Choice” show where the public votes? I think creative people would be shocked and horrified to see what would win a show like that.

All of this reminded me that a few years ago, I judged an ADDY show in a small market. After the judging was finished, we got an email from the director of the show saying the Best Of Show we chose didn’t actually run. So we chose another spot, in time for the awards night. It’s quite possible that, for all the derision they get, local ADDYs have more integrity than the CLIOS or Cannes Lions.

The post Scam Ads Are Nothing New. Perhaps The Old Ways Of Judging Aren’t Working. appeared first on AdPulp.

This is the hype machine and the the hype machine is deafening.

Chugga, Chugga, Chugga the hype machine goes. That’s the sound of spinning yarns into memes and trends. Social media is the new this. Content is the new that. And so on.

Which is why I find this cold glass of water (or is it sand in the gear box?) from serial entrepreneur Kaila Colbin refreshing.

In the provocatively titled “Can We Please Stop Hyping Social As The Marketing Messiah?” Nathan Safran replaces assumptions with data. During the 2012 holiday season, for example, 34% of retail website visits came from search. 40% were direct. 2% — yes, a mere two percent — were from social.

Another study Safran cites has 15% of respondents always or often turning to social for shopping or product research, while 97% say they always or often turn to search. Search is obviously not the only possible marketing channel out there, but at least if your dogma is that “search is best,” you’ve got some stats supporting you.

I’m not a search marketer. And this post isn’t about search, it’s about our ability to reason and read between the lines. For instance, digital spending reports continue to baffle me. Up and up the spending goes; yet, so-called display ads are the worst of the worst ROI generators.

Can we trust our most trusted media sources today? Hell, can we trust our own media literacy?

Companies are about to spend $17 billion dollars on display ads this year, but only one tenth of one percent of the people who see these display ads will notice, or act. The information fails to justify. Either companies are throwing money down the hype-made drain for no good reason, or display ads work much better than reported.

The post Protect Yourself from Industry Hype – Search Is What People Use When They Intend To Buy appeared first on AdPulp.

The founders of the website The Good Men Project predicted early on that their lean operation would turn a profit from ad sales once it started attracting about a million unique visitors per month. And as traffic neared that mark late last year, the company indeed turned in its first profitable quarter. So why did it just start offering an ad-free version?

“It became clear that banner ads are annoying to people and they just aren’t that profitable,” said Lisa Hickey, CEO of Good Men Media. “The CPMs slowly go down,” she said, using industry shorthand for the price advertisers pay for every thousand views on a site. “The number of ads we have to put on the site to break even goes up. It’s a balancing act that doesn’t get us to where we need to go.”

This is web publishing in 2013, when declining ad rates and the sense that each buck is harder to get than the last is leading increasing numbers of publishers to strip out the ads and ask readers to pony up. Even The New York Times has at least contemplated the idea of an ad-free version, asking readers about it in a recent survey about potential new products. Its sibling The Boston Globe already operates two websites, the free Boston.com, which is packed with all kinds of traditional ads, and the subscriber-only BostonGlobe.com, with far fewer, and much less intrusive, ads.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

GIFs have been around for 25 years, but they’re exploding in popularity in a web that caters to visuals and content curators. As once stated in a New York Times article, “GIFs function as glorified emoticons” with the ability to punctuate a moment.

The ad:tech blog has summarized a special GIF-format report from 360i that explores why GIFs are enjoying a renaissance, how to create successful GIFs and five ways brands can use them to their advantage.

Check out the full details here.

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority pardoned Mamdouh Hamamreh, who officers said portrayed Mr. Abbas as a traitor on Facebook.

Three of the biggest ad holding firms are vying to handle Cadillac’s creative account.

Agency execs from a trio of companies — Interpublic Group of Cos., Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe — flocked to Motor City yesterday to be briefed by General Motors marketing leadership about the Cadillac pitch. All told, spending is estimated at around $250 million.

It’s a closed process, there is no consultant overseeing it and it will be a fast-moving review, executives familiar with the matter say. Final presentations are expected to take place in May. The key decision makers at Cadillac will include VP-Global Bob Ferguson, Director of Advertising Craig Bierley and VP-Marketing Don Butler.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Writing for HubSpot, I’ve explored what’s wrong with current iterations of native advertising and what we can do to fix it. Native advertising, of course, all the rage these days. Companies like BuzzFeed and ShareThrough have based their business models on the notion that in-stream, organic-like content will save the day and finally allow everyone to retire those tired and underperforming banner ads to a nice tropical island far, far away.

In its current form, however, native advertising is destined to fail just like the banner ad failed. Why? Because most native advertising placements — just like most banner ad placements — are not structured with inbound marketing strategies that treat native advertising content creation as a starting point. Rather, the content is treated as the end point. In essence, most native advertising today is basically a branding play.

More…