Hasta La Creative!

King of Shaves founder Will King is to step down as chief executive and hand the reins of the business to long-standing colleague Andy Hill.

Xbox users will soon be able to order a Domino’s pizza without having to tear themselves away from their gaming console, thanks to a deal between Microsoft and the pizza chain.

You’d have to be slightly insane to throw marketing money into the headphone arena these days. Just as Apple and Samsung are sucking up all the oxygen in the smartphone space, Beats and Bose seem to be doing the same in the personal audio industry. Granted, the majority of the country may be simply walking down to the closest Walmart and buying whatever’s on sale for $12.99, but if you were to ask the average consumer what the best headphones are, he’d likely say Bose or Beats.

In terms of marketing, Bose is tying up with the NFL as an official sponsor and Beats is tying up with NFL players and just about every other celebrity out there. Beats, in particular, has rolled out solid advertising over the last year, the most notable of which featured star athletes shutting out a world of hate-fueled opposing fans with a pair of Beats.

So when the JBL press release landed at Ad Age HQ, my first response wasn’t “How odd,” but rather, “How sad.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Trying to recruit a director of analytics who had been making $125,000 at another agency, Andrew Swinand, CEO of digital-analytics shop Cardinal Path, offered the candidate $140,000. It wasn’t enough: Accenture snagged him with $160,000 and a $20,000 sign-on bonus.

Such is the market for data roles, which is driving big salaries at shops.

Mr. Swinand was president of media agency Starcom MediaVest Group prior to co-founding Abundant Venture Partners. That venture group is associated with Cardinal Path, which conducted an analysis of salaries based on its own staffers’ experience and past gigs, mostly at agencies and consultancies. It found that entry-level salaries for data-related jobs at agencies tend to start at close to $60,000 compared to around $30,000 for standard entry-level agency jobs. Staffers with data experience and jobs also move up more quickly than others, jumping from $60,000 to $100,000 in just two years and reaching up to $150,000 after five years, he said.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

A group of Egyptian newspaper editors pledged to limit their criticism of state institutions, after Egypt’s president warned of a “conspiracy” behind a militant attack last week.

Category: Up Your Game
Summary: “Must be able and willing to defend the creatives against outside interference from account services, clients, traffic, agency principals, etc. Must approve and ‘sell’ the creative work to the account team and client. If the creative work isn’t sold properly to the account executive, it will not be sold properly to the client.” Yikes…I get it! Why would I want to work there?