Hasta La Creative!

Mr. Tallmer, the first theater critic for The Village Voice, also conceived its award for Off Broadway theater, the Obie.

Resource Ammirati has won the White Castle account following a competitive pitch. Rojek Consulting handled the review, which began in July.

The incumbent, Omnicom’s Zimmerman, had handled the fast-food brand’s creative and media efforts since 2009.

Resource, a digital agency headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, acquired New York creative shop Ammirati earlier this year.

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Senate Majority PAC reported spending even more than House Majority PAC between Oct. 21 and Election Day on Nov. 4, laying out $12 million in that period, according to an initial Advertising Age analysis of Federal Election Commission data.

Ad Age evaluated independent expenditures on TV, direct mail, digital ads, radio and print ads made by outside groups that were reported in the last two weeks before the election, which resulted in a new Republican majority in the Senate and the largest GOP House majority since the ’40s. Independent expenditures are those made in direct support or opposition to a candidate by outside groups not coordinating with campaigns. Some of the payments reported in the final weeks may have paid for ads that ran earlier in the election season.

The League of Conservation Voters proved to be a third major supporter of Democrats in the last couple weeks of the cycle, spending around $4 million in independent expenditures, much of it on direct mail.

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CNN, the cable news channel owned by Time Warner, will stop broadcasting in Russia after a new law was passed that limits foreign ownership in media companies.

Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting division said it hopes to resume broadcasting eventually, according to an e-mailed statement. The move was first reported by Russia’s Vedomosti newspaper. CNN’s Moscow bureau operations are unaffected, according to the statement.

“Turner International is assessing its distribution options for CNN in Russia in light of recent changes in Russian media legislation,” Turner wrote in the statement. “We are bringing our existing distribution relationships to an end while we do that. We hope to re-enter the market in due course, and will notify our partners of any update about resuming these services.”

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Originaire de Dublin, Maser est un artiste réputé pour ses installations très colorées et son talent pour ajouter une dose de surréalisme au quotidien. L’artiste compose des formes géométriques avec des rayures, des polyèdres et des camouflages pour créer un monde bien propre à lui. Une compilation de ses travaux est à découvrir dans la suite.

In September, we posted on the Camel/RJ Reynolds account leaving South Carolina/New York-based agency BFG Communications after more than 17 years. While multiple sources told us that the account went to Havas Chicago, we never received confirmation.

Today we hear of another account shakeup at BFG: a tipster claims that Snyder’s-Lance may be shopping around. The client, maker of sandwich crackers most often encountered in workplace vending machines around the country, signed with BFG in December 2012.

After our initial post on Camel, several readers reached out claiming that at least 50 team members at various offices had been laid off; today a tipster claims that the loss led to the closing of offices in Savannah and Tampa and that two rounds of layoffs in recent weeks have reduced the total workforce at the agency’s South Carolina office.

Another tip claims that the MillerCoors account is no longer with Bromley Communications of San Antonio. MillerCoors did sign the Publicis agency as its Hispanic media buying/planning AOR almost exactly six years ago, but the reader tells us that the client will be shopping elsewhere due to disagreements over audience targeting strategies.

We’ve yet to receive confirmation regarding either of these tips. Updates as they arrive.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new and trending TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, a company that catalogs, tags and measures activity around TV ads in real time. The New Releases here ran on TV for the first time over the weekend. The Most Engaging ads are showing sustained social heat, ranked by SpotShare scores reflecting the percent of digital activity associated with each one over the past week. See the methodology here.

Among the new releases, just in time for Veterans Day, Walmart publicizes its plan (originally announced last year) to hire 100,000 veterans by 2018, while Southwest Airlines promotes the availability of free live TV (streamed to the device of your choice) on its flights. And Sony calls attention to just how amazingly comprehensive its product line is.

As always, you can find out more about the making of the best commercials on TV at Ad Age’s Creativity.

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Sears Holdings has reached out to agency holding companies for a potentially sweeping agency consolidation.

According to executives familiar with the matter, the company has reached out to all of the major agency holding companies, asking them to present ideas on how to structure and staff the retail giant’s accounts, which are spread among a number of agencies.

According to these people, Sears sent a two-page document containing information on an “agency structure project” for 2015. In the document, Sears asks agency holding companies for information on how they would structure and support the account, which incluces Sears and Kmart, as well as its Craftsman, Die Hard and Kenmore brands. The scope includes merchandising, packaging, media buying, media placement, multicultural, social, mobile, search, direct marketing, catalog work, loyalty, brand positioning and more.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

PETA is certainly no stranger to provocative advertising, and its latest attempt to take on the wool industry with its “#WoolFreeWinter” campaign is no exception.

The group created two separate ads featuring models in open red long johns scratching their junk, one male and one female, ending with the tagline “Scratch Wool From Your Shopping List” and directing viewers PETA.org to watch a video exposing animal cruelty in the wool trade. Both ads were intended to run on digital billboards, above 42nd Street and at 1500 Broadway from November to January, but Neutron Media deemed the male version — which, unlike the female one, contains a hint of pubic hair, too suggestive, so it is running on PETA’s website instead. The website also features an editorial questioning if Times Square is sexist for rejecting the male ad. We’ve included it after jump, so you can decide for yourself.

“PETA routinely uses both men and women in sexy ads advocating for animal rights,” said PETA Senior Vice President Dan Mathews. “It was especially important in this campaign, as wool is marketed to both men and women who have no idea how violently sheep are mutilated in the shearing process.”

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

How do you market round-the-clock customer customer service? If you’re Norwegian bank DNB, you buy all of the ad space on one channel in a 24-hour window, and fill it with advice from your country’s citizens.

The marketer crowdsourced some 3,000 clips from the public. And on Sept. 19 it aired 1,000 of them once each—totaling about two and half hours of content. That included pretty solid gems of wisdom, like it’s a bad idea to stay up all night watching Netflix, and the classic winner, “Always look on the bright side of life” (alas, whistling not included).

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In the case study, agency Try/Apt (also onetime matchmaker to George Clooney and shepherd to a singing goat) claims some pretty impressive results, like doubling awareness of the service to more than 70 percent overnight. And if the usual rotation of late night commercials in Norway gets anywhere near as hairy as in the U.S., DNB scored a major victory just by knocking them off the slate for a day.

Then again, anyone who stayed up until 6 a.m. watching Netflix wouldn’t have to worry about that.