Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: We’ve decided to give you tips on how not to get a job in advertising. This reverses our position of trying to help you get a job.
This “sea change” occurred after watching Progressive’s spokesperson Flo advise a lactose-intolerant Progressive staff member.
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Digital agency Fuel has gamed Instagram — literally — by turning its portfolio into a gamified treasure hunt on the platform.
Fuel’s Instagram page looks and feels like a pinball machine, with 15 different images stitched together into one big picture. Six of these 15 image tabs are visual easter eggs, that users can click through to see the agency’s work and projects.
To create the portfolio, Fuel hacked Instagram’s tagging feature, creating a series of linked pictures that lead to six of its projects, each of which have their own accounts. Users can click through to explore the agency’s work on behalf of clients like Disney, Hasbro, Microsoft and Star Wars and even find mini-videos describing them.
When you click on the square image with the Mickey Mouse ears, for example…
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” is paring down its commercial load, with plans to cut about 30% of ads out of the sketch comedy show next season.
It will do this by removing two commercial breaks per episode, giving viewers more content, said Linda Yaccarino, chairman-advertising sales and client partnerships, NBC Universal.
And for advertisers, NBC will also be offering a limited opportunity…
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Those with a materialistic frame of mind think of spring not as the start of milder weather but as the beginning of the season for annual reports. That’s when publicly traded companies present their best face to the financial community and shareholders, publishing summaries of past performance and promises of future successes.
Given the crucial role that advertising plays in the economy…
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: McDonald’s is issuing a request for proposals to three major holding companies to find a single creative agency to work on its massive U.S. business.
McDonald’s currently has Omnicom’s DDB and Publicis’ Leo Burnett handling the bulk of its national advertising. Both Omnicom and Publicis are part of the RFP process that begins Monday, along with WPP.
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: A YouTube video called “Player Two” is going viral on YouTube because it is a tear-jerking, super touching story.
But the story of how and why it got made is just as heart warming.
Here’s a clue: Microsoft had nothing to do with it, reports Adweek’s Robert Klara.
Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: I am still hopeful that we can save ourselves.
We are in very deep trouble, but there may be a strategy to rescue ourselves from the hole we have dug.
Let’s start by defining the problem. The problem is that everyone seems to have lost confidence in us.
Our clients don’t trust us. In fact, the Association of National Advertisers is…
It was a pitch, a room full of MBAs, acronyms and awkwardness. We were the small agency competing with two very big agencies. The other agencies had pre-existing relationships with this very large CPG company. The nice woman running the pitch was very clear that they were “open to working with a smaller agency.”
There is that moment of time in a pitch we all know well, when you grasp that you are a likely choice to be awarded the business. The CMO will ask a question that makes it sound like you’re already working together, or someone important will say something like “you really get us.”
There is also that moment during a pitch presentation when you know that you have missed the mark in a myriad of ways. You know your agency is wasting everyone’s time, and that moment was an hour into this meeting. As executive creative director — of a small or big agency — I felt like a dick.
Last year Super Bowl viewers were treated to a barrage of emotional, sometimes uplifting, sometimes maudlin commercials. While there’s nothing wrong with moving advertising, or marketing that acknowledges real life, it all added up to be a bit much. [Exclude Lookbook Directory]
Led this year by Mtn Dew and BBDO’s PuppyMonkeyBaby, however, the advertising of Super Bowl 50 went a different way. For the most part, viewers were the winners.
Do you know someone under the age of 40 who you think should be recognized for accomplishments in the worlds of marketing, media or advertising? We want to know. The nomination form can be found here.
Ad Age is opening up submissions for its prestigious 40 Under 40 list. Specifically, we are seeking people who will be under the age of 40 by March 21 who have made a significant contribution to the industry within the last year.
This could be the brand manager who has launched a successful new product; the data whiz who has come up with a new way to find marketing insights; the programmatic genius; the up-and-coming creative; the media star who has reinvented a medium or has significantly contributed to a successful new program.
The call for entries is open for the Wave Festival, a leading ad festival for Latin America that includes the U.S. Hispanic market and Puerto Rico.
Entries are due by Friday, March 25, 2016 for the Wave. See the Wave’s 15 categories and enter here.
Advertising Age is partnering with the Wave, to be held April 13 and 14 in Rio de Janeiro. The regional Wave Festival is organized by Meio & Mensagem, Brazil’s top advertising and marketing publication and events organizer, and Ad Age’s longtime partner in Brazil.
On my office wall in New York, along with pictures of family and other people and occasions important to me down through the ages (including a photo of me and my hero Ernie Banks), there’s a framed picture of an ad N.W. Ayer & Son ran in commemoration of Ad Age’s 50th anniversary in 1980, headlined “Advice to a Friend on Reaching 50.” The ad features me and Louis T. Hagopian, former chairman and CEO of Ayer.
Lou died Jan. 9 after a short illness at the age of 90. N.W. Ayer, founded in 1869, is no longer with us either, and neither is its most important invention: the commission system.
Ayer, at the time of our 50th, had a slogan, “Ayer makes human contact,” and in those days, agencies had their own distinct personalities.
The U.S. Hispanic Idea Awards are being revamped this year as an October awards show after being held for the last four years during the annual April conference of AHAA: The Voice of Hispanic Marketing.
The awards will take place in Miami on Oct.12, after a full-day program that will include Philip Thomas, CEO of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, as one of the keynote speakers.
The awards are being moved partly to take advantage of fresher work that breaks later in the year and missed the earlier deadlines of previous years when the show happened in April. Luis Miguel Messianu, creative chairman and CEO of Hispanic shop Alma and also chairman of Circulo Creativo, which organizes the awards, said there is “clearly a gap” between April and June, a period when agencies prepare a lot of new work to send to the Cannes festival.
If what they say about getting there being half the fun is anywhere near the truth, I had more than my share on a recent trip to snowy Syracuse, N.Y.
And along the way I learned why ad people who foresee creative agencies reuniting with their
media counterparts are entertaining an impossible dream.
Many marketing managers overlook a simple principle: In the long run, every category coalesces around two major brands.
Cola: Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.
Toothpaste: Crest and Colgate.
A handful of people who claim to be WPP staffers are calling for the resignation of Mauricio Sabogal, CEO of out-of-home media agency giant Kinetic Worldwide, in response to a blog post he wrote that they claim contains “offensive and discriminatory treatment and views of Americans,” according to an email they sent to WPP CEO Martin Sorrell.
Mr. Sabogal, who is originally from Colombia, wrote the post in his native Spanish for Tumblr page “What’s on Fire.” He then tweeted a link to the post from his handle, @msabogalkw, on Jan. 22, 2015, when it was published. Both the tweet and blog post have since been recently removed. A cached version of the blog post can be found here.
After discovering the post over a year later, a group of more than 10 people sent an email to Mr. Sorrell, using a newly created anonymous email address, in which they express their frustration with Mr. Sabogal’s blog post and call for his resignation. The people behind the email include creative and media WPP staffers, three of whom work at Kinetic, as well as at least one non-WPP staffer, according to someone involved with the group. Ad Age obtained a copy of the email they sent to Mr. Sorrell.
An agency is once again being charged with racist and misogynistic behavior — and this time it’s JWT.
A discrimination suit has been filed in Manhattan federal court against the WPP agency and its worldwide Chairman-CEO Gustavo Martinez by JWT’s longtime communications executive Erin Johnson, claiming the executive made “racist and sexist slurs.”
“As Chief Communications Officer, Johnson reports directly to the Worldwide Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (‘CEO’) and oversees global corporate communications for JWT, including both external and internal communications,” the suit said. “Her career progressed without impediment until 2015, when JWT appointed Martinez as its Chair and CEO.” The suit goes on to say that Ms. Johnson had difficulty maintaining her duties, particularly promoting the company. Promoting it “internally and externally in a positive light has become virtually impossible given Martinez’s apparent comfort in making constant racist and sexist slurs, even on tape.”
Could the fractious client-agency relationship have been salvaged if agencies had been willing to take less than 15% commission?
“Losing the 15% media commission was the biggest game changer in the ad business since it started,” contends Gary Burandt, who worked across the world for Young & Rubicam before becoming executive director of ICOM, an independent agency network. He retired from that post in 2015 and now serves as an adjunct professor of marketing at the University of Denver and gives guest lectures at the universities of Missouri and Colorado. He’s been married for 50 years to the “extraordinary” Harriet “Freddye” Krumrey, a teacher and author of children’s books.
Gary said the commission system worked well for decades, but by the 1980s because of inflated media costs it was getting too favorable to the agencies. The fat profits were an incentive for agency chieftains to sell out to the newly emerging holding companies at big multiples — spurring the consolidation of the agency business in a few hands.
The deadline has been extended until Monday, April 4, for entries for the Wave Festival, a leading ad festival for Latin America that includes the U.S. Hispanic market and Puerto Rico.
See the Wave’s 15 categories and enter here.
Advertising Age is partnering with the Wave, to be held April 13 and 14 in Rio de Janeiro. The regional Wave Festival is organized by Meio & Mensagem, Brazil’s top advertising and marketing publication and events organizer, and Ad Age’s longtime partner in Brazil.
Ken Auletta is writing a book about advertising because the advertising business is in the throes of disruption, and disruption is something he likes to write about.
He came by the office to “pick my brain,” as he put it, and I must say I enjoyed the process of observing how another reporter tries to pry the most out of the person he’s interviewing.
The trick is making the other guy feel like he’s having an interesting conversation, and I think I asked him as many questions as he asked me.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
