Hasta La Creative!

As Verizon’s bidding battle for Yahoo comes down to the wire this week, the phone giant is betting that victory will be determined not only by its cash but by the strategy and leadership it has planned for the internet pioneer.

Verizon, Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and Vector Capital Management submitted bids by Yahoo’s Monday deadline, along with AT&T and private equity suitor TPG, according to people familiar with the matter. A decision could be made in about a week, one of the people said.

While some of the parties may view Yahoo as a collection of assets that could be realigned or broken apart, Verizon sees a complementary set of businesses that could find a home alongside its AOL properties. And Verizon is confident it has a key asset to make the integration a success — AOL Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong, according to people familiar with the company’s strategy.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

ICYMI, local TV can get pretty weird.

Kentucky for Kentucky, the project launched by agency bros Whit Hiler, Griffin VanMeter and Kent Carmichael to promote their home state, released a new ad that attempts to “push the medium without having to pull the ejector seat,” a la Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

KY for KY, which sells “Y’all” t-shirts and shot glasses with “Bourbon only” instructions (not really), has released a series of projects related to beards and ass-kicking in recent years.

The latest one is an ad for themselves (or, rather, their new retail space, CHECK IT OUT) that they tried to place on four different local stations in their native Lexington. The first three said no thanks to the cocaine reference and the F-bombs, but local NBC affiliate WLEX-TV somehow agreed after cutting out whatever fucks it had left to give.

The result is kind of like Tim & Eric dropping a few hits and wandering a little too far below the old Mason-Dixon line with the help of local prod co Kong.

As the kids say, Shit Be Cray. From Mr. Hiler himself:

“We felt the need, Goose. The need for speed! Kind of like that YouTube show Will It Blend?, we wanted to play Will They Air This? and make something so off-the-wall ridiculous that most local stations wouldn’t want to touch it. And they definitely didn’t.”

A corresponding blog post details how those stations said no in colorful ways. One called it “a little edgier than we typically see,” while one asked, “Can you do something (hate to say it) without the **** yeah ya do!”

Anyway, the ads will air during the late-night shows and SNL. The dudes even added “Digital Short” to the beginning of the one that will air on lonely, half-drunk Saturday nights, just to further confuse their fellow Kentucky residents.

About the stimulant-loving carnivore: It was a real bear that died after consuming a veritable shitload of The White Stuff that had fallen from the plane of a local drug smuggler.

We might ask whether these guys will ever win KFC, because we’d kind of like to see what they might do for the Colonel after they make sure to get rid of Norm Macdonald. But why the hell would they want that account anyway??

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Portuguese Film Academy

This is a press and poster campaign for the Portuguese Film Academy (Academia Portuguesa de Cinema) with the purpose to announce the 1º World Exhibition Trophies of Film Academies. This Exhibition take place at CCB (Centro Cultural de Belém), one of the most important contemporary museums in Portugal and all Europe.

Advertising Agency:004, Lisbon, Portugal
Creative Director:João Gomes de Almeida
Art Director:Daniel Matias
Copywriter:João Gomes de Almeida
Illustrator:Daniel Matias

Advertisers can now buy native ads programmatically in DoubleClick Bid Manager, Google said Tuesday at its DoubleClick Leadership Summit. Publishers can also make their entire native ad inventory on the web and in apps available programmatically.

The move, which was expected, comes nearly two months after the search giant said it would allow publishers to sell native ads in sales where there was a direct relationship with the advertiser. Now no such relationship is required, making it easier for marketers to buy native ads at will across all screens and formats, Google said.

“With the user shift to mobile, users have higher expectations for a great user experience and advertisers and publishers are working hard to deliver on those expectations,” Dan Taylor, managing director of global display and programmatic at Google, told Ad Age. “We’ve all had the suboptimal experience of browsing a well designed mobile site, when a legacy static display shows up and disrupts up an otherwise seamless user experience.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the pharmaceutical behemoth which paid out what was then the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history in 2012, followed up last year’s media review (itself resulting from the $20 billion joint venture deal in which GSK absorbed Norvartis’ consumer brands) with a review of global advertising, marketing and PR for all its brands.

This week, GSK concluded that review by consolidating with nine agencies: Advertising will be handled by Grey, Saatchi & Saatchi and Weber Shandwick; GSK’s digital account will be split between WPP Digital, Havas and Weber Shandwick; Content marketing goes to WPP Digital, Havas, Edelman and Weber Shandwick, with the latter two agencies also handling PR; McCann Health and Ogilvy Commonwealth will handle expert marketing, while Geometery will be responsible for shopper marketing. 

“We will tailor agency capability category-by- category to meet their unique business needs to more effectively reach consumers with the brands,” GSK said in a statement. “The transition to the new model will take place over a period of time and we are currently working through the specific allocations of work by area and brand.”

According to The Drum, the review included the four holding companies previously working with GSK: Omicom, Havas, Publicis and WPP, resulting in Publicis and WPP ultimately splitting most of the assignments. Since WPP previously “almost owned the  majority” of GSK’s advertising and marketing accounts and was seeking to keep Publicis off the roster, The Drum characterized the consolidation as something of a loss for the holding company. More About Advertising, however, characterized WPP as “the biggest winner” in the review, while pointing out that Omnicom’s DDB and TBWA and CHI/The&Partnership lost work on sports nutrition range Maxinutrition, which spends nearly $1 billion domestically, according to the publication. 

In the U.S., meanwhile, the big winner agencies appear to be McCann (which won expert marketing) and Grey, which retained all four of the “global power brands” it held going into the review  — Sensodyne, Poligrip, Parodontax and Panadol — while adding Otrivin. The two remaining such brands, Theraflu and Voltaren, remain with Saatchi & Saatchi, which won work on the then Novartis brands back in December of 2004.

An internal memo sent out this morning by Grey CEO and chairman Jim Heekin reads, “We now serve 5 out of 7 of GSK’s most important global brands including Sensodyne, Poligrip, Parodontax and Panadol. This is a tremendous vote of confidence in our partnership that began in 1955.”

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