Hasta La Creative!

Communication Arts is “The Bible” for the creative side of the business. To be featured in the advertising or design annual, or to appear in a feature article in one of the quarterly editions, is a form of acceptance into the club. To have an Adpulp article land on CA’s digital front page this week […]

The post Migrating to Client-Side Opportunities: A Rich Topic To Mine appeared first on Adpulp.

In our 13+ years of existence as an online trade rag, we’ve tried several approaches to monetizing our content. Finally, in 2017 we decided to strip the site of all advertising. An ad blog with no ads? We tried it, and I’m certain we can do better. Here’s the new deal, starting now. The second […]

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This has been a year of transformations for Adpulp. We stopped taking advertising (including paid posts), switched to a new responsive template, secured our hosting setup, loaded Facebook-enabled comments, implemented a micro-payments platform, and now we’ve refreshed our brand identity. The Chronicle of Bright Ideas The new logo was made by Jessica Knedgen, a designer […]

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This year, AdPulp.com moved away from being an ad-supported site. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we currently carry no ads at all. We are now 100% publisher supported. We no longer take paid posts, although the offer is there to do so literally every day. And we no longer place banners or text […]

The post A Dime for Our Thoughts appeared first on AdPulp.

If you’ve ever spent any time in advertising or marketing, you’ve heard people speak in terms that are beyond bizarre. Scope Creep. Deliverables. Ideation. You’ll also hear people talk about killer ads, hard-hitting ads, ads that are blown out and executed. I break down (and sarcastically deflate) these terms and others in my new book, […]

The post Buy My New Book: “Killer Executions and Scrubbed Decks” appeared first on AdPulp.

Ten years ago today we started an experiment here. The experiment has grown and morphed, and we, its producers, with it. There have been many things to learn along the way, and on this the site’s 10th anniversary, I’d like to share some of the more pointed lessons that come to mind. 1) Do what […]

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It’s always a fun time to participate on The BeanCast as I did last night.

We discussed Yahoo Advertising, CES, New York Times native ads, B2B social marketing, Amazon’s car-in-a-box delivery and my hopes for a Seahawks Super Bowl appearance. Hopefully I’m not babbling too fast for you to enjoy. Also on the panel were Len Kendall, Anthony Kalamut, Peter Shankman,, and show host Bob Knorpp.

And, since our first topic was Yahoo, I’m including an obligatory photo of Marissa Mayer. I think that’s a journalistic edict, right?

The post CES, Yahoo, NYT, B2B And More On The BeanCast appeared first on AdPulp.

It was nearly nine years ago that Shawn and I said what the hell, let’s give this ad blog thing a run for the money. We’ve learned a lot about the industry, ourselves and about building a micro-media brand along the way, and we continue to marvel at the accelerated pace of change in marketing and communications.

No doubt some of the changes are for the best. Frederic Filloux, writing in The Guardian, notes “we are witnessing the emergence of a new breed of smaller, digital-only outlets that are closing the gap, quality-wise, with legacy media.”

Meanwhile, legacy media companies struggle to maintain relevance in a rapidly changing mediascape. Take the watering down of Forbes, an historic media brand, with what is now a murky sea of contributor-generated content.

Sometimes, I so hate Fake Forbes that allows anyone to write under the Forbes brand. Forbes used to mean something.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 7, 2013

Legacy media brands are working to find their place in the market today. Paywalls are going up and paywalls are coming down. Editorial lines are being crossed, and tacky advertising intrusions and sponsored content are now commonplace. It’s no wonder a title like Forbes loses its center and its way.

At AdPulp, I feel like we are continually finding our way. This is part of AdPulp’s charm for me and why it remains an interesting project to work on every day. There have been times when I thought of retiring from the site, but I always come back for more. It’s not for the adoring fans and buckets of money. I wish I could say it was. The truth is AdPulp is something I enjoy doing/making.

Naturally, I consider this project and our team to be part of “the new breed of smaller, digital-only outlets that are closing the gap, quality-wise, with legacy media.” I think we along with Adrants, Adland, Adverblog and The Denver Egotist network constitute a whole new layer or block of media — we’re all practitioners who publish “industry insider” trade journals, exclusively online. Does our product stand up against legacy media’s reporting? You be the judge, but on a good day, I’d say it does. But it’s not necessarily the right question to ask of us. Ad bloggers are free to editorialize, whereas real reporters are encouraged to explore all sides of an issue.

I think readers enjoy both the rigor of journalism and the freewheeling nature of micro-media and we attempt to provide a degree of both.

The post Ad Blogs Are Anachronisms. Long Live Ad Blogs. appeared first on AdPulp.

Carl’s Jr. and 72andsunny have a great thing going. They do “food porn” really well, and now have a patent on the “stuff a sandwich in your sexy face” thing.

Hey, they’re able to make fast food look good on TV and that’s an accomplishment. Not one that needs another stupid award, but an accomplishment nevertheless.

I’m thinking you’d like to see your own TV spot in this space. Am I right?

We get worked over pretty good by PR people in the employ of various ad agencies. Some of it I welcome, most of it I reject. My thought is this: thousands of agencies are doing work in the shadows, heads down, noses to the grindstone. These shops don’t bother to promote their work. Their websites are always out of date. The agency blog is in tatters. We all know who we’re talking about.

If you see yourself in the above description, bust out for a second. Send a link to your latest spot or campaign. We’ll only rip it to shreds when made to do so by our evil twins. The rest of the time, we’ll repost it to Facebook. From their the cream rises to the blog. See above.

The post Today on TV: #EatLikeYouMeanIt At Carl’s Jr. appeared first on AdPulp.

I see a lot of PR pitches, just like I see a lot of advertising. I don’t mind the over-exposure, because it is my job and my passion. However, I do mind especially crass and often repeated attempts to reach me, and the general lowering of standards industry-wide.

According to Ragan’s PR Daily, the ratio of PR people to “pitchable” journalists is estimated at 4 to 1.

This certainly explains my inbox. Here’s one that just came in — read it with me, will you?

Since you blog about the marketing and advertising industry, this new technology development — announced today — should be of interest because of the effect it will have on the marketing discipline..

“There are a lot of garbage, irrelevant pitches out there,” says Gail Sideman, owner and publicist, Publiside Personal Publicity. “Some PR people are so pressured by their clients or bosses to pitch stories with no real news value that they devalue themselves and leave reporters with a bad taste should they ever pitch another story.”

Yet, the practice has its place and its defenders. Christopher S. Penn of Shift argues the central reason why public relations and marketing communications as a field “will never go away” is because every business needs three fundamental communications drivers: Awareness, Engagement and Trust. To deliver on these key promises, Sarah Skerik of PR Newswire suggests that PR pros, “Keep surfacing those crucial nuggets that describe why the story matters, and lead your audience through the message, laying a trail with these compelling ideas.”

Good advise, but I have even better advise for PR pros. Develop relationships with the reporters and bloggers you’re pitching by taking the time to read their work, know their interests and specialties and generally have a clue about what’s going on in their world. I can count the PR pros on one hand who bother to do this for me.

We pay lip service to “scaling one-to-one” in a world where authenticity and personalization matter. The problem with scaling one-to-one is it takes a ton of work. A busy PR person needs to send their pitch to 100 people right now! Yet sending it to 10 might be fine, if each email is personally crafted. Bottom line, when you make the reporter feel important or good about themselves, you boost your chances of being heard immeasurably.

The post When Will PR Grow Up And Be All It Can Be? appeared first on AdPulp.