Meritocracy Is A False God. Instead, Practice Gratitude and Cultivate Good Luck.

Editor’s Note: The following article is by Clifton Mark. It was originally published at Aeon and has been republished here under Creative Commons. ‘We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else …’ Barack Obama, inaugural address, […]

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Media Expert, Simon Peel, Helps Get Adidas on the Right Page

Why do you continue to go to marketing conferences? Are they worth the cost, the travel hassles, and the time away from the office? For people interested in marketing effectiveness, the answer last week was yes. Marketing Week, Campaign, and Footwear News are all carrying the story of how Adidas overinvested in digital marketing and […]

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Need to Convince People? Stop Talking and Reach Consensus

When you work in a creative field, you traffic in ideas. For a creative person in advertising, ideas are currency and like cash, fluid and hard to capture. Ideas are also something that people in advertising fight for, steal, glorify, and covet. The thing to know about ideas is they do not accrue value when […]

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Shopper’s Expectations Are Sky High; Retailers Not Equipped To Meet Them

Yesterday, I started an Adpulp story with this lede: “Expectations. Many American shoppers have learned to let them go, begrudgingly.” I was being facetious. Shopper’s expectations are sky high. According to a new report from BRP Consulting, customers expect engaging and relevant interactions and conversations across all channels and they don’t have any tolerance for unsatisfactory […]

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Are You Open to the Massive Business Opportunities in EQ?

Daniel Goleman’s seminal book Emotional Intelligence was a breakthrough in workplace dynamics. For the first time, we had to consider that intelligence alone is a poor metric for measuring or predicting career success. The thesis of the book is that an individual’s emotional intelligence quotient — their skill in innately human attributes like empathy and […]

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With A Little Help from Made, TaxAct Targets Today’s Workers

How are you feeling about tax time this year? Corporations, for the most part, are feeling good about reduced tax burdens, but what about individuals operating a business in today’s gig economy? Boulder-based Made, a marketing agency specializing in brand transformation, partnered with TaxAct to help freelancers and contract workers manage their tax needs and […]

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Smarten Up; Facebook and Your Mobile Phone Make You Dumb

Sean Parker, Facebook’s first President, gave an interesting talk recently, where he reveals the thinking behind the machine. The problem the Facebookers sought to solve: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? The “solution” they ended up inventing: “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of […]

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Is Adland A Risky Place for Investors?

The stock market is on fire. So, why are advertising agency stocks are languishing on the vine? According to The New York Times, WPP, which owns agencies including Y&R and Ogilvy & Mather, said annual net sales may be flat or grow up to 1 percent as it reported that the measure shrank in the […]

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Don’s Next Tweet Bomb May Land In Your Lap

President Trump has the power to rock markets and drive a company’s stock price up or down. He may not intend to upset a company’s apple cart, but the outcome of his erratic actions is the same. When the man drops a Tweet Bomb from his Samsung, things are bound to explode. Melanie McShane, head […]

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Real Ronald McDonalds Agree: Taco Bell’s New Breakfasts Taste Good

Taco Bell encouraged real men with a famous name to testify! “I am Ronald McDonald and I love Taco Bell’s new breakfasts,” several real Ronalds repeat into the camera.

 

This new campaign from Deutsch LA is not exactly brilliant, but it may breakthrough. And breakthrough is what it is going take to loosen McDonald’s grip on the morning hours—McD’s currently dominates with 31 percent of sales. Egg McMuffin ain’t no joke.

Ad Age’s reading of NPD data indicates that breakfast in 2013 logged its fourth consecutive year of growth for restaurants, while lunch and dinner continue to decline. Fast food, which accounts for 80% of total restaurant morning meals, showed the strongest growth, with a 4% increase over the prior year. And the forecast looks good: NPD estimates that fast-food breakfast will grow a cumulative 9% over the next nine years.

According to Nation’s Restaurant News, the hot item on Taco bell’s breakfast menu is expected to be the waffle taco—a waffle that cradles scrambled eggs and a sausage patty and is served with a packet of syrup for $1.79.

An Instagram post by a customer who stumbled across the waffle taco went viral, sparking about 4 million impressions.

UPDATE: The Ronald has responded on Facebook in a visually stimulating way.

lil buddy of mig mac

Previously on AdPulp: A Smothering Jewish Mother Smothers Son With Taco Bell, Son Eats It Up

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Customer Service Defines Your Brand In A Way Advertising Never Will

Impatient, are we? Not so much by nature, but by digital design. If something takes a few seconds to load, for instance, we act as if we are being cheated of precious time.

The powerful multi-way communication channels we now rely on have also reset expectations. Emails can sit there unanswered, but ignoring an Instant Message is another issue entirely. Now, take that concept to Twitter and Facebook.

According to Marketing Charts, a new study conducted by Havas Worldwide suggests that consumer expectations are high for social responsiveness, and that brands that fail to meet those expectations risk alienating a large portion of consumers.

What happens when companies don’t respond quickly? Consumers get annoyed. 48% of respondents agreed that “it annoys me if I don’t get a fast response from a company or brand I contact via Facebook, Twitter, or another social media channel.”

Facebook and Twitter are places where people like to talk. That’s the “social” piece of social media. The need to craft traditional but moving communications remains. But now a brand (with help from its agency partners) is also expected to keep up an ongoing dialogue with the company’s biggest supporters on Facebook and Twitter. This dialogue is one part content offering, another part realtime conversation. And as a representative of the company, the conversation can quickly turn to customer service, reputation management and sales.

Brands spend lots of money on advertising in effort to capture the interest of a coveted audience. But whatever good will the brand earns via paid, earned or owned media can be instantly washed away in a devastating typhoon of social media cluelessness. Don’t be that brand. Understand the demands of modern media and invest in developing talent to meet these needs, because they’re not diminishing.

Footnote: To McDonald’s credit (see above), the hamburger chain maintains a customer service account on Twitter to quickly address customer’s problems.

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Bob Hoffman Is Back For More!

Last week over beers in downtown Portland, I asked Sharon Krinsky if Bob Hoffman has a type A personality. She said yes. I’ll have to take her word for it, given that the two worked together for 20 years at Hoffman/Lewis in San Francisco.

There is also the evidence to consider. Starting and running a successful San Francisco advertising agency isn’t for the faint of heart. Deciding to rip the business a new one as The Ad Contrarian is another sign — only people with missionary zeal take on this sort of challenge.

So, am I surprised that one month after leaving the agency with his name on the door, Bob has a new gig? Not really. Nor am I surprised by the ambitious nature of the new undertaking, or that the new entity’s first move is to kick some hard core facts (see video below).

Type A Group, with Krinsky and Hoffman at the helm, is up and running with three primary goals in mind: 1) Consulting to independent agencies; 2) Turnaround Marketing; and 3) Marketing to the Fifty Plus segment of the American population.

“To be honest here, I have no idea whether this thing is going to go anywhere or not, but it’s a good time to do things I’m really interested in,” says Bob. Which is proof that you can be humble and be driven to achieve great things. The two things actually go together rather nicely, in my experience.

Personally, I wish Bob and Sharon all the best with this new venture, and I will be interested to see if one of the three disciplines emerges as a clear winner, or if the new consultancy fires on all three cylinders.

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The Martin Agency Joins Wieden+Kennedy In The Agency Incubator Game

Agencies don’t just churn out ad campaigns these days, they incubate startups. And why not? When you have the resources you can afford put them to good use. In fact, it is your responsibility to do so.

You may have heard, Wieden+Kennedy got into the baby-company warming game a few years back with the launch of PIE, now run by Man about Tech Town and friend of AdPulp, Rick Turoczy. Some notable success stories have already emerged from PIE, namely Urban Airship and Simple.

Note: PIE is taking new applications from budding startups until April 15th.

Now we have word from Richmond — home of VCU Adcenter, Cabell Harris and The Martin Agency — that 80amps, a local incubator, is being backed by Martin.

Neil Patel, The Martin Agency’s Senior Vice President of Content Strategy and Development, says:

We’ve chosen to work with 80amps for two main reasons: first, it provides a path to innovation that allows us to continue to focus on our core business of creating world-class advertising; second, 80amps’ focus on consumer products and services is in perfect alignment with our core competency.”

A path to innovation that fuels world-class advertising. I think this addresses the “Why?” question some may have.

Media is a shifty business, and marketing with it. Martin and W+K already have deep expertise in print and broadcast, now they need to add digital to their core competencies, and the people who make digital are different beasts. Interestingly, Richmond and Portland are not cities loaded with VCs, so Martin and W+K are stepping up to fill a need.

Iain Tait, who works at Google Labs now, following the shortest stint ever as a W+K partner, highlighted the differences quite nicely a few years ago.

We need to borrow from the places where real innovation is occurring: the world of hack-days, collaboration, open-sourcing, ring-fenced R&D time and incubators. Clinging to outdated idea-farming methods just because they’re reliable and predictable is a surefire route to extinction.

For sure, Tait’s world of propeller heads on speed is not the agency world of old, where creative teams holed up for days on end scribbling ideas on a notepad. Marketing complexity is increasing rapidly and it is a struggle to keep up with the curve, much less ahead of it. Not only do agencies need to produce a ton of content today, they need the data-crunching capabilities to track what happens once it is released. This data, in ideal circumstances, is then used to help inform next steps.

Can you see why agencies want to cozy up to people practiced in lean and agile development?

Previously on AdPulp: Be Fast And Fascinating (Or Be Gone) | The Google To Adlandia: Be Lean And Agile Like Us, And You’ll Be Rich Like Us

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