Hasta La Creative!

I once interviewed at an ad agency that had a manufacturer of corn syrup on its client roster. And while it didn’t make a difference in me getting the job or not, frankly, I was really turned off by that because I’ve read countless times how the abundance of corn and corn-related products in every step of the food chain has done a number on our health. And I’m a guy who’s done my share of casino marketing.

I’d forgotten all about that agency until I started leafing through The Fattening of America: How the Economy Makes Us Fat, If It Matters, and What to Do About It by Eric A. Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman.

I was sure that in this book, advertising and marketing would get the blame for America’s expanding waistlines, but the truth is more complicated than that. The authors examine every aspect of the way we live our lives these days, and how even today’s schools, jobs, and government policies have affected our collective health.

If you’re looking for a good examination of one major topic in our society, read The Fattening of America. There are lessons to be learned that relate to almost any client you have, or even your own lifestyle. And remember that we in advertising play a role in it all: we advertise the food, the grocery stores, the fast-food joints, the medications, the diet plans and the hospital services.

Special thanks to Anna at FSB Associates who provided me a copy for review.

Stuart Elliott’s Monday morning wake up call is all about how clients and Madison Avenue saw “the recession” coming a mile away and have already adjusted accordingly.

Whatever. Let’s click over to where the action is, shall we?

LA Times Staff Writer, Alana Semuels, paid a visit to the Rubicon Project’s offices, where “dozens of twentysomethings in jeans crowd around tables in one big room, hunched over laptops, typing away. A few play a Nintendo Wii game in the corner. One sips a beer.”

Investors may be jittery about the current economy, but Rubicon — a start-up online advertising company — isn’t worried. It hired most of its 37 employees in the last few months, and today it plans to announce it has received a new round of funding, bringing its total to $21 million in eight months.

Here’s Rubicon’s pitch to web publishers:

A couple weeks ago my subscription to the online version of The Wall Street Journal expired, then seamlessly auto-renewed. I don’t like auto-renew and didn’t know it was on. Add to this, the Journal’s move to a free content model supported by ads, per Rupe, and I said to myself, I hope they give me a refund when they do go free.

But, today The New York Times reports that Rupe said not so fast on the free thing. When you think about it, why be free when you have people like me on auto-renew? It makes sense to keep paid subscribers.

Here’s a more twisted reason to keep things the way they are:

Dow Jones executives argue that the firewall not only generates revenue, it also creates an elite audience of high-income business-oriented readers whom advertisers pay a premium to reach. The Journal has a million paying online subscribers, some of whom also subscribe to the paper in print.

Media Shift’s Mark Glaser spoke to BusinessWeek executive editor, John Byrne, about sweeping usability changes to the venerable magazine’s website.

In response to a question about upping participation from the user base, or community, Byrne says:

We have had a very rigourous, very lively reader involvement on the site for a long time. In any given month, roughly 15,000 people participate in conversations on our site, but they are largely hidden from view. You have to either go into a blog and see how people are responding, or you have to go into a forum to see how people are exchanging views, or go to the end of a story to see the comments on it. We want to elevate those conversations and make them more apparent to everyone that these conversations are occuring.

We are rewarding our readers for making thoughtful comments on our site by going to the reader and saying, “We like what you’re saying and want to feature it in a prominent way, can you send us a digital picture of yourself so we can put it on the home page.”

This is about elevating our conversation and giving credence to the rhetoric that everyone has, that the web is a dialogue and not a lecture. The truth is that very few people are delivering on it, having reporters actively engage with readers or elevating comments and saying, “This is as important as any story we have, any video we have, any audio we have.”

Real estate mogul, Samuel Zell, is intent on changing the culture at The Tribune Company, his latest acquisition and first media company.

Zell tapped Randy Michaels, Tribune CEO for interactive and broadcasting, to rewrite the company’s employee manual–that lovely document workers snuggle up with at night.

According to Los Angeles Times (a Tribune paper), the document–which shrunk from 11,519 words to 3,663 words–is nothing like the mind-numbing, lawyered gobbledygook in most corporate manuals. Consider the opening:

“Rule #1: Use your best judgment.”

“Rule #2: See Rule 1.”

It appears that Zell is using his best judgment. Should his employees do the same, Tribland will be, no doubt, be a happy place.

Edward Wasserman, professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, argues in the Miami Herald that journalism ought not be subject to the brutal trappings of online metrics.

Under the new rules, the commercial value of specific editorial offerings is estimated with precision, rewards and punishments doled out accordingly, and coverage cut to fit.

The problem with online Popularity Pay is it that it mistakes journalism for a consumer product, and conflates value with sales volume. Journalists don’t peddle goods, they offer a professional service, a relationship. The news audience renews that relationship to get information and insight on matters it trusts journalists to alert it to, even though the news may be disquieting or hard to grasp.

Gawker Media already operates on the Popularity Pay model. Nick Denton’s goal is to discourage “self indulgent” posts and “mind-numbing frequency” in favor of “linkworthy material.”

More than two-thirds of consumers who use the internet have used it to research package-goods products, according to a new survey by Prospectiv, a firm that provides online customer leads for marketers.

Of the consumers who use the internet to research package-goods brands (48%) do so primarily to get product information. Another 46% use the internet to seek savings or coupons, while 6% are primarily looking for tips on how to use the product.

[via Ad Age]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Garden & Gun’s new editor, Sid Evans, in The New York Times this morning.

Here’s the heart of the piece:

“There’s a kind of arrogance here that anybody who’s not in New York isn’t here for a reason,” Mr. Evans said last week over elk chops and bourbon at Henry’s End, a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights near his apartment. “You really do begin to believe it, that the only smart people in the media are in New York.”

The same arrogance in media exists in advertising, despite the fact that many of the nation’s best agencies exist in Miami/Boulder, Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Richmond, Boston, Austin and San Francisco.

You’d think that smaller TV audiences would lead to falling ad prices, right? Not so, according to this story in the New York Post:

Although it seems counterintuitive, it’s the law of supply and demand. As the TV audience shrinks, advertisers have to buy more ads to reach their target number of viewers. But that increased demand for ad slots creates scarcity, which in turn leads to rate hikes.

In the fourth quarter, advertisers on average paid 18 percent more for primetime “scatter,” or spots purchased on the open market, compared with the year-earlier period, ac- cording to SQAD Inc., a media research firm that tracks TV ad costs.

“I think this is going to be the tipping point where advertisers will sit there and really evaluate what they’re getting for their money,” said Jason Kanefsky, a senior broadcast buyer at ad-buying firm MPG.

So advertisers just keep paying more for more ads to reach the same audience. I can’t quite figure it out. Can you?