Karoshi is the Japanese word for “death by overwork.” Sadly, the term has currency today, inside and outside of the ad world. On Christmas Day in 2015, 24-year-old Matsuri Takahashi jumped to her death from her Dentsu-supplied dorm in Tokyo. In September last year, a labor standards office in Tokyo determined she had worked 105 […]
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Bad advertising is here to stay. Bad advertising is about to go away. Which is it? Here’s a fresh sample of how bad, bad can be: I know that hurt. Sorry for putting you through that. Is there any hope for an industry that consistently churns out this kind of rotting flotsam? According to Andrew […]
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Art Net News calls it, “a hypnotically-brilliant video.” The New Republic says, “It makes the end of the world seem as sweet as bubble gum.” All high praise for North Hollywood-based Mike Diva, the director behind one of the best political ads of the season, hands down. If Trump’s team knew what they were doing, […]
The post Mike Diva Makes The Impossible Possible: The Donald Can Dance! appeared first on AdPulp.
AdPulp’s publisher reported this morning that a small brewer in Mason City, Iowa dared to poke Budweiser in the nose, in response to the macrobrewer’s negative portrayal of craft beer and craft beer drinkers on Super Bowl Sunday. I then added a note to Shawn post about a response from video producers HopStories in Oregon. […]
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Miami ad man, Bruce Turkel, appeared on Fox to provide expert commentary on two new commercials: a sexist blunder from Subway and a spot from Domino’s that features a voice ordering app for pizza. Turkel rightly claims that Subway missed the mark. You don’t tell people to go on a diet so they fit into […]
The post Subway Crosses The Line, Bruce Turkel Throws A Flag #goodcall appeared first on AdPulp.
Jerry Seinfeld won a Clio and made an anti-advertising speech. Yes, that is working both sides of the silver dollar. Personally, I don’t want to watch or hear Seinfeld’s whine. I think the following ad from Adobe is better.
The post Jerry Seinfeld Wins A Clio, Treats It Like A Lesser Emmy appeared first on AdPulp.
Heidi Hackemer, founder and director of strategy for Wolf & Wilhelmine, has the right idea—either rebuild the agency of the future around her own human needs or get the hell out of dodge. Hackemer is a Wisconsin-bred New Yorker who believes in good ideas, a good run and good hair. She also eloquently states several […]
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Let’s make fun of digital culture, shall we? It’s certainly an easy target.
With barbeque season upon us, Kingsford Charcoal is launching a new campaign with the aggressive tagline “Get Off Your Gas.” The work was created by DDB California, which neatly showcases the contrast between the self-indulgent, smartphone obsessed and those who embrace the simple pleasures of life, like charcoal grilling.
Now, let’s look at another spot—this time from Crispin, Porter + Bogusky—which is built on this simple truth: people lie on the internet.
To get back at these TV-making smart asses, an angry Webster might say mean things on his blog, or Tweet up a storm. But that’s such a lame response to well-made and well-funded broadcast sarcasm. Well-made and well-funded broadcast sarcasm has Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Tina Fey on its side. Who do bloggers and Tweeters have to defend their honor?
The post Two New Commercials Use Anti-Digital Sentiments To Sell Things appeared first on AdPulp.
JPMorgan Chase & Co intended to use Twitter today for thought leadership purposes.
Using the hashtag #AskJPM, interested parties were invited to send questions in advance of the session set for Thursday at 1 p.m. in New York.
$JPM VC Jimmy Lee is taking over @JPMorgan on 11/14 at 1pm ET. Tweet Qs using #AskJPM & learn more about him here: http://t.co/eTDT8pJeq8
— J.P. Morgan (@jpmorgan) November 13, 2013
The bank was going to make one of its star bankers available for a live Q&A, but when negative Tweets starting rolling in like waves, the marketing team at the bank shut the event down.
Tomorrow's Q&A is cancelled. Bad Idea. Back to the drawing board.
— J.P. Morgan (@jpmorgan) November 14, 2013
This episode nicely illustrates the difference between what the people who work for the bank or its agencies think and feel about the brand, compared to what people on the street think and feel.
Given that a flare up like this is a rich educational experience for the brand, I would advise The House of Morgan to keep their scheduled Twitter chat and to carry on. It’s the difficult path for sure, but choosing to not engage sends the wrong message, making a bad situation worse.
In the face of a Tweet storm, you can run and hide or you can show some resolve, patience and balance.
The post #AskJPM Backfires, House of Morgan Cancels Tweet Chat appeared first on AdPulp.
Hey man, don’t let your routine get you down.
Sure the pressures of work threaten to destroy your good mood and there’s not enough money to send the kids to college, plus your football team is an embarrassment. But seriously none of that matters when you drive a new Jeep Cherokee into the mountains where you can toast your rediscovered freedom around the campfire with big swig of Wild Turkey.
Are Vitro (Wild Turkey’s agency) and Wieden+Kennedy (Jeep’s agency) in cahoots here? Of course not. This is simply more of the “same think” that I spoke of following W+K’s loss of Levi’s.
Interestingly, there’s nothing in the Jeep spot that appeals to truck guys—not one fact about the truck itself. At least the Wild Turkey spot has the necessary appetite appeal.
Has W+K taken their brand-advertising-is-the-only-good-advertising motif too far?
Customers will be the judge. Here’s one unhappy response to the Jeep spot on YouTube:
JEEP I HOPE YOU READ THIS MESSAGE. THIS COMES FROM A DIE HARD FAN OF BOTH YOUR WRANGLER AND MOST ESPECIALLY THE CHEROKEE LINE. I AM AN OWNER OF THREE JEEP CHEROKEES — a ’97, ’99 AND ’00. With that being said I believe I have a voice here, since I spend my hard earn money on your trucks. Please bring back the old XJ style and beef up the axles, tranny and maybe a body on frame. Why not build upon the culture and legend of the Cherokee rather than to destroy it in order to go after soccer moms and hipsters??
Snap.
I can hear the Masters of the Pearl now…”Who cares what some guy on YouTube or some ad blogger has to say about our work? How dare these commoners not recognize the sheer brilliance of our patented approach.”
Yes, how dare we.
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Media is powerful. In fact, just one potent article in a trusted magazine or newspaper has the power to inspire us, shape us and lead us to new places. Take “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters. The article first appeared in Fast Company on August 31, 1997.
Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.
How many believers has Peters reached in the last 16 years? Millions. For the author pours a particularly seductive nectar into Fast Company’s crystal glass.
Naturally, there is truth in Peters words, but how much truth?
I read a great rebuttal this morning to the mountain of bullshit sometimes known as the literature of creativity. Let’s listen to wonderfully critical Thomas Frank on the topic:
Consider, then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well… And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.
Are you familiar with the self-satisfied “creative people” Frank describes? If you work in advertising, you are. Our profession is full of people who mindlessly spew their recipes for brand success, but sadly most of what the poseurs say (and do) is total garbage.
I’m not just pointing fingers here. If I were to open a deck of my own making from a few years ago, I would likely be appalled at the tortured logic and language of my arguments.
The reality is marketing isn’t all that complex. Are you creating compelling brand experiences for prospects and customers? Yes or no? This is how simple MarCom is at its core. The hard part for most practitioners is coming to this conclusion and then choosing to live by it. We want so badly to believe our ideas separate us from the pack. That our ideas above all else are the real difference maker. Yet, I think the evidence points to execution. The ability to make mundane things like advertising into something artful (that also builds the brand and moves product) — that’s the difference maker.
The post Come On Down, Everyone Is Welcome At The Altar of Creativity appeared first on AdPulp.
Chew on this…the act of chewing negates the efficacy of adverts, particularly in movie theater settings.
According to a new study by a group of researchers from Cologne University, the reason why adverts manage to imprint brand names on our brains is that our lips and the tongue automatically simulate the pronunciation of a new name when we first hear it. Every time we re-encounter the name, our mouth subconsciously practices its pronunciation.
However, according to the study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, this “inner speech” can be disturbed by chewing, rendering the repetition effect redundant.
The researches conducted their experiments on movie theater goers, giving one group popcorn and another group a dissolvable sugar cube. The popcorn eaters had little to no brand recall following the filming, unlike the other group which absorbed and retained the ad messages shown prior to the feature.
Source: The Guardian
The post Order Large Buttered Popcorn and Save Yourself from Cinema Advertising appeared first on AdPulp.
Robin Williams once said cocaine was God’s way of saying you make too much money. Something tells me he’d say the same about ad agencies’ current fascination with turning even the smallest task into a gigantic group project.
You’d think in these days of tight budgets, rapidly changing media and constant connectivity, agencies would not only be doing things faster but with fewer people. Especially after all the crazy mergers, consolidation and downsizing. Sadly though, in today’s ad world there’s just no project too small to involve way too many people.
Notice I used the word involve. That’s important because the number of people actually doing the work hasn’t really changed. Just the number of people involved. For example, if we were talking about a crew of city utility workers, these would be the six guys standing around the edge of the hole doing nothing but watching the two guys who are actually down in the hole digging. (And if they were agency-types, they’d be constantly emailing the poor saps while they dug.)
Naturally, these peripheral peeps insist their Too-Many-Meetings process be given a new name, so as to sound less stupid and more innovative I guess. Scrum seems to be the latest moniker they’ve latched onto, a surprisingly apt descriptor given the way workplace overthink can invade your personal space. As buzzwords go, scrum may soon prove to be the next crowdsourcing. And no wonder, considering it has a much better ring to it than the other name they were considering, Opening The Oven Door Every Other Minute To See If The Cookies Are Done.
I may be getting out of my element here, but I always thought one of the easiest ways for an agency to make money was to do more with less. Considering that people are an agency’s greatest expense, the fewer people you pay per task, the more money you have left over, no? Especially if your revenue comes from a fixed monthly fee.
Yet it seems like the goal in most agencies today is to require more people than ever to hold as many meetings as possible to accomplish what could just as easily happen in about half the time with 1/3 of the manpower. (With that 1/3 feeling much happier and vital and empowered and other stuff the Human Resources Dept. says we should care about along the way, too.)
Of course, I can hear the scrum-mers now: It’s all about collaboration! The wisdom of the crowd! The hive! Great ideas can come from anywhere, etc, etc.
Fine, great ideas are everywhere. So is gold and oil technically, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize we’re not all equally adept at finding it. And sure, collaboration is important, but at a certain point we’re simply getting in each others’ way.
So what say we all pick up our Scrum Participation Trophies then go back to our desks and spend some of this precious meeting time actually thinking instead?
Who knows, maybe some of us will actually get some work done.
(Thanks to Brian Morrissey @bmorrissey for pointing out the rise of scrum. So many buzzwords, so little time.)
Prediction: the big agency buzzword of 2014 will be 'scrum.'
— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) October 2, 2013
The post How Ad Agencies Do Less With More appeared first on AdPulp.
We need to develop a pH test for brand content in social streams.
Short of this chemistry set solution, we can listen to Mike Proulx, senior vice president and director of social media at Hill Holliday. Here are some nuggets from his Ad Age spotlight on the preponderance of brand babble in social channels.
Today the hope and belief that brands would connect with people has in large part given way to brands publishing to them by hijacking social buzz.
Driven by the myopic goal of increasing engagement, many brands are unscrupulously on the hunt for likes, shares, followers and retweets without an overarching strategy based on core business objectives. This blind yearning for social currency is leading to incredibly irrelevant and unavailing branded content (a.k.a. advertising) that’s preying on social media.
Phrases like “hijacking social buzz” and “preying on social media” make me wince a bit. Social media isn’t a more precious form of media. However, when Proulx suggests “this blind yearning for social currency is leading to incredibly irrelevant and unavailing branded content (a.k.a. advertising),” I say “Amen.”
The trick with digital is the always-on nature of possibility. A brand can make light of topics in the news, in effort to seem human, relevant and available. However, the same brand can just as easily appear flat and out of touch.
Let’s look at a few samples from this morning on Twitter. If you will, please use our comments here to grade these brand-generated Tweets:
1)
You can look at where you've come from. We'd rather look to where we're going. #TryingStuff http://t.co/hJwTjAf6sR pic.twitter.com/aqyES4MrrP
— Columbia Sportswear (@Columbia1938) October 3, 2013
2)
#DidYouKnow Intel has over 200 programs in 70+ countries fostering digital literacy and #STEM? http://t.co/zwR17cUMEM
— IntelInvolved (@Intelinvolved) October 2, 2013
3)
The Beercade consists of 2 buttons and a joystick, a rustic throwback #CreateTech
— 4A's (@4As) October 3, 2013
4)
Bye bye car, hello weight set. See these home garages creatively transformed into workout studios, bedrooms & more. http://t.co/UmDnADqBPH
— Redfin (@Redfin) October 3, 2013
5)
Clay oven roasted lamb leg, spinach, grilled peppers, fennel-fatali pepper purée http://t.co/h46rOdpYk9
— Wildwood Restaurant (@wildwoodpdx) October 3, 2013
6)
It’s Name Your Car Day! What is your car’s name?
— State Farm (@StateFarm) October 2, 2013
The post Brand Babble Is Social Media Pollution appeared first on AdPulp.
Thanks to the crazy number of hours I spend in front of a computer screen, I see a ton of questionable content. The content is suspect because it is overly promotional.
I expect brands to fall into this trap. Brands have more than a century of bad advertising to convince themselves of the rightness of their chest thumping. Where things go wrong for me is when well-meaning people become lifeless and shameless hucksters.
On Twitter, in particular, people with promotional objectives in mind often use automated software to deliver a stream of supposedly worthwhile updates.
Why would people use robots to keep their Tweet stream full and fresh? The short answer is they bought a bill of goods sold to them by everyone from FastCompany to the legions of self-help marketers trolling the ‘tubes. The idea being that more content brings more followers and more followers means more potential leads and greater social influence.
Buffer–a service with one million users broadcasting phantom Tweets–says it’s a “smarter way to share.”
Be awesome on social media. Easily add great articles, pictures and videos to your Buffer and we automagically share them for you through the day!
Did you think, like me, that Twitter and Facebook and the rest were conversational platforms? They can be used this way, just like they can be gamed by people with something to sell.
I know I can simply unfollow all the ritual self-promoters, and so can you, but they will continue to exist and continue to make lame attempts at growing their influence online. So, unfollowing does nothing to solve the problem, it just mutes the mess on an individual basis.
Allow me make this clearer: I can’t get to know you if you’re not present. And I can’t get to know you by the articles you link to.
Maybe you don’t want to be known. Maybe you prefer the idea that you’re a personal brand, rather than a human being with countless vulnerabilities. As we know, the real-world looks quite a bit different from the projections we see on in our social streams. In reality, people are afraid, alone, angry, confused and many other difficult things that rarely get communicated.
In other words, the complexity of human existence is not coming through loud and clear in social. From a business perspective, you may wonder why the complexity of human existence matters. It matters because business is personal. I don’t want to do business with an automaton. Do you?
The post Scheduling Your Tweets? Congratulations, You’re A Broadcaster appeared first on AdPulp.
There’s a lot of noise about agencies failing to innovate and how this doesn’t work for today’s young workforce. In many instances the complaints are highly credible. Other times, it doesn’t add up to more than bitching about work.
Murat Mutlu, a product designer and co-founder of Marvel App, offers up his take on why talented creatives leave the agency on Creative Review.
His summary:
1) You won’t stop taking on shit work
2) You don’t innovate
3) You keep hiring shit
4) You don’t stop taking on projects that can’t be delivered unless we work 12 hour days
5) You don’t give staff any credit
6) You don’t buy us decent equipment
Man, advertising agency managers sound like a bunch of pricks in his assessment. I can relate to that. Many agency leaders are pricks.
But many agency leaders are not pricks, so the above list of complaints I can do without (it’s obvious to me), but I love the following insight Mutlu provides:
Whilst working at Isobar, every talented graduate or young UI designer I tried to recruit wanted to get experience working on products. They didn’t care about the type of work the agency produced. The brands were no big draw either. iPhone app for a beer brand? Mobile site for moisturising cream? So what?
When one of the designers told me “I want to look after users, not brands”, I had no reply, he was right. That’s all that you ever really do in a place like that.
“I want to look after users, not brands.” Exactly!
Ad people who advocate for the customer do the brands in their care a great service because that’s how you establish and maintain brand loyalty.
The post Fix Your Agency Talent Drain With Praise, Respect, Money and Skill appeared first on AdPulp.
Elmore Leonard’s recent passing prompted Bruce McCall to write a reflective piece for The New Yorker.
McCall worked on Chevy in Detroit at the same time Leonard was banging out Westerns on his typewriter and working as a copywriter. McCall notes how common it is for real writers to find “safe harbor” in the ad business.
A fat book could be assembled, just listing all the later-to-be-famous writers who stopped briefly in the cubicles of ad agencies: Dorothy L. Sayers and Salman Rushdie and F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Patterson and Joseph Heller, for starters. Advertising is a morally squalid racket that demands one make a Faustian bargain by manipulating truth for money. But I’ll say this much for the murky intersection of morality and commerce and guess-who-wins that is the ad biz: it has perennially provided a safe haven and a decent income for writers while they were working out their higher destinies.
“Manipulating truth for money” is some pretty tough language. Or is it tough love? After all, it’s common wisdom that advertising is all about the bullshit. The agency dreams up some bullshit to present to the client, who has a whole list of bullshit reasons about why people ought to care and buy the bullshit they’re selling. After several high-priced bullshit sessions, the client then buys the agency’s bullshit about the client’s own bullshit, at which point the agency goes off to spends millions of the client’s dollars justifying all this crazy bullshit.
Here’s what I think. Common sense trumps common wisdom. And in this case, common sense dictates that advertising is no longer about the bullshit. It’s not that marketers woke up one morning and realized the error of their ways and opted for higher ground. No, it’s more like the Internet was unleashed on society and its industry-crushing reach has had its way with marketing communications, just like it did with the news and music industries.
Today, thanks to radical transparency and the popularity of people-powered, mobile and always-on media networks, your brand is who and what you do everyday, for real. You are not who your ad campaigns say you are and this is great news, provided you know how to operate in this new media environment.
When I consider my own higher destinies as a writer, I allow dreams of a best seller or a successful screenplay. But for me, it makes perfect sense to infuse advertising with poetry and art. Also with meaning, soul and passion. Advertising is a storytelling platform, like films and theater are storytelling platforms. The job is to convey memorable information in a moving way, and it’s far from easy to do.
McCall notes that advertising’s real writers rarely have much success in advertising. Clearly, for many, advertising is a payday and nothing more. In the beginning, I wondered if it would be like that for me. It wasn’t and isn’t and I am grateful for this.
The post Are Copywriters Just Authors In Hiding? appeared first on AdPulp.
People are pissed about the food supply being tweaked by multi-national corporations in pursuit of profits. How pissed? Two million activists from 436 cities in 52 countries participated in Saturday’s March Against Monsanto.
According to AP, Monsanto, which calls itself a “sustainable agriculture company,” maintains that its seeds improve agriculture by helping farmers produce more from their land while conserving resources such as water and energy.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not require genetically modified foods to carry a label and the Senate last week overwhelmingly rejected a bill that would allow states to require labeling of genetically modified foods. Meanwhile, Whole Foods Market reports that sales of products with a “Non-GMO” verification label are spiking between 15 percent and 30 percent.
In related news — which is going totally unreported by mainstream media outlets in the U.S. — Russia’s President Vladimir Putin kept U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, waiting for three hours last week during a state visit to discuss Syria.
According to minutes from the meeting, the Russian leader showed “extreme outrage” over the Obama Administration’s continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war.
Einstein famously warned, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”
The post People of Planet Earth Rise Up Against Monsanto, Putin Threatens War appeared first on AdPulp.
Wal-Mart want to clear some things up. Hence, the launch of a new PR-driven site, TheRealWalmart.com and new TV spots that began airing on Saturday during the Kentucky Derby.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the campaign is the company’s first purely image-based ad push in several years.
WSJ also reports that Wal-Mart’s “energized differentiation,” an advertising term for the direction a brand is going based on consumer interest, loyalty and momentum, dropped 50% between 2011 and 2012 among college-educated adults.
That’s what allegations of bribery, poor global sourcing practices and low wages brings.
Barbara Andridge, 38, who has been working at a Placerville, Calif., Wal-Mart for nearly eight years and makes $12.15 an hour. She said she had to drop its health plan this year because she couldn’t afford the $18 weekly cost.
“I don’t want to see ads,” she said. “I want to see Wal-Mart provide decent wages, affordable health care and enough hours to feed my children.”
The post Wal-Mart In A Battle To Redefine Its Brand appeared first on AdPulp.
Leonard Oulian est un artiste italien passionné par la technologie et sa partie cachée aux yeux des utilisateurs composée de circuits électroniques et composants divers. Utilisant ces éléments pour créer des mandalas et yantras, ces créations très réussies permettent de redonner une utilisation esthétique aux composants.
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.
