Hasta La Creative!

Oh hey, have you guys maybe heard of this super trendy pastime called “trolling?” All the kids are doing it these days by logging on to their anonymous social media accounts and harassing people who disagree with them about one thing or another or just happen to be public personalities (even those of the C-list variety).

We thought you might be familiar.

Now, two ad agencies with unusual &-based names have joined forces to help discourage the practice altogether with a new project called the “Troll Tax.”

In short, social media fans can donate to charities of their choice on behalf of those who choose to troll. Here’s a video for the project, created by North Carolina’s Baldwin&, New York’s Hunter S. & Thompson, creative consultant Seth Callaway and developer Kevin Haight.

To get more specific, one simply has to plug a particularly offensive tweet into the Troll Tax page, choose a non-profit organization from a list and then automatically respond to the troll in the form of a tweet announcing that you’ve made a donation in his or her (screen)name!

“Trolling is in the eye of the beholder,” said Callaway, who came up with the idea. “In our opinion, trolling ranges from comments meant to derail constructive online conversations to deliberately offensive posts that have the aim of eliciting emotional responses.”

We were, frankly, skeptical. The entire reason for trolling is to get a rise out of one’s target. It is quite possibly the least productive of all human activities. The list of charity organizations also indicates that some people will be less inclined to participate:

• American Civil Liberties Union
• Planned Parenthood Federation of America
• Human Rights Campaign Foundation
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• International Center for Journalism
• American Refugee Committee
• National Public Radio
• Zacharias Sexual Abuse Center
• Conservation International

“It won’t stop them from trolling, it’ll re-channel the hate into something positive,” on the part of the person who was trolled,” said Baldwin& founder Drew Baldwin in response to our critique.

But someone is trying! Donations for the project were enabled by The Social Good Fund and PandaPay.

As dedicated libertarians, we believe all taxation is theft.* Even the taxes proposed on pharmaceutical advertisers, which are obviously violations of major drug-makers’ First Amendment rights as corporations … according to a statement released today by the Association of National Advertisers.

*We don’t believe this at all. Hopefully that was fairly obvious.

CREDITS

Creative Director: David Baldwin, Bob Ranew, Hunter Simms
Developer: Kevin Haight, Seth Callaway
Designer: Nate Hinners
Writer: Seth Callaway, Michael Barbano, Chad Temples
Producer: Liz Stovall, Seth Callaway
Project Manager: Lindsay Barnes

Donny Deutsch wrote some stuff about men and women in the workplace in his 2005 book that he will likely regret, and The Washington Free Beacon chose to call him out on it as someone who now works for MSNBC.

A post that ran on the conservative blog last Friday includes several quotes from the former Deutsch leader’s “Often Wrong, Never In Doubt,” and they are just not good.

For example, here’s Donny on the Deutsch offices during his tenure:

“I don’t think there’s been a day in my business career when there hasn’t been some woman at work that I fantasized about. People come by the office, look around and say, ‘Boy, the men and women at Deutsch are very physically attractive.’ Now obviously we hire supremely competent and talented people, but the idea of some woman that I’m excited to see or flirt with or even just think about stimulates me in business.”

On powerful men sleeping around:

“The question ‘How is this going to get me into the sack’ goes deep to the heart of all impulse to action. I truly believe that’s why men accumulate power. I also believe it’s the carnal guys who are better people and use their power to better ends.”

And again:

“We acted shocked when we find that throughout history, men in power have been womanizers: FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Bill Clinton. I would argue that this goes hand in hand with the personality type. Why do we expect men who are conquerors to stop conquering when it comes to women? If in ancient times you were conquering new worlds, or in the modern era you are buying up companies, why would that impulse go away? It’s more surprising when things don’t work out that way.”

Deutsch also took a moment in the book to praise Donald Trump and talk about his “buddy” Harvey Weinstein.

All of these block quotes are both indefensible and completely unsurprising. And Free Beacon only cares about Donny because he now makes his living as a left-of-center talking head, as per this key line:

In 2005, Deutsch praised Bill Clinton and other Democratic presidents who were known philanderers. On Friday, the Morning Joe panel called Clinton a “predator” who sexually harassed Monica Lewinsky. Clinton has also been accused of rape and other sexual misconduct with women.

Why are people listening to Donny Deutsch’s opinions on politics, again?

It’s now been four days since the Cannes Lions makeover, and agencies around the world are still asking, what does this mean for meeeeee???

The answers are starting to come in. For FCB, it means stricter guidelines on who will go to Cannes next year.

FCB worldwide CEO Carter Murray sent out the following memo to all FCB staff yesterday.

FCB executives didn’t elaborate on the note. But one industry veteran speaking on background stated that this would not be a dramatic departure from the makeup of past Cannes teams and that the employees who opt out of the festival this year will probably be executives.

A couple of points to note: Murray’s memo seems to imply that the FCB organization doesn’t think these changes went far enough but doesn’t get specific. One source called the changes “confusing” and predicted that next summer’s Cannes parties won’t be quite crazy as those in past years. Of course, the Gutter Bar will still be open.

It’s also notable that WPP and Sir Martin Sorrell, who seemed to be driving the conversation about Cannes in the first place, have not said anything about the announcements. This despite the fact that, according to an email chain published by Adweek in September, the holding company was not particularly happy with Cannes parent company Ascential.

But then Publicis Groupe seems satisfied, so all is good with the world.

Ad agencies are maybe possibly sometimes a little ridiculous. But you clicked on this blog, so you didn’t need us to tell you that.

Take it from the anonymous “young” person who spoke to Digiday about the culture at his/her agency for a post today:

We play nice, but we’re in a catty environment. Nobody wants to help each other. As an industry, we’re always at each other’s throats, or at least at each other’s collarbones. There is a culture of gossip that’s hurtful. Agency people are incestuous. The gossip follows people around. There are people who go to eight agencies in five years and come out with negative stories. People are real assholes.

Well that one hit close to home. Thankfully, there is a whole subset of agencies that take the time to produce pieces specifically making fun of their own business beyond all those Ad Council shorts. One of them is Portal A. The L.A. and S.F. digital studio does work for real clients, most notably its annual YouTube “Rewind” series, but in our minds it is still best known for its spoof of the Dove Real Beauty campaign from four years ago.

The latest in its Ad Hoc series (which started with the Dove video) is a self-explanatory collaboration with our friends at Adweak titled “Genius at Work: Inside the World of Modern Advertising.”
“We work with brands all the time, but AdHoc has been our chance to take a step back and have some fun with the absurdity of the ad industry,” said Portal A co-founder and executive producer Nate Houghteling. “AdWeak was the perfect match for us because they’re doing the same thing but with a different angle. Luckily for both of us, there’s plenty of nonsense to go around.”

See, they only poke fun because they’ve been through it themselves.

The Adweak team’s deep cynicism comes from years in the trenches, and we have little doubt that the good people at Portal A have spent more than one afternoon trying to come up with a good hashtag for a soap brand … or a hotel chain, or a tablet, or a bunch of little emoji-like things that Twitter used to make its service more exciting to people who aren’t 45-year-old journalists obsessing over the latest White House press conference.

For more of the same, Canada’s Strategy calls on the top agencies north of the border each year to create their own parodies of the ad business. Here’s BBDO on adding shits to your sheets.

One thing we would like to ask some of these unnamed spoof specialist agencies: why don’t you share your client work? Like, the stuff that pays your bills. Are you embarrassed by your day jobs, or what?

As we all know, the relationship between agencies and production companies is something of a “can’t live with them, can’t launch our own full-service unit” sort of thing.

And it may be getting a bit more tense as clients tighten their budgets.

Specifically, one source claims that certain unnamed agencies have been asking production partners to work on their biggest campaigns of the year for free.

This party, who has a long history in the agency world, told us that agencies have approached production companies regarding their upcoming Super Bowl campaigns with an unusual request: front us the work and we will pay you later.

Details remain somewhat sparse, but the claim is there’s an understanding that production companies will get the money they’re owed for the work … at some point. One source speculates that this movement stems, in part, from clients moving toward 120-day billing terms at a time when agency profit margins are growing slimmer and agencies simply don’t have the money to pay for the work until the client gets their fees to them. Grey reportedly quit the Coty account for this very reason.

According to several parties who’ve discussed the matter with us, production work is now the most—if not the only—profitable department at many agencies. And this narrative is very similar to tales from the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation into the practice of “bid rigging” by which large agencies divert such work to their own in-house studios. In those cases, the shops allegedly do this while promising that they will steer project toward the same production companies at some future date in exchange for participation in a rigged bidding process.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of actors unions accusing holding group production units of finding ways to avoid casting union talent in campaigns.

A veteran of the production company world tell us that this sort of thing has happened in the past, but never for a project as big-budget or high-profile as a Super Bowl campaign.

In one such incident, an agency allegedly sent its production company a spec spot project, stating that they would only get paid if the client chose to run the ad (they did).

We’ve reached out to multiple parties regarding this latest claim. The anonymous tip box is on the right.

So you’re all aware that the Department of Labor fined financial advisory firm State Street Corporation $5 million last month for allegedly underpaying 305 women and 15 black employees during the years 2010 and 2011.

This news was especially noteworthy, of course, because the company’s subsidiary State Street Global Advisors was the sponsor of McCann New York’s “Fearless Girl,” the most exhaustively over-analyzed work of advertising in the last decade (at least).

Today, SSGA CEO Ron O’Hanley assured CNBC that his company is and has been committed to equal pay for equal work.

So that was pretty straightforward.

It’s also in keeping with what CMO Stephen Tisdalle told a panel at Advertising Week:

“Do we as an organization reflect the penultimate makeup and reflection in being a diverse organization? No. And that was a risk because a lot of the people felt the message might be diluted by a lot of cynical people saying, ‘Well who are you to talk about gender diversity when you’re not a perfect embodiment of it?’”

And so it has.

This is a bit of a complicated story, and few read past the headline about the company behind “Fearless Girl” agreeing to a multi-million dollar settlement.

SSGA is not the same organization as State Street Corporation, and the filing was based on data collected during a mandatory compliance review that happened because State Street is a federal contractor. In other words, it was not based on individual complaints made by the employees in question.

While the corporate org knew about the audit that started in 2012 and ultimately led to the fine, it’s not clear when SSGA’s leadership found out about the settlement. Most importantly, we don’t know whether they had any idea that this bombshell would drop when they commissioned McCann to set up Fearless Girl right across from Cipriani and that big bull.

But then O’Hanley didn’t get very specific in his company’s defense, either. And this story will forever remain a very good case study on the dangers of wrapping your brand’s message in social activism.

In old, sort-of-related news, aspiring sculptor Alex Gardega died earlier this month after being struck by a subway train on the Upper East Side. We bring him up because his lasting claim to fame will almost certainly be the small papier-mâché dog he placed next to the statue; it appeared to be peeing on her shoe.

We even interviewed him about it, and he said, “This is corporate fake feminism, and I’m totally pro-real feminism. That’s not what this sculpture is, and I thought I would enlighten [people].”

Ogilvy & Mather India managing partner Chandana Agarwal weighed in on the “Me Too” social media campaign with a post, screencaptured by an Ogilvy & Mather employee, in which she dismisses certain types of sexual harassment as “part of growing up.”

The Vagabomb reported that when the Ogilvy employee shared the status, she “requested anonymity and feared for her safety.”

In the post, Agarwal expressed “many issues” with the “Me Too” campaign “at many levels.” She went on to claim the issue should not be about things “like someone grabbing at you or pinching you and that “there are some experiences that are just part of growing up especially in India.”

She adds that “there are some experiences that are part of growing up anywhere in the world” and seems to suggest that these include “a boss/ a colleague/ a teacher trying to act fresh” and that “this is not about that.”

Agarwal concludes by saying the conversation should be about more traumatic experiences of abuse than the ones she suggested and that “By making it so general we are being unfair” to those “who have been scarred” with such experiences, ending with the hashtag, “#notme.”

Here’s a screenshot of the post:

Harnidh Kaur shared the screenshot on Facebook and explained: “This screenshot was sent to me by a current employee who chose to stay anonymous (for obvious reasons), who very rightly pointed out that this made her feel actively unsafe at work. Calling out women who propagate a toxic ability when they have the power to change things for the better is as important as calling men out.”

She likened Agarwal’s line of reasoning with the “line of minimising so many survivors face” and pointed out that Ogilvy & Mather is the agency behind Dove campaigns which she claims “exploits important ideologies and beliefs.”

This week we also learned that Ogilvy & Mather’s holding company, WPP, continues to employ Gustavo Martinez, who appears to be leading its operations in Spain, while a sexual harassment and discrimination case filed by JWT global head of public relations Erin Johnson continues.

More than 18 months after Erin Johnson first filed suit against WPP and now-former JWT CEO Gustavo Martinez, the case remains bogged down in legal back-and-forth.

The latest documents filed last week by the parties’ respective law firms concern requests for Johnson to quantify the damages inflicted on her by Martinez, WPP and JWT. They include emotional distress, lost wages and “reputational harm” due to defendants’ attempts to “smear” her. In terms of the latter demand, Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker (which represents Martinez) wants concrete proof that the case has made it more difficult for her to find another job.

“As the Court’s Order noted, plaintiff’s alternate job opportunities are highly relevant to her … damages,” they wrote, arguing that any job offers she may have received negate claims that the case has damaged her career, whether she responded to them or not.

The Martinez team says it’s not satisfied with Johnson’s W-2 forms and email history as “bases for her damages,” arguing that she is attempting to avoid getting specific about how much the experience of working under Martinez affected her in monetary terms by not requesting a specific amount in compensation for the experience.

“‘Garden variety’ emotional distress,” they argue, is not a strong enough argument for a significant settlement.

To an untrained eye, these sentences read like pre-negotiations regarding the total that might be awarded by a jury … or an attempt to convince Johnson to agree to a smaller settlement before this mess ever goes to trial.

That said, Martinez has requested the ability to “independently conduct his own deposition of plaintiff vis-a-vis her cliams against him” for at least 14 hours in a presumed attempt to chip away at her case. This is in keeping with his lawyers’ argument that the cases against him and WPP/JWT are separate legal matters (though WPP’s law firm Davis & Gilbert has also argued that it needs more time to question Johnson).

On the other side, Johnson’s lawyers at Vladeck, Raskin & Clark have been asking for more information about Martinez’s current compensation, and this request stems from the now-public knowledge that he still works for WPP in some unspecified capacity in Spain. They’ve also insisted that he return to the U.S. for continued deposition—and his lawyers are attempting to deny both requests.

In what may be one of the more significant developments in recent weeks, the firm behind Martinez strongly counters the Johnson team’s contention that, by continuing to employ him, WPP has effectively failed to discourage the behavior of which he’s been accused—namely, sexual harassment.

“[Johnson’s] argument that Defendant Martinez’s continued compensation evidences [WPP’s] failure to remediate or prevent sexual harassment is baseless,” the filing reads, because he “ended his employment with JWT … and left the country.” They also dispute the argument that Martinez cannot be considered an unbiased witness due to his continued employment with WPP, which they say is on an “ad hoc” basis.

So essentially, they’re saying that his resignation negates the fact that WPP continues to pay him and also absolves them of any responsibility for not taking action against him in the first place. The document also notes that Martinez decided to leave JWT “following his discussions with Sir Martin Sorrell when this litigation was filed” and states that he’s not making as much money as he used to despite being “paid the same base rate,” because he’s no longer getting bonuses.

In new papers filed last Friday, Johnson’s team argued that WPP and JWT are going out of their way to slow the case down, refusing to make Sorrell available for a full deposition because he is “too important and busy” and scheduling HR lead Laura Agostini’s deposition on an “inconvenient” day (last Wednesday) before cancelling her session “with virtually no notice” because their own legal counsel “decided to take the day off.”

The document also argues that Sorrell’s team is attempting to get around the understood rule that all parties must be subject to seven hours of deposition by “refus[ing] to produce him” even after he “agreed without hesitation to continue at a later date.”

Interestingly, WPP has also subpoenaed four parties: Johnson’s husband; her “potential employer” TBWA; the company that attempted to recruit her (MediaLink); and former JWT New York chief creative officer Jeff Benjamin, who is now with Barton F. Graf. They will attempt to use each of these parties to downplay the seriousness of her experience.

Two key points stand out to us. First, Martinez’s lawyers argue that Johnson’s claims are invalid, or at least less valid, if she can’t put a specific dollar value on the harassment she allegedly went through while working under him. Second, both Martinez and WPP argue that he’s already suffered enough.

It seems fairly clear that the defendants’ larger legal strategy consists of drawing this process out as much as possible in the presumed hope that a frustrated Johnson team will settle for the smallest settlement … or no settlement at all.

Whatever its outcome, the story will long serve as a case study in why so many employees hesitate to come forward with complaints about their superiors.

[Pic via Getty Images]

Protests are all the rage, but they rarely include anthropomorphic “furry” costumes. A recent incident in Austria was different.

Earlier this year, the country implemented a law called “Prohibition for the Covering of the Face,” colloquially known as the “burqa ban.”

If that sounds a bit weird, consider that Austrians came close to electing a far-right presidential candidate last year. The government later insisted on passing the ban even though it will only affect the estimated 0.03% percent of Austrian Muslim women who choose to cover their faces in public, or a grand total approximately 150 citizens.

Lots of Austrians were not too happy about it, and Vienna-based agency Warda Network decided to make a very public point about how ridiculous this law is … by dressing some dude up as a shark.

Here’s an image from the agency’s own Facebook page.

Why a shark? Turns out this was both a social statement and a stunt to help promote client McShark, which operates a chain of electronics retail stores.

A Warda spokesperson calls it “a simple but effective strategy to expose the absurdity of the new law while at the same time us[ing] the gained attention” to score media coverage for McShark.

“At the opening of the new McShark Store an employee was dressed up as a shark to dance on the street and animate pedestrians to enter the store,” the rep said.

Someone called the cops, and three officers quickly arrived to tell the man to remove his shark mask. He refused to do so and was subsequently fined.

According to Al-Jazeera, the Vienna police later issued a statement on Twitter indicating that they are tasked with enforcing the law that one James Anderson did indeed violate.

Nach Anfragen zur Amtshandlung vom 06.10.17 bzgl. einer Werbeveranstaltung unter Verwendung eines Kostüms wollen wir wie folgt informieren: pic.twitter.com/U6djkl4meN

— POLIZEI WIEN (@LPDWien) October 9, 2017

“Generally, it is allowed to wear disguises or covering for artistic, cultural or traditional events, as well as for professional practice,” the statement read. “This particular case is currently being examined within the framework of administrative penal proceedings.”

Creative director Jakob Kattner later told the Washington Post that the agency would not appeal the fine, acknowledging that Shark Man had violated the law and adding, “He was dressed as a stuffed animal and not as a terrorist.”

It’s not clear whether Anderson, who lives in Dublin, is a Warda employee … or whether the agency called police to ensure the success of its own stunt.

We also find it kind of amusing that reports about the incident can’t seem to decide whether Warda is a PR firm or a creative shop. It’s pretty clear what they’re good at, though.

[All pics via Warda Network]

Today in Blind Items, we examine the challenges of communicating with other people in the real world. It can be quite difficult!

• Talking smack about clients: every agency does it. Surely you’ve fantasized about telling a stereotypically uptight marketing rep what you really think of him. Chances are pretty good that you’ve even participated in one of those conference calls involving everybody on the account team where you press “mute” on your end while the clients talk and proceed to tell everyone else in the room what a bunch of idiots they all are.
  According to some sources who spoke to us, this recently happened to a major agency. The team was talking amongst themselves while waiting to join an international call under the assumption that this client’s head of global marketing could not hear or see them.
  There was a problem, though: while the video was off, the audio was very much on. And when the client joined the call, he or she was greeted by some all-too-frank opinions on the other end of the line from a bunch of dudes who thought they were in a safe space. The one-way exchange involved many f-words and s-words and perhaps even an f—ing c-word.
  Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go over too well. The agency later lost major portions of what was its parent company’s largest single account.
• Speaking of sexist behavior at agencies in 2017, one male creative leader at another big shop isn’t super comfortable with members of the opposite sex. Now, this guy is from another continent, which is TOTALLY a legitimate excuse. It may also explain his fondness for drinking throughout the day while ostensibly doing his job.
  Multiple female employees, however, recently filed official HR complaints against him for being a general chauvinist jackass.
  What does that mean? When working on a campaign to promote an unnamed luxury brand, this guy allegedly suggested that the team stage a reality-TV style scenario in which a man “beats up his girlfriend” while he waits to see whether a second man will intervene or “be a pussy.”
  He also reportedly declines to interact directly with female junior creatives and, in an unrelated incident, asked whether the agency could hire some black actors to play “thugs” and stage a robbery for a brand activation.
  As noted before, more than one person in the creative department filed complaints against him, and several of the women who worked under him have left the agency in recent months, some of their own accord and some not. But HR did get the message: they scheduled a one-hour sensitivity training seminar for everyone in the office, and all was well in the world again. The male creative later got promoted.