Hasta La Creative!

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Marcus Brauchli, The Wall Street Journal's well-respected managing editor of just 11 months, left the post today, after talking to the editorial independence board formed when Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought The Journal's parent, Dow Jones.

In a new video which mirrors the Dove Onslaught commercial, Greenpeace is claiming Unilever, which makes Dove products, buys palm oil from suppliers in Indonesia who destroy the region’s forests.

Adrian Ho of Zeus Jones is a planner, a.k.a. one who thinks deep thoughts, and increasingly shares them via the interwebs.

As postmodernism tore apart the traditional hierarchies and relationships I had been brought up with, I felt a strong need to create new ones. To tie things back together into a new story, to help make sense of the world again.

I think this sense of feeling adrift was quite widespread. One of the books that I felt captured this phenomenon very accurately was The Protean Self. I haven’t read it for a long time, but the main thesis was that one reason for the resiliency of humans is our ability to become very fluid and adapt to “dislocations” by re-creating ourselves rather than by trying to recreate our world.

Rather than attempting to weave together a new story or structure to explain the world, I think we have all become more adaptable, more fluid and less concerned with structure and hierarchy. This is one of the defining characteristics of Generation Y and it has led to the mashup culture that we all experience today.

Marketing has created more meaningless structures than most disciplines in its attempt to disguise what is essentially a creative discipline as a “scientific” one. To me progress starts by tearing these apart and allowing the relationships between the various concepts we use to be more fluid and more dynamic.

I’m trying to think what this means in a practical sense. Does it mean copywriters are now free to write plans and planners are free to write copy? I suppose. There must be thousands of applications for this new and improved fluidity.

(TrendHunter.com) This Kit-Kat campaign brings a whole new twist to the famous “Have a break, have a Kit-Kat” slogan.

The print ads shows people that annoy you (wife, boss, and bully) being broken in half the same way you break your Kit-Kat bars. The message is that whenever you feel angry, depressed, or annoyed tr…

DETROIT (AdAge.com) — American Suzuki Motor Corp. has tapped independent agency Siltanen & Partners Advertising, Marina del Rey, Calif., to handle two vehicle projects later this year.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — You can't say that word on TV — or can you? No one on broadcast TV is supposed to be able to use the four-letter profanity that starts with the letter F and signifies sexual intercourse. Even on basic cable, the word is often edited out of movies and usually not inserted into original scripts. In short, when it comes to that word and TV companies who wish to court mainstream advertisers and audiences, healthy distance is usually helpful. Some networks, however, are cleverly dodging the issue.

NEW YORK – Omnicom Group, the world’s largest marketing services company, has reported better-than-expected first-quarter results, with net income up 14% to $208.7m (£104.8m) year on year.

The Barbarian Group launched a new self-promo site. It’s good.

Rick Webb, Co-Founder and COO, explains:

Taking six months to make a website is pretty ridiculous, but we were doing several things during that time. building a whole publishing platform. This site has a full, rails-based custom, multi-level blogging platform. Each employee has a blog, and then posts are bubbled-up to the Barbarian Blog, and the most important information is elevated to the Barbarian Homepage. We’ve also introduced a whole topical-taxonomy thing, aggregating content around various topics to give many different windows into our content. Finally, the site is fully integrated into our sales, production and staging systems. Finally, finally, after six years, no more entering the same data into multiple databases. We are now running on a fully-integrated, custom-built project management platform.

Webb also says he almost cried when he saw Modernita’s new minimalist “site,” but that approach would not have worked for Barbarian. “We’re more than an idea shop, more than a branding shop, we actually have to execute some pretty serious stuff, so our website needs to be representative of that.”

[via Ken Wheaton]

(TrendHunter.com) Locking up your bicycle with style just got better and a lot smarter. The Street Cuffs from Master lock ensure nobody runs away with your trendy two wheeler as the lock doesn’t provide a point of leverage for the thief.

It provides virtually no space for jacks and the heavy gauge steel provides ma…

LONDON – Information commissioner Richard Thomas has urged organisations to see the importance of protecting staff and customers’ personal data after continued ‘unacceptable’ security breaches since the Revenue’s loss of child benefit data.