The man who changed things

Craig Newmark "invented" Craigslist to let his friends know about events in the Bay Area and grew it to be the content juggernaut it is today. But clouds may be gathering on the horizon. Though the power and value of the web enterprise is enormous, Newmark runs it like a Mom & Pop corner store - if you've walked past his modest two story headquarters on 9th Avenue near Judah, you know what I mean. The building looks like it could be the office of a estate agent who became weary of selling houses about seven years ago and can't wait to retire.
Here's an interview with Craig Newmark from today's edition of boston.com (The Boston Globe).
And here's a story from c|net.com and another on auctionbytes.com on the lawsuit mentioned in that article.
Lastly, here's the Craigslist Hits Back story from The Guardian.
David Battles Goliath: Ugly stuff version.

Do Mystery Ads In Ontario Promote Mind-Control Or Education?

This from OMMA Behavioral online. Interesting campaign:
__________________________________________
By Amy Corr , Monday, June 16, 2008

Earlier this year, Ontario residents were puzzled by a series of outdoor ads that appeared to promote a drug that altered the thoughts of teenagers.

"When Amy started thinking for herself, we had to nip it in the bud with Obay," read one ad. "My son had ideas of his own. Obay put a stop to that," read another.

Creative showed a smiling, happy family, and a bottle of Obay pills.

The teaser ads ran for two weeks, causing local bloggers to speculate their origin. Theories ranged from Obay being an actual mind-controlling drug created by a pharmaceutical company to Obay being the handiwork of Scientologists.

The ads originated from an unlikely source, Colleges Ontario, an advocacy group that represents the 24 publicly funded colleges in the province.

According to Malcolm Roberts, principal at Smith Roberts, the creative and media agency behind the campaign, the objective was to change the way parents viewed college.

"Colleges Ontario asked us to help them change the public perception that college is a lesser alternative to university. Many parents are pushing their kids into a university education when, in fact their children would be happier with a college degree in a subject area that actually appealed to them. This campaign was designed to get parents to take notice, and re-think their attitudes toward colleges," said Roberts.

Following the teaser ads was a month-long "revelation" campaign. Original ads were covered by crumpled, yellow pages explaining the rouse.

"Luckily, Obay isn't real. Sure, you want what's best for your kids, but when it comes to post-secondary education, pushing them to do what you want isn't right. Explore all the options at ontariocolleges.ca," reads an ad for the second phase of the campaign.

The campaign delivered 50 million impressions in six weeks and serves as the beginning of a multiyear campaign.

"All 24 colleges have fully supported releasing funds for the next phase of the campaign," said Roberts. "We knew from the outset that this was going to be a long-term strategy, possibly up to five years. You can't change years of ingrained attitudes overnight."

Too bad there isn't a pill for that.

____________________________________________

What do you think? Effective or manipulative?

Case Study: HBO - Voyeur

This multimedia campaign just won a first at the Cannes Advertising Festival.

Take a look on AdAge.com

Everything I Learned About Google in China...

I learned here.
A series of videos by the man who knows.

Ad-Mashing Mixercast.com Hits a Billion Page Views Monthly

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- As founding partner of Velocity Interactive Group, former AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller has become very involved in the "mashing" of online video ads. At yesterday's OMMA video conference, he cited the exploding traffic of Velocity's Mixercast.com. It allows users to legally mash -- or mix together -- parts of various marketers' video commercials and other media content.

SAN FRANCISCO (fishlanguage) -- Yikes! I had no idea that this is going on!
Jump on this bicycle. It's an amazing ride.

I'm Not Sure What This Means, Either

Presented for your consideration:

Dear Employer:

Please be informed that on June 30, 2008 the USF Career Services Center will discontinue using MonsterTRAK as its online job board and recruiting tool.  We will be switching to the NACElink service in July.  Once the system is live and ready to use, we will alert you via email so you may begin scheduling Fall on-campus interviews, information sessions/tables, and posting jobs.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact the Career Center as we are open all summer.

Thank you for your patience as we make this transition.
Julia

Julia Hing
Coordinator of Employer Relations
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street, UC 403
San Francisco, CA  94117-1080
Tel: (415) 422-2027
Fax: (415) 422-6470
Email: jahing@usfca.edu

Is "Music Business" an Oxymoron?

If you like music, do you care how it gets to you?
Probably not.
But if you'd like to be a part of the chain that makes and delivers music to the rest of the world, here's an article from this morning's New York Times suggesting that, similar to laws and sausage, you might not want to know how it's made if you make music your living.

Water, water everywhere...

The marketing/advertising phenomenon of the last decade is bottled water, on which Americans spent $11 billion in the 12 months of 2006.
Comedian George Carlin once rhetorically asked, “What happened in this country that now, suddenly, everyone is walking around with their own personal bottle of water? When did we get so thirsty in America? Is everybody so dehydrated they have to have their own portable supply of fluids with them at all times? Get a drink before you leave the house!”
A review in the New York Times of a new book by Elizabeth Royte, titled Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, points out that Pepsi - which owns Aquafina - "spent $20 million suggesting that Americans 'drink more water.' That year (2006) we drank... about a billion bottles a week."
As you may know, there's a backlash on against bottled water and Royte treats the topic in depth - marketing and advertising are only part of the story.
Find the review here and you might want to drop by the library for the book. I'm going to.

JK Rowling at Harvard on Failure, Imagination

Harry Potter's "mother" spoke at Harvard's commencement (yes, that Harvard).

Rowling was a broke Single Mom at one point, and credits "failure" as a stepping stone (along with "imagination," the ability to imagine the lives of others) to her success.

Watch video of the address here. We all say we learn by our mistakes, but some of us refuse to look at them eye-to-eye. She didn't back off.

Video is downloadable if you'd like to save a copy.

New look for MySpace - free preview

MySpace is cleaning up and may be able to go out without looking like a tramp (note that ads are part of the tune-up). On AdRANTs.

Ad students hold a bake sale

These Creative Circus student won the Future Lions prize. Now they need to get to Cannes.
Cookies for $500 each! That's almost as much as 100 gallons of gasoline! (Thanks to Adrants.)

Here's some history of the Cannes ad festival.

Note: design's time has come. This will be a regular theme on this blog.

Everything old... Part 2

If this nostalgia-themed topic keeps turning up, I'm going to start thinking that this "Recession" is deeper than I thought. I know it depresses me.

From this morning's post by Lydia Loizides, Vice President, New Media Division at Paradigm on Media Post's TV Board.

Who owns a brand?

Risking overly scrupulous semantics, I personally believe that the consumer "owns" the brand in that we engage with a brand by, usually, buying the product which we then consume - eat, drink, wear, drive, watch, laugh or cry at, etc. The brand is the sum total of our experience, both intelectually and emotionally, with both the product and the trade mark.
The company that manufactures and/or markets the brand should probably be called the "author" of the brand.
So, if you drink Coke, you own the brands Coca-Cola and Coke. The Coca-Cola company is the author of both and the owner of the trade marks.
Here's a video from AdAge that discusses this dichotomy (using "brand" to mean "author," very specifically in this case) and illustrates how the line between authorship and ownership is beginning to blur and that Vuiton handbag counterfeiters and people who sell second generation CDs at swap meets aren't the only pirates out there.
Sometimes they're the most loyal fans of the brand that cross the line.

Who would you want leading your horde, Conan or Xena?

A comprehensive Australian study took on the issue "I can do anything you can do better." (thanks to SmartBrief on Leadership).

For those of you that I haven't already sent this: results!

A woman that I hired almost 30 years ago - and who climbed all the way to CEO of Publicis Dialog/San Francisco wrote:

"PERFECT!

Finally science to prove reality.

But will men believe it?"

What do you think?

Everything old is new again.

Today's blogs serve up a heapin' helpin' of old ideas applied as new solutions.

Casting dead celebrities in ads seems more than a little creepy to me, including this magazine campaign using look-alikes for Armstrong Floors (New York Times).

Then Citibank - in deep trouble - dusts off a shiny former slogan to better light the way back home (ADWEEK magazine).

And lastly, BMW/Spain hits the road with a copy of Jack Kerouak's On the Road (thanks to AdGabber).

But sometimes it works.

I think it was the incomperable Yogi Berra who said, "Nostagia just ain't what it used to be."

Wal-Mart, cultural hero

In this morning's New York Times, the Arkansas Ark of Culture is making waves yet again by striking deals directly with music artists/bands, cutting out the middle man.

That grinding sound you hear is the RIAA, the voice of those middle men, self-resurfacing it's metaphorical teeth - usually used to bite the metaphorical butts of online file sharing miscreants.

Sidebar: I'm in Atlanta (Hotlanta - 79 degrees at 6 am) for the American Advertising Federation annual meeting. NYT advertising columnist Stuart Elliott speaks to us at lunch today. If anything interesting emerges, you'll hear it here tomorrow.

Popcorn: Sex/City Challenges Capra, Sturges

"Applied Futurist" Faith Popcorn has decided that the film, "Sex and the City," is a classic Depression Era movie that "comes at just the right time for a nation exhausted politically, emotionally and financially - and signals a growing desire to escape that idea-strapped marketers can use to their advantage."

Preston Sturges and Frank Capra were the Past Masters of the genre, but neither one were fortunate enough to have a previous TV audience as a launch pad. Nor are we in a depression like that of the 1930s.

(Isn't Barack Obama planning to be the vaccination against a "GD?")

What do you think?

GP

The man who lies to Nielsen - and laughs.

The Nielsen company produces ratings data for television programs. Buckets of money are won and lost based on the numbers of households (HH) and people (women, 25-34, men 50+, etc.).

This morning, on "Media Post's TV Board," Frank S. Foster reports on a fairly troubling story - and the economics of the thing is the least troubling - of a man (and his family) who "games Nielson."

"My Neighbor Is A Nielsen Stooge"

GP

Welcome!

This blog is about advertising.

I made my living from advertising for many years. Since I now teach advertising at the University of San Francisco, I guess I still do. Except that the dollars no longer flow from my clients, they now stream from the parents of my clients. And bless their hearts for that.

I read a whole lot of advertising blogs and will pass the best of them on to you, dear reader. So hang with me. I hope to keep it interesting for both of us.