"Charmed" client romance begins finger-pointing stage of relationship

Winning a major award at the Cannes International Advertising Festival is a really big deal and usually the agency team, the production company and the client collectively act the proud parents.

This year a Bronze Lion-winning TV spot for JC Penney, called "Racy" by AdAge, is almost an orphan.

Saatchi & Saatchi says they didn't order it. JC Penney says they didn't approve it. And production house Epoch Films (and even administrators of the festival) ain't sayin' nothin'. Meanwhile the spot, which seems to condone teen sex, got about 16,000 views on YouTube in less than 24 hours.

I suspect the account will be up for review (JCP will be talking to other agencies) within 30 days. A lawsuit against Epoch Films for trademark infringement - and probably including a cease and desist order - should be expected even sooner.

File this one under "Smart People Acting Stupid."

What Should Obama's Media Plan Look Like?

I can't think of a better one than this.

How "True" is Mad Men?

More than a little soapy, the AMC TV series is emerging as America's next guilty pleasure. The series has it all, cigarettes, booze, bigotry and sex - set in the early 60s on Madison Avenue in a fictional ad agency named Sterling Cooper.

Mad Men was the cover story in yesterday's The New York Times Magazine.

It took me some time to catch the fever - I'd seen a couple of episodes and didn't really engage. But I looked at the whole first year via iPod over the winter and now I'm hooked. The series is even literary in a sneaky sort of way - "Don Draper," for example, is the name of a character who is not what he seems, he "dons a drape," figuratively "puts on" a curtain to obscure his identity. Article author, Alex Witchel, notes that Jon Hamm, the actor who portrays Draper, "[acting] assignment as Don is to locate the emotions in a man who spends his life denying them." Or draping them.

I also enjoy the irony that Robert Morse, who was the young lead in the real-time 60s How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying on Broadway, just a few blocks west of Madison Avenue, now plays the aged and eccentric Cooper of Sterling Cooper without really, well, you know. Yeah, I was once an English major.

The NYT piece features a mini debate between two ad giants from the era of Mad Men, George Lois and Jerry Della Femina, about the truth of the series - but no issues are settled.

The great amateur historian George MacDonald Fraser (author of the Flashman series and a screenwriter himself) once wrote a book, The Hollywood History of the World evaluating historic fiction in movies. His standard, "If it makes me feel like I'd just visited that time and place, it's good history." That's why I'll be watching.

Mad Men, Season One can be bought directly from AMC and a slide show of stills from the series are also posted on nytimes.com. DVD is relwased on July 1st. Season Two begins on AMC, Sunday July 27th.

Here are videos and commentary on Mad Men Season One on amc.com

Non-traditional media-man Obama considering network TV: same-old same-old?

Well, his campaign advisers are. Yesterday AdAge reported that his media team "asked NBC Universal about Olympics advertising including $500,000, $2 million and $4 million packages of ads. (NBC presented those along with a $10 million package.) It's not only a sign that the Obama camp has faith it can continue its stellar fundraising achievements but a signal that a widening field of battleground states has the candidate contemplating national broadcast buys. An Olympics buy could also allow Mr. Obama to reach out to a large swath of women."

This morning's New York Times features conflicting opinions of this media strategy from bloggers and Obama partisans Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft and James Joyner* at Outside the Beltway.

Which side of the mass media TV issue do you come down on?

* Does it look to you like Joyner's picture is posed on the very-inside-the-beltway White House grounds?

Big guy doesn't want to blow it

The NBA is a big brand with big problems... can David Stern fix the leak before the ball goes flat?
(AdAge)
Are you a fan? Do you bet on games? Does this change that?

When big guys blow it, they blow it big

Blogger Joseph Jaffe - a rabid advocate for social marketing - tells an AdAge workshop how five companies, apparently through corporate naval-gazing, fumbled big communication opportunities. (AdAge Video)

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?