Adrants to Crush AdFreak In 'Battle of the Ad Blogs'

We were going to sit back and take the high road on this competition, letting things flow organically but, what the hell, AdFreak isn't and the competition is a battle after all so we're bringing out the guns. Let's show the industry a small upstart like Adrants can crush the big VNU-backed AdFreak. But let's remember it's all in good fun. To bring you up to speed, Adrants was named a contender in AdLand's Battle of the Ad Blogs in the Best Commercial Ad Blog category. We are joined in that category by some other very fine ad blogs including Adhurl, AdJab, the aforementioned AdFreak, MarketingVOX, The Spunker and Fast Company. We're honored to be among such a fine collection of fellow advertising opinionites but we're confident Adrants readers will rally to the cause of standing up for the little guy...even though we're not really all that little anymore, mind you.

So drag your mouse over to the Battle of the Ad Blogs, scroll down to the Best Commercial Ad Blog category, vote for Adrants and smoke AdFreak's ass.

Some say email marketing is dead. Not ExactTarget, an email solutions company that's done succesful successful work for big boy marketers The Home Depot, General Mills and Bristol-Myers Squibb as well as lots of small- to medium sized businesses. ExactTarget is sharing its expertise and insight with a new, free Effective Email Design webinar which will offer tips on design and share best practices.

Alright all you creative types, the next ego-fest has arrived. The Web marketing Association has announced its fourth annual Internet Advertising Competition so fire up your Flash, your Shockwave, your Adobe Creative Suite, your Macromedia Studio and dig through the past year's worth of your work to un-earth those creative gems your proud of, your boss loved and your client high-fived you for. The competition grants awards by industry across several categories including best microsite, best newsletter campaign, best online ad and, thankfully, best ad the client didn't choose.

The organizations website details what you need to know to enter, who's judging and who won in past years. To be eligible for entry, the work must have run between January 1, 2005 and January 31, 2006 and be submitted to the IAC Awards website by January 31, 2006.

Reminding us why our elders always told us to plan ahead, Aquent's newly released video, Project Initiation: Start Strong, Stay Strong, features Aquent Technologies President Chris Moody who explains why a design project’s outcome is so dependent on the initial planning process and how proper planning can save time, money and yield great work. Watch and reminisce my friends.

In advertising, marketers are always trying to get an inside view of consumers to better tailor commercial messaging. Of course, that inside view is figurative, never providing a truly clear image of what's going on inside a person. With an upcoming event called, Bodies...The Exhibition, that will all change. Rather than guess at the inner workings of the human mind and body, Bodies...the Exhibition, held at the South Street Seaport in New York beginning November 19, will showcase real human bodies including a collection of 22 full bodies and 260 organs preserved in their natural state. That's right. Bodies...the Exhibition promises to unveil the inner workings and many complex systems of organs and human tissue that make up...well...consumers. The organizers of the event, sensing the ad industry's need to get a deeper look into its target audiences, will offer Adrants readers a 15 percent discount during opening weekend. Just bring a print out of this email when you go to the exhibit.

In yet another Best Practices video, marketing and creative services firm Aquent explains how workload, because of increased marketing sophistication, has increased exponentially requiring 4-5 times more effort and expense compared to sales figures. Also, touching on the industry's propensity to grant lofty titles to under qualified individuals, Aquent Business Analyst Jennifer Miller explains how Aquent's market-wide knowledge of company practices can provide businesses with a benchmark from which to improve their operations.

Naturally, the video is full of the usual buzzwords and doesn't hide it. But, then again, this is advertising so it's entirely appropriate. Miller explains Aquent's most successful clients are "willing to embrace change" and explains how Aquent can offer help to companies that "don't have the resources free to dedicate to optimizing their processes." Basically, Aquent says they can offer companies a chance to compare themselves to one another and to use that knowledge to improve.

Once popular as Cracker Jack prizes and an early form of interactive entertainment, the flip book - which created a mini-movie by flipping quickly through its pages - all but vanished from the scene until a company called Flippies, using custom produced clips of live-action footage or animation, decided to re-engineer the novelty into a bona fide, thumb-triggered promotional advertising tool. With marketers blathering on about eBay-powered headvertising, taxi-trunk arm-vertising, cow-side advertising and even ass-vertising, it's refreshing to see something break-through which is simple and straight-forward for a change.

In this first installment of a new video series called Inside Marketing from marketing and creative services firm Aquent, Practice Leader Ed Krug discusses three objective metrics for internal creative services benchmarking: on time delivery, accuracy to estimate and adherence to measurable brand standards. While some might toss this off as lean back, marketing blather-speak, Krug properly advocates the addition of quantitative metrics to the creative process that he claims will help creative services organizations decrease re-work, increase re-use and simply do better work. He also communicates that this quantitative approach to performance measurement allows a rationale for increased expenditures, to justify additional headcount, to build the business case to add additional technology and to identify other types of process improvement. It's worth a look.

Aquent and Adobe have teamed for Studio Smackdown 2, a four week graphic design elimination contest which will net the grand prize winner $5,000. Using Adobe Creative Suite 2 and Macromedia Flash, contestants will submit their completed designs to the Studio Smackdown 2 site along with a video confession revealing their creative insights and decision making processes. The audience, American Idol-style, will judge contestants, vote for those they deem worthy and boot those deemed wannabes.

Voting begins September 20 and the Studio Smackdown champion will be announced October 18. Register to vote at www.studiosmackdown.com

To promote its HP Designjet 130, Designjet 90, Designjet 30 series and Photosmart 8750 printers, HP has launched its Extreme Exchange Promotion which offers up to $500 in rebates when buyers trade in a qualifying printer or camera. The campaign runs from June 1 to October 15 and, for those who take advantage of the offer by July 31, HP will provide its HP Color Profiling Service for HP Designjet printer free of charge.

If you write copy, marketing plans or white papers, you know the power of well chosen words. You also know how excruciatingly difficult it can be to come up with words which convey the desired nuance. A company called ThinkMap feels that pain and has created a thesaurus on steroids that puts Roget's to shame.

Already used by creatives at BBDO, Deutsch, Mother and other shops for brainstorming, naming, copywriting and ideation, ThinkMap's Visual Thesaurus uses a graphic interface to animate the English language in a unique way, revealing the meanings, origins, pronunciations and relationships between words. After entering a word it creates a matrix of type, colored dots and floating lines to display the meanings, parts of speech, synonyms, antonyms, and the relationships between 145,000 English words.

Part I: The Client Call

We've all worked with those pompous, obnoxious, self-important brand managers who just can't keep there hands out of the creative process, offering nothing but useless brand blather. In this new video called Transformational Marketing, part of Aquent's Design Out Loud series, this full-of-himself brand manager goes through an interesting transformation of his own while berating his creatives, butchering a perfectly good ad and, at the same time, calling attention to some of the more annoying creative practices such as the insistence on using fancy, hard to read type, tiny logos and a lot of white space. It's not clear whether he's a bad trick or just the treat this creative team needs.

To promote its new HP Designjet 130 series printers, HP has launched an "Extreme Exchange Promotion" which offers rebates up to $700 and the chance to win a digital camera. To earn the rebate, owners of older, wide-format printers of any make can trade them in for cash when they buy a new HP Designjet 130 printer. The first 100 to do so will receive a free HP R707 digital camera.

Reducing the level of anxiety, stress and the urge for a shot of Kettle One that sometimes accompanies the creation of a killer online media plan or the maximization of your site's inventory, AzoogleAds has rounded out its advertiser services to include a network of 2,500 sites, customer acquisition programs, media buying services, search engine optimization, co-registration and graphic design as well as it's publisher CPM, CPC and CPA services. Click here for sanity and sobriety.

On Adrants, we like to make fun of the ad industry but we also know there's a lot of smart and impressive work being done, so we are excited when we find a company like BrainMass Professional who can help us get even smarter. Now if this sounds like an ad, it is but bear with us. You know you hate to do all that in depth, excruciatingly detailed research that goes along with creating a campaign but, conversely, you love all the positive client comments, awards, new biz, and raises that come from a well thought out campaign. You can't get the latter without the former but you can get a lot of help with the former from BrainMass.

BrainMass does all the stuff you need to do to make yourself brilliant. So when you need detailed market or competitive intelligence, trend identification and local market culture analysis, or primary research, let BrainMass do it for you. They'll even write your proposal. You still have to stand up and present it to your client, though. Let's see if we can come up with a good tagline here; "Impress. Work Less." "Be Smart. Don't Throw A Dart." "Thrill. Chill." Where's a good copywriter when you need one?

DVDmarketer.com has announced a program which provides marketers the ability to deliver their customized creative on a free DVD to Amazon.com's highly coveted 42 million active customers. The DVD's will be inserted in the shipment boxes.

Acknowledging the effect of ad-skipping and the increasing control consumers have over the media they consume, DVDmarketer.com has developed a proprietary solution it claims is low-cost, targeted, measured, scalable, and turnkey. To aid marketers in determining the best use of the DVD as a marketing channel, DVDmarketer.com offers research reports covering DVD penetration and consumer attitudes toward DVD-based marketing and an overview of the Amazon program.

Sanders Consulting Helps Agencies Win More Business

Sanders Consulting, a firm that specializes in helping ad agencies win more new business is launching its Fall 2004 New Business Summit Seminar Series which will focus on nine ways to do new business better. From the fast close to maximizing chemistry to organic growth, the four city, day and a half Summit will feature industry luminaries as well as Bob and Stuart Sanders who will share their winning new business strategies with attendees.

Beginning in October, Seminars will be held in Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. To find out more and to register, visit the Sanders Consulting website.

Designers To Win $40,000 in HP 'Extreme Makeover' Ad Campaign

With the tagline "Dream It. Create It. Win It.," HP is launching an ad campaign to promote its new line of HP Designjet printers for creatives. The campaign is centered around a contest in which creatives can submit an image of their dream office to win an office makeover and $40,000 in high tech toys including a Powerbook G4, iPod Mini, Herman Miller office chair, Adobe Creative Suite Premium and, of course, the printer itself.

HP wants creatives to know this new line of printers uses dye-based inks which help images resist fading for up to 70 years, closed-loop color calibration to insure proper color propery and can produce 11 X 17, 2400 X 1200 images at four pages per minute. So if your sick of your crappy digs and want a collection of new electronic toys, take HP up on their offer to hook you up.

CMP's TechWeb Seminar Educates Technology Marketers, Raffles iPods

CMP Media's TechWeb Network is offering a one hour online seminar called "How to Market to IT" which will provide technology marketers the necessary strategies and tactics to better market their offerings to the IT segment. Featuring industry experts Ellis Booker (Editor of BtoB, The Magazine for Marketing Strategists), Sarah Fay (President, Carat Interactive), Anne Rath (Director, Marketing and Business Strategy Practice, Gartner Consulting) and Andrew Latzman (Metrics Editor, MarketingSherpa), the seminar will provide tips on email marketing, generating leads, maximizing small budgets and writing white papers.

The seminar is scheduled for June 16, 2004 at 4PM EST and will last for one hour. Those who register will be entered in a drawing for the chance to win one of five Apple iPods or one of 20 $5 Starbucks Cards. TechWeb is also offering two free white papers from Bitpipe called "Writing White Papers for the US IT Market" and "2004 IT Marketing Trends Study Results" and an Executive Summary of MarketingSherpa's "IT Marketing Metrics Guide". They are free whether or not you attend the event.

STEP inside design Launches First Advertising Competition

STEP inside design, published by Dynamic Graphics, is introducing the first STEP Advertising Design Competition and will feature the most provocative and daring ad campaigns from the past year. Ogilvy's Brian Collins, Wieden's Ty Montague and Euro's John Rea are all creative directors at the world's finest ad agencies and will judge the first annual STEP inside design Advertising Competition. If you've printed, published or aired creative work between January 1, 2003 and May 1, 2004, it is eligable for entry. Selected work will be featured in the September/October issue of STEP.

So don't wait. Enter today. Print entries are $30 each; TV spots and web banners are $75 each, multi-media campaigns are $150. The entry deadline May 15.

TRENDWATCHING.COM Fall Seminar Series to Educate Marketers On Emerging Trends

TRENDWATCHING.COM, a group that has its pulse on worldwide trends, will hold a series of seminars in North America this fall to educate marketers on emerging trends relating to advertising. The seminars will provide an overview of consumer and business trends that TRENDWATCHING.COM believes will shape the next 12 months as well as provide a catalyst for developing your own communications plans based on these forecasted trends. Seminars will be held in Toronto (14 Oct), Chicago (18 Oct), San Francisco (22 Oct), Dallas (28 Oct) and Atlanta (4 Nov). More info here. If you do decide to go, use this code (ADR100XT3) when you register and you will receive $100 off the registration fee.

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