Oops. Looks like one of the windows on the new Frank Gehry-designed building for IAC/InterActiveCorp in West Chelsea was installed upside down and was noticed by Sugartown Creative whose offices are nearby. Of course, it's all just a promotional stunt to garner press for IAC/InterActive and/or Sugartown which we've just given them. Of course the PR person forgot to send us any links to these two companies and we are way too lazy to figure them out for ourselves.
While it's always fun to lay battles to rest and hook up with former enemies, if ad agency merger mania doesn't stop, there will be no more rivaling agency softball teams to play each other and everyone will simply show up for the post-game cookout. As Draft and FCB combine to form Draft FCB Group, this year marks the last the two teams will face each other in the New York Co-ed Softball League. Last night, FCB and Draft played their last game against each other at Randall's Island. Draft won 7-4 and is now tied with McCann for in the NYACSL top division. All good things come to an end.
Tribble Ad Agency which isn't really an ad agency but rather a search engine marketing firm or an agency that offers SEO or a just parody site designed to crap on the current state of the ad agency business has caused a debate between ad agency types and search engine marketing folks who are jockeying for position as to who's best suited to handle a company's online marketing. We think the SEO guys are a little bit more right than the ad agency guys.
In announcing their launch last month, Tribble had this to say, "Tribble Ad Agency has opened it's doors and launched our blog to consume companies' ad budgets and deliver next to nothing by way of online ROI. We promise to build your website all in flash so it never ranks in the search engines. We also like to use image navigation with complex DHTML menus that are unspiderable and employ random 'keywords'." And it goes on deliciously from there.
For all you New Yorkers, here's how they do things out west. Calgary-based agency Rare Method, each year, hosts what they call the Calgary Most Wanted Stampede Party which involves all things west: bulls, barbecues, booze and hotties in cowboy hats. This year's party was attended by 800 clients, employees and a collection of those random people called party crashers. Check it all out here.
Quickly capitalizing on that whole World Cup head butt thing, Belgian communications agency Mortierbrigade has created a site where people can subtitle the video of what Materazzi said to Zidane prior to the head butt. The agency will offer a copywriting internship to the person who they think writes the best subs.
It's not only the Got Milk campaign that's got the "got." Gathering together all the ads created by people who can't seem to come up with a headline better than "got...fill in the blank," Albuquerque agency 3, begs marketers to hire an agency. Any agency. Preferably theirs, of course but any will do. If you ever created a "got" ad, you might feel a bit uncreative after watching this video.
Apparently, Hollywood has an advertising movie trend in the making. In April, we reported Desperate Housewives's Eva Longoria would star in Deep in the Heart of Texas, a movie about a snotty Beverly Hills diva who gets uprooted and moved to San Antonio to head her ad agency's new Hispanic division. Now, FOX just purchased a script written by Derek Guiley and David Schneiderman (Chasing Liberty) which, as the logline explains, will focus on "Four out-of-touch advertising executives (who) decide to take a seminar class in order to get back in touch with what is "cool," and they end up in a high school and find themselves falling into the roles they were in as teenagers." It sounds stupid but if done well, it could be funny. Of course, the realities of our business will, as always, be butchered and misrepresented.
Along with Google, UPS, Sprint-Nextel, Yum Brands and Heast, Mullen was named as having one of the top cafeterias by U.S. News & World Report. Having eaten at the Mullen cafeteria a couple time, I can tell the publicity is well deserved. The food there is great and nothing like you'd expect to see in or near, for that matter, any agency. Since the agency is located in a giant mansion on an estate in the woods north of Boston, going out for lunch is a bit of a trip so having a great place to eat in the agency is a necessity. The cafeteria, run Culinary Institute of America grad Liz Walkowicz, serves 420 employees with a staff of nine. Hmm. Maybe they'll invite us up there to sample the cuisine again. After all, it's been a while since I knocked on their door looking for a job.
Each morning after my three mile excuse for a workout, I head over to the local Dunkin Donuts to pick up an iced latte. Hey, I know it doesn't sound very manly but it just seems to taste a lot better than regular coffee. Anyway, each day I look at my Dunkin Donuts cup, branded with the new tagline "America Runs on Dunkin," and think, finally, an agency and a company that hit on a message which actually means something. Recently, there's been loser taglines like "Bold Moves" and "Leap Ahead" so it's refreshing to see Hill Holiday, Dunkin Donuts' agency, come up with a winner in "America Runs on Dunkin."
I love the tagline because it speaks directly to the "fuel" that many Americans depend on to get going in the morning. Just like re-fueling a car, that morning stop at the local Dunkin Donuts fills the tank with energy to keep one running all day long. While a 2003 research study found taglines not very effective, "America Runs on Dunkin" just feels right as well as actually says something, an admirable accomplishment in comparison to most meaningless taglines littering the current advertising landscape.
- This just isn't worth mentioning but it involves a catfight and breasts, two things this publication can't seem to ignore. Our apologies in advance.
- Some train stations to to great lengths to keep their stations clean and they want everyone to know about it.
- We swore we'd never again mention a million dollar homepage but this one is a bit different. It;s selling space on the side of a building. Oh wait. Not an actual building. Just pixels on an image of a building. OK. Sorry. It's just the same old crap with new clothes on.
- It's a pretty good bet Nike wishes this guy was wearing a different shirt.
- From time to time, we all hear those stories about upper management embezzling funds. Mack Simpson has recrafted a story he told us back in 2003 about a CFO at the company who worked for who shot himself after stealing $6.5 million dollars. It's an unfortunate story worth revisiting.
- Sometimes ads are so incredibly bad, there's actually good. This may or may not be one of those times.
- CoBRANDiT has summed up the recent Word of Mouth Marketing conference with a collection of video interviews which include Robert Scoble, Pete Blackshaw and other agency honchos.
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