Biz Stone's Twitter talk this afternoon was met with a full auditorium, people clamoring for places to park cameras and laptops so they could livetweet questions in real time.
Kind of a neat format. Stone addressed questions as they appeared under hashtag #hkcannes, the results of which were projected onto a screen. Two problems with this method:
1) Wifi outside the press room isn't accessible for free, meaning those that livetweeted from inside the room were either paying for use or mobiling it up. Questions were never taken directly from audience members, raising their hands, for example.
2) Questions were still for the most part selected by a Hill & Knowlton rep. I'm pretty sure the Oracle of Delphi had a less formidable filtering system.
Stone talked a bit about Twitter's birth, which I'm sure will become the stuff of online legend, so I don't really need to go into it. (Hey look, here it is.) One point of interest: his partner, Jack Dorsey, conceived the idea out of a fascination with AIM status updates.
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Just wanted to do a quick update before Cannes consumes me and I lose my will to blog while sober.
Arrived yesterday: five-hour train ride from Gare de Lyon to the Cannes station, which appears to be dead-center of nowhere. You can immediately tell who came from the city because we're all still in coats, looking grimy and sordid.
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- Recapping Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World.
- JWT could use Nestle copywriter.
- Lady Parts. Auto services.
- VW tweetnalysis.
- Disney, Asus partner on kiddie Netpal comps. (Via @FredCavazza.)
- UNIQLO calendar.
- Twitter delays scheduled downtime, following the Iranian elections, to give Iranian users a platform for protest/discussion/covert tweet-ups/etc.
- Not one to miss a hot show, Anonymous launches iran.whyweprotest.net, a space for what it calls a "tech-savvy uprising."
- Okay, onto less serious things. CK orgy scandal action.
- "Contextual dating sadness."
- Swill from Lovemarks man.
- AgencySpy ponders the tough stuff.
- Harley Davidson gets all musical.
Hopping right on the "we'll do anything to increase ad revenue" bus, Entertainment Weekly is out with Andy's Richter Scale, an advertorial on the magazine's Must List page pimping the Conan O'Brien show, Andy Richter himself and HBO's True Blood. Wait, what's this ad for again?
Whatever the ad may be for, we love the riff on vampires which ends with, "And have you ever noticed that their real-life fans are ust renaissance fair types with substance abuse problems?"
As advertorials go, it's a good one. So good, it took us three days to realize it wasn't just an editorial sidebar to the Must List. But one wonders. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
In some sort of Mean Girls meets Teen Witch Meets Twenty-Something Ad Hotties, we have Chiat High. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like; a bunch of primadonnas, a jock, a wimp, a collection of geeks and a love story with a happy ending. Yea, it's the high school cafeteria known as Chiat.
And you know what? This is the best representation of ad agency life we've seen in a long time. The primadonna's (account managers) prance with self-importance, the jocks (creatives) think they're better than everyone else, the tools (media) actually have heart but are afraid to express it and the nerds (traffic) get run over...over and over again.
Oh yes, some think this is yet another step down for a once great ad agency but we think someone's finally got agency life right.
And at Chiat, the lowly media planner scores with the hot AE. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all.
With the explosion of social media, the direction marketing flows is shifting from outbound to inbound. After all, with the ability of a company to have an infinite number of "findable" touch points in every corner of the internet, spending the bulk of marketing dollars on traditional outbound push marketing makes less and less sense.
As this shift continues, the practice of inbound marketing becomes ever more important. So what is inbound marketing? According to inbound marketing company HubSpot, it's a combination of "getting found" through SEO, blogging and social media; conversion through landing pages, lead tracking and lead management and analysis through marketing analytics, competitive analytics and lead scoring.
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We're all for diversity but not when it becomes forced efforts both in real life and in Photoshop hack jobs like this cover of Toronto-based Fun Guide. You can't fake diversity which is exactly what the magazine did when it chop shopped a perfectly decent, racially-nebulous photograph of a family for its cover.
Nope. We need a black man, stat!
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- We like the new Miller Lite commercial with Sopranos start Frank Vincent but, it seems, Italian cause groups are all a flutter (twitter?) over the supposedly stereotypical portrayal of Italians in the commercial.
- We don't like the "screaming" ad from Volkswagen. Not at all. Not one bit? Why? Because we know a little bit about being a dad and we've heard our fair share of screaming. We don't need a commercial to add to our stress level.
- We like Southwest's new commercial which, in effect, holds its middle finger up to the recession and says, "fuck off." Yea, we like that dark sort of optimism.
- We don't like Microsoft's new Bing commercial which, while it claims to reduce search result overload, piles on more overload than anyone should have to sit through inside of a minute. But that's typical Microsoft. Just like they're packaging on which every last conceivable speed, feed and spec visually assault you to the point you're like, "where's the Apple store?"
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Working with YouTube, Justine Ezarik (iJustine) created a video for Carl's Jr. in which she plays the duel role of Carl's Jr. employee and customer. She perfectly epitomizes the valley girl of yesteryear and, at the same time, the confused customer of today.
Entitled How to Eat a Burger, the video - following the employee/customer exchange - tells us how to eat a burger iJustine style. Yea, she likes to eat her burger with a fork, knife and lots of ketchup. LOTS and LOTS of ketchup. Never quite understood that method but hey, to each their own.
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