The New York Times looks at LifeAt.com, a social networking site that creates password-protected Web sites for apartment buildings and housing developments. The company, based in Brooklyn, is surviving on the roughly $6,000 it receives from each building that signs up for the service. It does not charge the buildings yearly fees. More than 335 buildings have joined since LifeAt began in March. About 600 more …
Ad Age Presents The Indie Digerati
Ad Age takes a look at independent digital shops that are presently flying under the radar. They are: AgencyNet The Barbarian Group BIG SPACESHIP Campfire DEEP FOCUS Fantasy Interactive firstborn iCrossing NIGHTAGENCY North Kingdom Nurun One to One Interactive Poke Profero Sapient Corp. Sarkissian Mason 360i WHITTMANHART Poking around Campfire's site led me to this splendid graph: …
You Can’t Size Up The Web With A Tape Measure
According to The New York Times, the growth of online advertising is being stunted because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight. There's also no one source for credible stats. Bloggers often turn to Technorati, but their data appears to be suspect, just like their competitors' data. There's Quantcast, but one needs to embed their code for it to return accurate data. The marketing and ad blog …
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Relationships Are Everything
DDB/NY was on the receiving end of unexpected news last week. Their $150 million car account peeled out and punched it to Minnesota without prior notice. According to Stuart Elliot, "executives at DDB were told of Subaru’s decision to dismiss them over a lunch meeting today at the agency, which had been scheduled previously to discuss creative plans." The reason behind the change is a desire by Timothy J. Mahoney, …
The Franklin Blog Looks At Ad Life On The North Coast
If you think your job in advertising is frustrating, try doing it in a crumbling blue-collar city city like Cleveland. I did it. It's not easy, particularly when you're a non-native outsider. So I can easily imagine it's especially not easy being a black advertising professional in Cleveland. Hence, The Franklin Blog. This blog should be a good read. Thanks to HighJive for bringing this to my attention. …
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Carving Out New Kingdoms
Richard Huntington, Planning Director at United London, has some interesting things to say about advertising's capacity to hold truly big brand ideas. It is not the global shortage of quality ideas that concerns me most. It is the role that advertising plays in serving those ideas. In short, while a brand idea can never be too big, it may well be too big for advertising. Advertising has always liked to see itself as …
Average Is Good Enough For Most
Spike Jones is reading Cripsin's book, Hoopla. He says it's "a great self-promotional piece about the history of the agency." For Spike the best line in the book comes from an email exchange: “It astounds me how people are afraid of so many things, but mediocrity never seems to be one of them.” Right, because mediocrity is par for the course. To strive to be something else, something better, is to risk and risk means …
What’s The Point?
Sally Hogshead on one of my pet peeves: Most of us spend a lot of time on the material in the presentation, and very little on the presentation itself. But dumping your notes into PowerPoint slides is akin to serving Bobby Flay cuisine on dirty paper plates. …