Ogilvy's Rohit Bhargava received an honorable mention in Slide Share's World's Best Presentation Contest for his blogging types treatise. Why one might need to know this type of arcane material is beside the point. I'm looking at the design of the presentation, and it is elegant for Power Point. …
McDonald’s Burger King
"We train more people than the U.S. Army." -Karen King, McDonald's USA's East division president According to Ad Age, Karen King joined McDonald's 30 years ago in Lawrenceville, Ga. Today she manages some 5,000 restaurants, comprising 36% or $10 billion of revenue for the domestic system. Today she's also the star of a new ad campaign that seeks to rid the world of the very concept of "McJobs." "If you have the …
The Irritainment King of Sacramento
irritainment (eer.uh.TAYN.munt) n. Entertainment and media spectacles that are both annoying and compulsively watchable. CNET News.com says Casey Serrin is "on his way to becoming the most hated blogger on the Internet." Serrin, 24, is a "would-be real estate mogul" from Sacramento, CA. He bought eight houses in eight months in four states with no money down looking to fix 'n flip. He became over-leveraged and lost …
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Fidelity Flexes Its Media Muscle
Ad Age is reporting on a public feud between non-profit Save Darfur Coalition and Fidelity Investments. The financial-services company has pressured CNN and Newsweek to hold off running coalition ads critical of Fidelity's investment in PetroChina, a company whose parent, China National Petroleum, is one of Sudan's largest oil-industry partners. Clearly, when it comes to ad clout, Fidelity has the upper hand. The …
Content Too Hot For Ritz To Handle
According to The New York Times, Ritz-Carlton is objecting to foul language and brand-diminishing storylines in a book of short stories it commissioned from Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. The luxury hotel chain planned to provide the book, Turndown Tales, as part of its turndown service. One of the stories in Turndown Tales is by the novelist Jodi Picoult, who wrote about a woman so fed up with her …
“Selling Out” Has Lost All Meaning In Today’s Media Culture
Jed Gottlieb writing for the Boston Herald takes modern indie bands to task for selling out to the man. John Mellencamp’s career has basically been one long commercial for the American working man. So when Chevy ads featuring his song “Our Country” scrolled across TV screens every 2.3 seconds for months last fall, it seemed fitting. But when Of Montreal - a cultish dance-pop band with a penchant for singing about …
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Delta’s Newest Destination: Twitterville
Ariel points to the fact that Delta Airlines has an active Twitter account. Love or hate Twitter, it is easy to see how it's a valuable resource for real-time brand monitoring. Thousands of users simultaneously (and quite candidly) expressing their good and bad interactions with brands, products, and services. Companies should consider it a virtual focus group of sorts... Only, instead of locking housewives in a room …
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The Struggle To Improve Creative
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that P&G and J&J are pushing for tighter integration between agency disciplines, particularly media planning and creative. Johnson & Johnson has joined a growing list of marketers who are dissatisfied with the way advertising firms are structured, and it is calling for more collaboration between the people who do the consumer research and the people who actually create the …