Jane Sample and Ad Broad consider morality in the context of an ad career. Jane says: I can see how some people think we are evil. But we are not evil. The majority of the people who work in advertising are extremely intelligent and empathetic people who CARE about the world and the people in it, we just like advertising. I know many people who work in advertising and are extremely passionate about “giving back” …
Step Up to the Drafting Table
Alan Wolk wants to be an architect, not a builder. Me too. Years ago, when I worked at the legendary Anderson & Lembke, Steve Trygg (who started the shop) was fond of saying that “an ad agency can be the contractor or it can be the architect. And you always want to be the architect.” Wolk argues that typically ad men and women are not architects today. We’ve turned ourselves into the contractors. The guys who make …
Thinking On Your Feet
Rob Walker has been out touring the nation to promote his new book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are. Portland bookstore, Powell's, asked Walker to write an essay that would help sell the book (because they're Powell's). In the essay for Powell's, Walker says no one wants to see themselves as a consumer. It's too trivial a description for a complex organism. Yet he argues that …
Are Ad Men As Hollow As The Fantasies They Create?
Alex Witchel, a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine spent some quality time with Matthew Weiner (pronounced WHY-ner). Weiner is creator, producer and head writer of "Mad Men," the original series on AMC. The show begins its second season on July 27th. It's a long article with lots of interesting detail, like the fact that Weiner is a meticulous control freak from an over-achieving family and somewhat …
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Digital Diva
Adweek is profiling Colleen DeCourcy, chief digital officer of TBWA Worldwide and Cyber jury president at Cannes. DeCourcy, 43, has been at the forefront of digital marketing since the first tech boom in the '90s, when it mostly meant building Web sites. Speaking about her new role at TBWA, DeCourcy says, "It's been a leap of faith for someone like myself to spend a year not being deeply associated with any work …
Slideshow MashUps
| View | Upload your own In the slideshow above, Uwe Gutschow and Don Longfellow from Saatchi & Saatchi LA, have expanded upon Paul Isakson's earlier work. Neil Perkin also developed a derivative work from Isakson's original. The Saatchi piece above neatly describes my own thoughts about content's role in advertising. From two of their slides: We stop pitching people with messages. We start providing useful content. …
Wenda! Wenda! Wenda!
I'd never heard about Wenda Harris Millard before. My bad. Thanks to Brian Morrissey at Adweek (and Catharine P. Taylor's pointer) I now know better. In a talk with Federated Media Publishing founder John Battelle at the Conversational Marketing Conference in New York yesterday, she said, "emotional creativity that has been key to building brands" is being overshadowed by "the cool efficiency of …
Minus 2.0
Hugh MacLeod can be counted on to deliver humorous material. He tends to drop it in a cartoon, but today we look at his latest list—"10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT WEB 2.0." I'll cherry pick a few for our purposes here: 1. Reconciling the huge gap between how interesting and important you tell your clients it all is, versus how interesting and important you actually find it all yourself. 5. The well-intentioned but misguided …