Tom Raftery has kindly condensed Robert Scoble's missive on his employer's need to make changes. Here's what Scoble wants: -A guaranteed Terabyte of Internet-based storage space for EVERYTHING and for EVERYONE running Windows in the world. -Buy every [Microsoft] employee a top-of-the-line Dell machine with dual monitors running Windows Vista. And do it now. -Change employee behavior through public compensation change …
Is P&G Getting Emotional With Its Ads?
From BusinessWeek: To find a new message for Tide, P&G tried a twist on the traditional focus group. Instead of gathering women in a room, Tide managers and strategists from Saatchi & Saatchi spent two weeks in the field talking to women in Kansas City, Mo., and Charlotte, N.C. They followed women as they shopped and ran errands and sat in on bull sessions "to hear them dish about their lives," says Wanda Pogue, a …
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Starbucks Staff Not Spelling It Out For Us
Starbucks is co-producing a Hollywood film that has nothing to do with coffee. Last January, Associated Press reported that Starbucks employees will wear lanyards with "Akeelah" buzz words during the month of April in the hope of sparking conversations about the movie, billed as the story of an 11-year-old girl from inner-city Los Angeles who makes it to a national spelling bee. It's now April and the Starbucks near …
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Purely Commercial Environment To Make Space For Ads
Ad Age reports on the desanctification of the iTunes store by advertising. Coming soon to iTunes: ads. Apple -- a brand that prides itself on the purity of the user experience -- will soon put up billboards on its popular iTunes service, according to content partners who have been briefed on the plan. Apple's current plans call for the ads to appear only in the lower-left corner of the iTunes library. …
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Wearing Slacks With Flip Flops
From Ad Age: The Haggar Clothing Co., a department-store pants supplier bent on becoming a lifestyle brand, has hired Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Miami, in what it describes as an "unconventional partnership" that includes Crispin taking a minority equity position in the newly private Haggar. Haggar was delisted from Nasdaq after an investor group, led by a pair of private-equity firms, bought the company from …
Iowa Writer’s Workshop Grad Deconstructs McDonald’s TV
It's been a long while since I clicked by Cup of Chicha, a site I used to frequent. I certainly did not expect to find advertising criticism. But I did. Here it is: With “The Pinky,” my name for McDonalds’ latest TV ad campaign, advertising’s fascination with the hipster lifestyle comes to its final vulgar climax. Co-opting youth culture’s propensity for sign language (e.g., the finger-figurations for signing peace, …
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Support The Arts—Buy Modo & Modo
According to The Telegraph, the Italian maker of a small black notebook once used by Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Ernest Hemingway has put his company up for sale. Mario Beruzzi's company Modo & Modo sold 4.5m Moleskine notebooks across the world last year, half of them in the United States. The notebooks, which have a pocket for mementos and an elastic band to hold them closed, were made by a French company …
You WILL Watch The Ads
From the AP: In this era of easy ad skipping with TiVo-like video recorders, could television viewers one day be forced to watch commercials with a system that prevents channel switching? Yes, according to Royal Philips Electronics. A patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says researchers of the Netherland-based consumer electronics company have created a technology that could let broadcasters …