There's really no way to accurately measure cluelessness in the agency business, but that hasn't stopped Brad Nierenberg and Charlie Jones from trying. The agency universe is suffering a rapidly declining population of managers who get it. In fact, on average, we submit that only 15% of all agency people actually get it. Yes, we know: We sound like snobs. But our hearts are in the right place. Honest. We're not …
Drop The Lingo And Make Something Great
Joseph Jaffe, author of Join the Conversation, writing in Adweek, offers some good advice. The movie Rounders contains a life lesson: "When sitting down at the poker table, look around for the sucker. If you don't recognize the sucker, get up and leave, because the sucker is you." Along the same lines, the next time you sit down at a planning table to discuss something viral, look for the moron leading the project …
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Timex Wants Us To “Return to the Outdoors”
Return to the Outdoors is a campaign from Timex, in support of the watchmaker's Expedition brand. I don't know if Patagonia CEO, Yvon Chouinard, wears a Timex or not, but it would be hard to find a better spokesman for the outdoors lifestyle. …
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Beach Reading for Brainiacs
Renny is getting his Ling on. “The continual need to be social, to greet, to interact, to converse and to carry out parting rituals obviates the need for the totemically-based rituals. We are, in effect [through mobile communications] continually recharging the symbolic value of our social links” (p.66) Amazon link: New Tech, New Ties …
Getting A Charge Out of Samsung
Drew Neisser and Jonah Bloom, like most business travelers today, need to get their charge on. Bloom describes the scene: After about half an hour of staring at the space where a plane should've been, we're granted the announcement we knew was coming: The 3:30 p.m. out of LAX is now the 4:50 p.m., which we all know means it's really the 6-something p.m. There's a brief period of eye-rolling before everyone goes back …
Don’t Rely On TV Commercials
I like this long-form anti-commercial commercial from Geico. Insurance is never once mentioned, but it works. …
Your Turn To Talk
From the head of Zues Jones comes some thought provoking material regarding the web as a less than perfect storytelling medium. There's no doubt that online advertising is generally pretty dire, but then the Web isn't really a great medium for delivering traditional advertising. But even more importantly it's absolutely the wrong medium if all you want to do is tell stories. The web isn't just a communications …
Outstanding Mission Statements: 11th in a Series
The Anti-Advertising Agency has ambitious goals (and the tools to get them there). Here's how they see things: Through long-term commercial saturation, it has become implicitly understood by the public that advertising has the right to own, occupy and control every inch of available space. The steady normalization of invasive advertising dulls the public’s perception of their surroundings, re-enforcing a general …
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