W+K hosted an event last week called Ignite Portland. A bunch of people stood up and spoke for five minutes on a variety of topics. I selected the one above because Keith Gerr looks as interesting as he sounds. When he's not appearing on YouTube, he's running Kemo Active, a brand actualization and invigoration consultancy. …
Ideas Don’t Grow On Trees
L.A. Times is reporting on a looming strike by 12,000 members of Writers Guild of America, the union representing writers in the motion picture, broadcast, cable and new media. Writers maintain they were shortchanged years ago, when they agreed to a discounted pay formula for home video sales, only to see that business flourish. They currently receive about 5 cents for every DVD sold. And they're determined not to …
Dentsu’s Mad Man Called Out
Catharine P. Taylor points us to this salacious story in BusinessWeek: The former creative director of the U.S. arm of Japan's largest advertising agency sued the company Wednesday, saying he was duped into visiting a brothel and pressured to engage in other sexually explicit activities on company outings across the world and then was fired after he complained. In a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages filed in U.S. …
The A-Word
Steve Rubel reminds Web 2.0 firms of a harsh truth they may not want to face. Nearly every online start-up you can think of is basing their business model on advertising. It's as if your digital budgets are a bottomless pot of money with more than enough to go around for everyone. Ask any of them how they plan to stay solvent and they all fire off the "a-word" - advertising. ...the harsh reality is that there will …
Developing Without A Conscience
Marketers spend too little (if any) time considering the manufacturing process behind the brand. Which is a mistake. Our job is to find the essential truth in the product and reveal it in a powerful way to the public. But what if the truth is horrible? What if the truth is unlawful child labor practices? What if the truth is environmental and community degradation? And so on... Manufactured Landscapes, a feature …
Have Content, Will Travel
Speaking at a conference this week, Beth Comstock, president of NBC Universal Integrated Media, said this a "golden age" of media. "It's a great thing to be a content company in the digital age," she said. "Content is always going to win." She also said media technologies can be considered mainstream once 40% of houses adopt them. That means video-game consoles, just over 40% by her account, are already mainstream …
AOL Puts “The User” In Driver’s Seat
AOL has been busy remaking its brand through a series of new product launches and innovations. Today, the media company announced it will let consumers opt out of behaviorally targeted advertising. “We want to make the opt-out process as simple and transparent as possible,” said Jules Polonetsky, Chief Privacy Officer, AOL. “We urge the industry to join us in ensuring that users who take steps to minimize the data …
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R.I.P., Robert Goulet
Singer Robert Goulet dies in Los Angeles at 73. …