Adweek takes a look at the agency/client tensions involved with bringing to life this Motorola spot, directed by French filmaker Michel Gondry. It was during editing that the creative differences became evident. While the agency wanted to keep Gondry's vision intact, the client wanted to streamline it and take out some of the more fanciful elements. After production had been completed in June, an agency meeting with …
“Mad Men” Drink But Not To Get Drunk
According to Ad Age, DirectTV will be the sole sponsor of the season's final episode of Mad Men. The article explores the sponsorship model, while also touching on product placement in the show. With its unflinching look beneath the veneer of 1960s politesse, it's easy to see why brands such as Jack Daniels' parent Brown-Forman, which inked a product-placement deal with "Mad Men," were cautious. "They have this whole …
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Raising A Glass To An Iconic Brand
To paraphrase a old saying, reading about beer is like dancing about architecture. But Bill Yenne's Guinness: The 250 Year Quest For The Perfect Pint makes a fun read, especially when you're sitting at a bar on a Sunday afternoon and the Falcons are playing like a Pop Warner team. From the beginnings of Arthur Guinness, an Irish brewer in the mid-1700's, through the present day, Yenne talks about how Guinness has …
A Two-Fer Of Columns
Looking for some very light reading for the weekend? Check out A Carbon-Neutral Pile of Manure, my new column on Talent Zoo which takes a look at brands desperate to greenwash themselves. Why? Money is green. Or vice versa. If you live in Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, or other Midwest cities, you can head to the bookstore and grab a copy of Create Magazine, whose Sept/Oct Midwest edition has a column of mine entitled …
Mute Buttons Collar The Truth
Joe The Peacock is funny. And when someone funny is forced to endure mindless babble on a conference call, they tend to a) pass out, or b) make a note of it. Joe The Peacock made note of it. Here are some of the things he thought, but could not say (without the invention of a mute button) on a recent call. God, I wish I'd been paying attention in college when they went over the definition of "synergistic" in English …
Big Money In Sales
Fortune reports that the job du jour is online ad sales rep. In fact, the field is so hot, journalist Jessi Hempel was offered a "mid-six-figure" salary by a CEO to defect while reporting the story. Hiring a sales director "is the single biggest challenge that we have faced," says Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.tv, a video-sharing site. Kaplan says she spends as much as six hours a day searching for the right …
Bob Garfield’s Not Feeling Comcastic
Ad Age critic Bob Garfield has taken his personal crusade against Comcast into the blogosphere with a new site called Comcast Must Die. Here's part of the site intro: Actually, I have no deathwish for Comcast or any other gigantic, blundering, greedy, arrogant corporate monstrosity, What I do have is the earnest desire for such companies to change there ways. This site offers an opportunity -- for you to vent your …
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From Nowhere To Everywhere In The Span Of A Decade
USA Today looks at the growing proliferation of, and resistance to, electronic mail. Today about 150 engineers at chipmaker Intel will kick off "Zero E-mail Fridays." E-mail-free Fridays already are the norm at cell carrier U.S. Cellular and at order-processing company PBD Worldwide Fulfillment Services in Alpharetta, Ga. Prominent techies are tackling the problem individually by declaring "e-mail bankruptcy" — …
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