Just last week, Wachovia awarded its $100 million-plus advertising account to WPP. Then yesterday Wachovia was bought by Citigroup, and they were like, Hey, whoa, no ad deal after all! That really sucks the big one, in ad industry parlance. Too bad for Wachovia, too; perhaps a better ad agency could have ensured that the bank didn't end up with horrific ad placement like this, in today's Wall Street Journal:
Lee Abrams, Tribune Co.'s "Chief Innovation Officer" of AWESOMENESS (pictured, with top advisers) is back with another hard-rockin', mind-shockin' memo to blow the socks off all you naysayers who thought newspapers could never change! Abrams is already single-handedly responsible for the ten dumbest things said about newspapers this year, and that was before he busted out yesterday talking about "freedom to have so much belief on the brand." Are you trying to upstage your own slammin' track record of badass, Martian declarations on journalism, Lee? I think you are! The Chicago Tribune just unveiled a redesign, which seems like a good occasion for a big old memo from Lee Abrams. High five! All ellipses are in the original text, people:
Yesterday we learned that our national diet is shifting towards cheap, simple meals like tomato soup and Kool-Aid because of the national economic meltdown. But that doesn't mean your tomato-Kool-Aid soup must be boring and plain! Publishers are flooding the market with a new crop of food magazines, just in time for our collective shift from a nation of gourmet snobs to a nation of bony, coupon-clipping scavengers. 2008 saw the publication of 336 food magazines, up by a third from only five years ago. That's probably way more than necessary! Bad move? Here's a market summary: Interest is up. News stand sales and web traffic are both up. But! Ad pages are down. Several big food magazines have already seen double-digit drops in ad pages. And outside industries like travel and home furnishings that advertise in some food magazines are also hurting, and buying fewer ads. So what are publishers doing? Tying new magazines to celebrity chefs, or to the Food Network. Paula Deen! Sandra Lee! Rachael Ray! All big successes, or predicted to be! Other, more mundane cooking titles will surely fall by the wayside over the next year. The future of American food publishing: "Rachael Ray Tells You How To Use Lard To Re-Fry Your McDonalds Burgers To Raise Your Family's Caloric Intake Above Minimal Survival Levels." Mmmm! [WSJ]
Last week Starbucks' ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy, quit the Starbucks account. As you can imagine, it's pretty fucking rare for something like that to happen, especially with a company of that scale. At the time, the agency just mumbled something about how it was "time to move on." But now the truth has come out: Starbucks is a notorious headache. Thanks largely to "mercurial" CEO Howard Schultz. Wieden & Kennedy (also behind this Nike campaign, incidentally) spent four long years working for Starbucks, and, according to an excellent Ad Age story today, none of that time was particularly happy. But Schultz was pals with Wieden's founder, so it went on and on. The conflict can be read either as a case of a prima donna client, OR the case of prima donna ad agencies not feeling "appreciated" for their brilliance:
Now that the wizards of Wall Street have destroyed all hope for your future economic security, it's time to start eating like a pauper! That's the new ad strategy that our nation's largest food companies are pursuing, reasoning that the fancy Pepperidge Farm cookies and "vegetables" are going to be the first thing that shoppers slash from their budgets in these lean times. Why not try some grilled cheese and tomato soup? Shiny apples for a nickel! But this nutritional depression has an upside: Hey, Kool-Aid! Among the products that are getting a new marketing push since the financial apocalypse: Cereal, soup, milk, and "single serve frozen dinners." Don't forget the ramen noodles and berries foraged from the forest! And also:
Perhaps the only place more bleak and frightening than Stephen King's haunted corners of Maine is ESPN headquarters in the hell of Bristol, Connecticut. So it's only fitting that the horror master took some time from his manic schedule to film this new ad for Sports Center.
The group Veterans for Obama has just released a batch of ads featuring "The Next Generation" of combat vets from the wars in Irag and Afghanistan to counter John McCain's never ending claims that he's the only candidate who supports or our troops—and that he's the only one our troops support. In the spots, the vets themselves offer McCain a healthy dose of much-needed reality. Check out a few after the jump.
So maybe you've seen this, right? The McCain campaign already bought some ads (we thought they suspended their campaign!) announcing that John McCain won the debate, which happens tonight, and which McCain had not yet even said he'd attend until late today. Great work, guys. Really nice, really professional. But what is more funny is this ad in today's Wall Street Journal (supposedly!). Do you want to buy one of John and Cindy McCain's 500 houses? You are in luck!
This much is provable: G.ho.st, a hosted service that dubs itself the Global Hosted Operating SysTem, uses a slogan, "No Walls." Microsoft's new Seinfeld-powered Windows campaign pushes several slogans, including "Imagine No Walls." Sleep-deprived superreporter Kara Swisher tells us the G.ho.st gang claims trademark infringement on a pending trademark for "No walls." Our attempts to pull G.ho.st's trademark entry from the United States Patent and Trademark Office's searchable database returned no matches to G.ho.st's claim. Ball in your court, G.ho.st.ers — post your USPTO documentation in the comments, or it didn't happen.
This is what happens when stupid magazine staffers get ahold of them. The internerds at Ectoplasmosis can't decide whether to be appalled or amused by this unfortunate juxtaposition of advertisements in a vintage magazine."Don’t the editors look at these things, or is it just that we here at Ectomo have really twisted senses of humour?" asks one. But the magazine is obviously a teen magazine from the nineties, which means it might actually be Sassy, which means it is possible silly production guy was doing it for the lulz more than a decade before lulz were even invented. [Ectomo]
The whole concept of "branding" is a vacuous hustle, the majority of the time. You can spend outrageous amounts of money "improving" your "brand" with only vague ideas and doublespeak. Nowhere is this more evident than in "rebranding" and logo redesign and shit like that, that could be accomplished by one guy with a pencil in 45 minutes, but instead is farmed out to consultants for ridiculous sums. Mindshare, a big media agency, just paid half a million bucks for this:
♦ John McCain canceled his appearance on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman tonight; Keith Olbermann will fill in instead. [HuffPo]
♦ The best (and worst) fall TV show ads. [THR]
♦ The end of the Sun is drawing near; the last paper may be published on Monday. [Gawker]
♦ NBC's Nightly News gained viewers in 2007-08; ABC and CBS both experienced declines. [TV Decoder]
♦ Did Harper's Bazaar photoshop its October cover featuring Kirsten Dunst? [WWD]
♦ Oprah Winfrey will lend her voice to the upcoming Disney flick The Princess and the Frog. [THR]
♦ Ad spending declined by 1.6% in the first half of 2008. [AdAge]
♦ Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho is coming to Broadway. [Variety]
♦ Meet the oldest working reporter in the country. [E&P]
It turns out that the ad industry has managed to find some minority people to hire after all! The NYC Human Rights Commission has been formally on the industry's ass to hire more non-white people and stop being such insular crackers. But everybody watching assumed they would fail, because ad reporters are extremely cynical and also because the industry really didn't seem to give a fuck itself. But hey, looks like they have snagged some of those elusive employees "of color!":
Who's ready for Christmas? The answer is: you, the consumer. Don't be one of those Grinches who grumbles and grouses about how the ads for Christmas items seem to start earlier every year. You're right, they do, so what? It just means more time for you to shop around for the best price on your "Thomas Kinkade 'Holiday Reflections' crystal Christmas tree" and "Ultimate Disney Holiday Village." Capitalism is here to turn that frown upside down, Scrooge McDuck! As you might be aware, Christmas ads are already going in full force in magazines, online, and everywhere else. Fake Christmas trees! The Radio City Christmas Spectacular! And "trinkets, bric-and-brac and collectibles" from the unfortunately named Hamilton Collection! Why are we flooded with these annoying pitches year after year? Because of our own lack of spontaneity. Advertisers say people's need to "plan" their purchases mean these early ads work. So you don't like Christmas in September? Don't plan anything until December. This way you can thwart the greedy Jews, who are behind all this:
Two weeks after News Corp COO Peter Chernin told an audience in New York that MySpace ads are ahead of target, the site launched a self-serve ad system at advertising.myspace.com. Aimed primarily at musicians and small businesses, the ads start at a $25 minimum for a campaign. The big difference from Google's AdWords: MySpace ads only link to other MySpace pages. Here's a summary of Mashable's writeup on the system:
A nonprofit group called Commercial Closet is trying to persuade the ad industry to be less stereotypical when it comes to portraying LGBT issues (THE GAYS). That would mean not making ads like that one Nike ad with the balls in the face or that other Snickers ad with Mr. T and the gun aimed at the possibly gay individual. Considering how much progress the ad industry has made with the race issue, we'd bet on South Carolina levels of sensitivity for the foreseeable future. Keep your gay cooties out of Bill O'Reilly's mayonnaise, homos. [Ad Age]
This really weird ad decrying "The New Communism" ran on A17 of the Times today. It was paid for by some plutocrat in Houston named Bill Perkins who supports Obama. I think it advances my general contention that some of the fiercest critics of the Washington-Wall Street complex are actually beneficiaries of that whole scam, because Perkins's firm Crystal Energy LLC would appear to be precisely the sort of outfit to which God instructed Sarah Palin to fast-track lucrative contracts decimating the environment in pursuit of cheap energy.But I don't actually know because today's Senate hearing cut his CNBC interview down to about one and a half seconds. In any case, I hope the Times still has a Houston rep who can take this guy out to dinner. Who knows, maybe he can rustle up some other likeminded rich guys with money they'd be wiling to give newspapers now that capitalism as we know it has been suspended.
Poster Boy is like gentrification: he doesn't stop, you just get used to him. NYC's premier subway ad poster art-vandal continues to implore hipsters to free their minds using little more than an X-acto knife and some glue. And all the cool bloggers still love him. Five of the anonymous kid's latest, greatest works, below:
