A commenter on my earlier post about the reports that WPP’s dude-we-won-the-Dell-account Project DaVinci has been renamed Synarchy is convinced that Synarchy is not the final name.
Apparently, it is but one of a few names under consideration, and noting how well-received Synarchy was I can’t wait to hear some of the other options.
In the best journalist tradition, I have contacted DaVinci’s PR flacks and hope that they can do half of my work for me.
Stay tuned.
Today is the last day for Fallon Minneapolis’ 50 South Sixth Street office. As of Monday morning they will be back in the AT&T Building, where they had been located from 1991 to 2001…it’s a nice building that kind of looks like an artichoke:
Fallon moved into five floors of the 50 South Sixth Street building during the good old days when it looked like they were going to hit 1,000 employees and $1 billion in revenue in Minneapolis. Things didn’t quite go to plan and slowly but surely the building started to empty out.
First it was one empty floor and then another, following the expected progression until they picked up and moved back to the old office.
But it’s not quite the same old office.
Instead of moving back to the AT&T Tower penthouse, where the agency had been, they are moving to some floors lower down. Sure, they have done a good job in making those floors look nice and respectably ad agency-like, but this is a real step down.
WPP’s new agency created just for Dell, the former Project DaVinci, has been officially named Synarchy…noting the vague similarity to anarchy and having the tickle of a memory from a history class long ago in my head I looked up the word to see what it meant, exactly.
The short definition is “rule by a secret elite.”
If that doesn’t just define most ad agencies, especially huge, faceless and leaderless conglomerations like Project DaVinci/Synarchy, then nothing does. In the case of Synarchy, which does not have a CEO yet, the elite that is running the place is even more secretive than usual…which is making recruiting an issue.
Anecdotally, a number of people that I know were willing to keep an open mind about the place pending who ran it (advertising is all about your connections, and if your guy is on top then it makes sense to fall in with him). But there is nobody running it. So they are staying on the fence. As are, based on the challenges Synarchy is having in staffing out, a lot of other people.
So who are the cabal in charge of the synarchic Synarchy?
Living up to the awful name, it’s a secret.
(There are additional meanings to the word, including a connection to European fascism through Vichy France. Which is nice.)
The European members of Strawberry Frog have been busy. They have just launched a new campaign for Panasonic’s Lunix camera that is predictably high in terms of production values and has a cute little twist:
It also reminds me of the movie Superman.
My memory of the old Superman movies with Christopher Reeve is pretty hazy…I was a youngster when I last saw one so I apologize if I am missing some detail, but remember when Lex Luthor sends the missle to the fault line so that the western part of California falls into the ocean?
The bridge scene in this commercial reminds me of that.
What does that have to do with advertising or the relative worth of this spot in the grand scheme of things? Absolutely nothing.
I’ve been putting some thought into The Girl Riot’s post on Noah Brier’s Brand Tags site…but before we get to my thoughts, for those that don’t know Brand Tags (and the associated CelebTags) let you put a one word or one phrase tag to brands. The tags then live in a “virtual tag cloud” that you can look through and see how people respond to the brands (and celebrities).
The most interesting part about the experiment is the huge difference in reaction between responses to brands and responses to celebrities. There is a lot of hate toward celebrities as evidenced by, to paraphrase The Girl Riot, every female celebrity getting tagged as a slut, whore or bitch.
Almost as a whole, celebrities are getting treated more roughly even than the corporations, like Wal*Mart, that everybody loves to hate.
Why?
For one, a brand logo is eminently less hate-able than a picture of a smug and fantastically rich no-talent, vacuous celebrity simply because of the emotional reaction we as people have towards other people.
While it is true in a sense that people are brands insofar as they have public reputations and representations, The Girl Riot notes that it is impossible to have the same emotional reaction to a brand as you do to a person:
“Wal-Mart responses run the gamut from american to white trash, south park to nascar, affordable to cheap, evil to value. juxtaposing these statements shows the range of emotion and perception–all of which may be true, but certainly there is a range. things that are affordable to some are low quality to others. evil to some is a necessity in some areas where there are no other supermarkets.
yet, Paris Hilton responses are much more flat and one-sided, ranging from airhead, bimbo, and bitch to sexual references, skank, slut, whore, herpes, and blow job. “rich” appears but small, and “heiress” appears once, but even smaller–only one person said it. this does not by far offer the whole picture, regardless of how you feel about Paris Hilton.
The range of reactions is so one-sided because the “Paris Hilton Experience,” if you can think of such a thing without video cameras and sordid trysts also coming to mind…you can’t…I can’t either. Let’s rename it to the “Non-Sexual Celebrity Experience.” “The Non-Sexual Celebrity Experience” is one that is lived vicariously through their media presence. There is no interaction, their image and deeds and comments are just sort of shoved out at people.
Brands on the other hand require actual action. You can walk into a store like Wal*Mart and get a more real experience than you could have with a celebrity. Same with driving car, using a golf club or doing any number of things with any number of products - the very fact that they accessible to us to the point that we get an experience from them that is two-way makes our reaction more nuanced.
Not to mention the fact that, since we have spent money on those brands and, in many cases, wear the brands are expressions of our self, we react and want others to react positively to them.
It’s sort of like hoping your alma mater gets super-selective after you graduate so other people think you’re smarter.
You want people to respect the brands you purchase. You want your money to be well-spent. You are looking for positives because brands reflect you, as much as you may want to deny it (and, if you’re not a brand whore, in the very least you are looking for value in your purchases and thus have a similar emotional desire that others think you chose your purchases well).
Celebrities, they experiences just aren’t real. They don’t exist on the same place as brands because there is no connection to them outside of the imagined.
With no connection to them, it’s easy to trash them.
Which is what’s been done.
Buzz Aldrin just hit rock bottom. That’s right, the second man to set foot on the moon is scraping away at the bottom of the barrel…he has just been announced as the headliner for the 11th anniversary party for Alexandria, VA agency O’Keefe & Company.
The only connection between Mr Aldrin and O’Keefe & Company is that Buzz Aldrin was on Apollo 11 and it’s the 11th anniversary of the agency.
Don’t feel bad for Buzz though, at least there’s free drinks.
Stephen O’Keefe, the agency’s founder, says that there is more link that just the number, “it’s all about going for it.” Both Mr Aldrin and O’Keefe & Co, according to O’Keefe & Co, represent this.
From an agency perspective, it will be kind of fun to get drunk with an astronaut…and certainly a lot more people will hear of O’Keefe & Co through this than otherwise…it just seems really hokey. Off brand.
Kinda like the 7UP aliens thing where the idea is just so weird as to be nothing more than a slightly-less-than-interesting novelty that has no lasting burnishing effect on the brand.
There is a little brouhaha going on over at Agency Spy because of a post about Minneapolis shop Colle + McVoy (a shop whose work was cited in the post and attributed to Adrants running with first, that I actually had the scoop on, but my pride is only marginally wounded by that).
As with all brouhahas, especially those about Minneapolis agencies, I love to weigh in (even if, because work is getting in the way, I am really late to the game).
But how to weigh in? The commenter driving most of the, er, discussion has a strong opinion that is sort of hard to refute. He thinks that Colle + McVoy need better senior leadership and have peaked creatively. Perhaps…it just might take a while to tell if he is right or not.
(To quote The Big Lebowski, “that’s, like, your opinion…man”)
But then, as I made my way through the comments section, I came upon a post by everyone in Minneapolis’ favorite copywriter defending his good name. It turns out that someone had thought that the negative commenter was none other than he of the e-mail, Colin Corcoran.
And Colin went to the site to say that it wasn’t.
He would have been better off saying nothing…since I started writing this post I have had multiple people email or IM me (on my personal accounts, they don’t know that I am the man behind the curtain and so aren’t trying to pile on publicly) to laugh about how the best part is that he posted a comment, etc and so on.
He really isn’t liked in Minneapolis, if you couldn’t tell.
And that is why I feel for him on this one. He may not be everyone’s cup of tea in terms of personality and he did have a very public humiliation (which makes it easier to pile on, like hyenas on a wounded deer), but why drag him into this? Especially as he’s just a freelance copywriter…it’s not like he’s Bob Barrie or Bruce Bildsten (also mentioned in the comments section), guys who have been to the top and have the work to back up their claims for their position in the industry.
They can shrug off an anonymous content, but who knows if Colin (or someone at a junior level like he is) can?
We all know that it must be tough enough for him even without the comments that will sit, forever, on SEO-machine blogs that will place high when, say, a prospective employer searched for his name. It’s time to let it rest. It’s time to leave him alone.
So we can turn our energy to finding out who the real Tool Hater is…
As a former accountnik, I remember well the feeling of distinct inferiority in the ad agency pecking order that I had whenever one found out my title (or, more likely, could tell my position based on what I was wearing). I imagine that it is the same feeling that I would get if I turned up at Greenwich Yacht Club and sidled up to the bar.
I, of course, didn’t take it lying down but rather decided that it was time to go where the glory was and become a creative.
The phrase “the grass is always greener” never rang so true, though it is undeniable that the traffic ladies and select account-side girls (though clearly not The Pretty AE) looked at me with more interest after I made the move.
At any rate, I have been recently talking to an account-side friend of mine about the vague idea that we have of starting up our own agency. I was giving him a hard time, saying that clearly we couldn’t split it evenly because creative talent is the ad agency product and was this more valuable than his contributions when he laughed and said something very close to this:
Which got me thinking that, somehow, most agencies with names on the door have at least one account-side name and occasionally two and that, perhaps, he was on to something and I had better get my ass in great and show him and his account-side brethren some proper fucking respect.
Then I got into the office and had a brief on my chair with a post-it note on it that said that the account team needed ideas to the client by noon and it all started to wear off…
(image from the blog of budding copywriter James Feess, who does some good work)
Because children’s clothing hasn’t become suggestive enough, Beyonce Knowles is out with a new clothing line called Dereon that just is perfect for Mommy’s Little Hooker or anyone wanting to recreate the JonBenet Ramsey look:
These little girls, who look like they are no older than my second grader cousin, are seductively posed and tarted up in a pedophilia-chic style that is more Little Girl Gone Wild than Little Princess and is a sad indictment on a culture that would turn seven year olds into real-life Lolitas.
It’s not just in advertising, as one needs only to look at the grade-school girls’ stripper pole dance on Keeping Up With The Kardashians last season to see another example of titillating tots, but advertisers really ought to know better.
And ad agencies really ought to draw the line somewhere.
Adfreak wants to find out the best name in advertising and is running a poll featuring four finalists to see who comes out on top.
It’s actually a pretty funny, though definitely navel-gazing, idea. I think that my name, pronounced correctly, would put me on the list…but since I’m not telling what it is, you’ll just have to suck it up and vote for one of the names below:
The finalists are:
1. Johnny Vulkan
2. Jelly Helm
3. Benzo
4. Scrappers Morrison
