my (imminent) glorious return

Hello friends…I am sorry for the very stalled writing, there has been a lot going on, not least the lack of an internet connection at my apartment.  And since I don’t blog at work (for obvious reasons), it means that I don’t blog at all.

The word from Cablevision is that I will be up and running again after the Fourth of July and, if they are true to their word, then I will indeed be up and running after the Fourth of July.

Mark your calendars!

technology issues have me down

In preparation for the design facelift of the site I seem to have sabotaged my own ability to make updates…also, the internet connection at my apartment is down because I left the window open and it rained on my modem…but a quick one here to say that I am working on it and will be back up and running later this week.

Sorry about that.

drive agency chalks up a symphony

There is a small shop in downtown St Louis called the Drive Agency that specializes in non-traditional advertising and, here is the coolest part, after the doors close at night it becomes the only commission-free art gallery in town…what a great way to live, breathe and fully support creativity.

In their new campaign for the St Louis Symphony, Drive Agency set out to prove that guerilla marketing could work for more than just hip, edgy brands:

Using massive stencils and some spray chalk, Drive Agency transformed crosswalks throughout St Louis into sheet music to promote upcoming concerts and attract a younger demo.

While the tactic isn’t whiz-bang new, it is still unusual and attention-getting in a city like St Louis (where it wouldn’t be here in New York), especially in the surprisingly walkable downtown area where the stencils will be seen by the young professionals that this campaign no doubt targets.

Add that to the interesting way to add notes to the already-existing painted crosswalk lines and this idea works on a creative level.

Whether it will be effective or not, time will tell. A theater in Minneapolis did something similar a few years back and, while it certainly was buzzworthy and gained awareness with the target, I never heard how it did. Which isn’t usually a great sign.

Hopefully Drive’s effort gets results that are interesting, too.

colle + mcvoy loves propane

Minneapolis agency Colle + McVoy has just pulled in a new account, and it’s a pretty big one though it might not be super-sexy…it’s the Propane Education and Research Council.

To quote an internal e-mail celebrating the win, “PERC is a significant win for Colle + McVoy and it will be one of our most visible accounts.” Oh, the joys of working at a Midwestern agency when a propane client is one of the most visible.

To be fair, Colle + McVoy did beat out strong competition for the account, including GSD&M Idea City, so it’s a good win. And, apparently, a big one.

Congrats to C+M!

advertising’s fifth column

Blogs actually can be constructive…or at least they can try. SuperSpy, the blogger behind the rise of Agency Spy, is back with a new name – Sabrina Duncan – and a new blog – Advertising’s Fifth Column – and it’s an interesting idea that just might accomplish that constructive thing.

How, you may ask? I’ll use her words:

I’ve decided to collect suggestions/ideas by agency about how each shop hires, fires, pitches, rewards, promotes, wastes money, creates, bills or brainstorms. I will then organize the input, shove it into a PDF and email all the suggestions to the appropriate VPs and CEOs. Then, the advertising media. After that, I’ll get someone to ring them up and get a response for the record, which will then be posted on the site.
The site has no affiliation with Media Bistro (her previous employers) and the comments that are currently up there are of the earnest-and-helpful variety, not the snarky-and-bitter type, and I’m hoping that tonality will continue.

So far the comments have been from people who are actually trying to offer helpful suggestions. If you have one, you should stop by. If you don’t, it’s fun to check them out anyway, if only to see what other agencies are like.

Right now it’s a limited list of the big guys, but it will expand.

a reader thinks they’re still adweak

An anonymous commenter going by the descriptive name “anonymous” has a good comment on my post about an improving Adweek…it is so good, despite disagreeing with me, that I just had to post about it, not to attack it but to clarify my own position.

I will do this line-by-line.

Meta message: I do not believe that Adweek has overtaken AdAge, has made AdAge irrelevant, is super-duper awesomer in every way than AdAge. I do believe, however, that Adweek has gone from being a total disaster to being a magazine that I feel like I have to read. And it has been a long time since I felt like that.

Now on to the comment:

Trying to land a gig at Adweek?

No, but even I can be bought. Cheaply.

Your perceptions don’t gibe with reality. Adweek writers engage in the blog experience? Yes, but usually to defend the franchise when their publication is rightly criticized.

True that perhaps most times they comment it is to defend themselves, but I have found that, especially compared with AdAge, they are more often commenting and much more polite and constructive when they do.

The Adweek guys ask how they could get better, the AdAge guys call you names and suggest that you are a hack…which may be true in my case, but is still bad form to actually say.

Ad Age not only engages the blog experience, they’ve also enhanced it, with their own blogs as well as things like the Ad Age Power 150.

There is a good argument to the AdAge blogs being a better engagement with the blog experience, but I have two issues with the way they manage the blogs. First, their blogs are all written by big names who write so rarely and irregularly that it’s really nothing more than a digital guest column (even guys like Armano are doing nothing more than running their content on AdAge.com). Second, the registration process for commenting on a post is even worse than Agency Spy’s and is therefore unusable.

I do think that the idea is salvagable and I do think that AdAge has clearly been exploring the best way to be successful online and therefore, because my point was not that they are terrible but that Adweek is relevant again, I will give them points and appreciation for experimenting.

As for the Power 150, I have a serious issue with it based on their unwillingness to actually e-mail me back about how to get on the list…it’s to the point now that, should they want to include me, I am going to get all Groucho Marx about being in a club that would have me and tell them to fuck off.

Adweek is moving its content beyond a digitized print version? When’s that gonna happen? Ad Age allows visitors to comment on virtually every story. Adweek barely accepts emails.

It is such a process to comment on AdAge that I would almost rather they just don’t let you. But again, you have a point that AdAge is farther ahead on this…I was more talking about something like the IQ newsletter which is a great aggregator of top content and is something that a journalist should do: separate the wheat from the chaff and aggregate information.

And much of the Adweek content is nothing more than press releases and Nielsen PowerPoint presentations.

I totally agree with you. It’s their biggest downfall and it drives me up the wall.

Yes, Ad Age still has a lot of old school columnists, although they cater to the old school dinosaurs still in the business. Adweek has just as many contributors teetering on the edge of irrelevance. The next insight to be found from, say, Mark Wnek will be the first.

True. I guess I just dislike the AdAge columnists more…it’s a matter of taste though.

It’s pretty clear that Ad Age has a much better grasp on where the industry is heading. They did, after all, publish an entire issue devoted to digital earlier this year. Sure, Morrissey’s a smart guy; but he hasn’t shown significantly more savvy than Matthew Creamer.

To go to my meta message, I wasn’t saying that Adweek had made AdAge irrelevant, I don’t believe that it has by any stretch, but rather that it is now relevant itself.

AdAge is still top of the heap in my estimation.

Yes, there are Adweek writers on Twitter; but do you really even connect those efforts with Adweek? I thought it was just those guys doing things on their personal time.

It may just be me, but I think that their Twitter feeds are pretty interesting, especially during big industry events like Cannes where you get the news from that milieu but from someone outside an agency and with a different perspective.

…Your dismissal of Ad Age, as well as your vision of Adweek’s resurrection, is pretty peculiar. Are you sure you haven’t accidentally been reading back issues of Adweek from the early 90s?

Back to my meta message, I was not trying to dismiss AdAge. It is still the leading trade. It’s just not the only trade that I feel I have to read anymore.

Adweek in the early 90s was on a roll.

Don’t get me wrong. I used to love Adweek, and would be happy to see them rise like the proverbial phoenix. Plus, they do have a small group of people who remain top-flight professionals. But honest to God, they actually reflect the advertising industry in that their organization has assumed a BDA stance. That is, a conglomerate has bought them out and brought corporate thinking and mandates to the enterprise.

I never said that they were perfect, just that they were rising. I still think that they are rising but there is still somewhere to go.

Unless they really are turning into a BDA…then they’re screwed.

adweak no more

If for no other reason than I have seen client-agency relationships falter on a bad ad review, the trade mags matter.

What is interesting about the trades though is how perceptions of the two players, AdAge and Adweek, have changed, even in the few years that I have been in the business.

When I started Adweek was still seen as the upstart challenger that was just a little bit more with it than stodgy old AdAge. You probably wanted to read both.

Then things started to change.

Adweek, for a few reasons, just sort of lost its way. It’s a long story that can be toplined by saying that Adweek’s content was not differentiated, it wasn’t a must-read, it isn’t actually a weekly anymore, etc and so on. It was okay to get by just by reading AdAge.

I said “it was okay to get by just be reading AdAge” on purpose. It isn’t anymore.

Not only have columnists like Bob Garfield – for obvious reasons – and Al Ries – this guy has been saying the same stuff since my father was in college and, while he is rightly a legend, I kind of get it already – grown long in the tooth and ceased to write stuff that I have to read, but AdAge is only valuable in its print form.

And print, as even AdAge crows, is dying.

I flip through Adweek as quickly as I do AdAge (that is, very quickly), but Adweek is actually more than just the print edition.

And no AdAge, your ridiculously stupid 3-minute video (I am at work during the day and, because I am at work, I want something to read when I have the time, not a fucking video that I have to pull up and sit through. Think.) does not count as you engaging readers beyond print.

Where Adweek wins, and why I spend more time engaged with them and their content, is that they are engaged with readers through social media. Guys like Brian Morrissey (and others, for that matter) has an excellent Twitter feed. Adweek writers engage in the blog conversation. They are trying to move their online content to something more than a digitized print version.

Advertising is moving into social media. Branding is about more than just pushing messages at consumers. People want more engagement than passive consumption of information, with each engagement opportunity tied to the time and place of their consumption needs.

Adweek gets this. They are engaged. That is why they are a must-read again.

Even though I may still only flip through the print edition, I am getting information from Adweek from multiple channels and touchpoints every single day.

overheard on an elevator

Because the only way to really get a feeling for what’s going on in the world of advertising is to hear some of the gossip, here are a few things that I have overheard this past week and weekend, one even on an actual elevator.

“There is nobody I’ve met at BBH [London] that I think is particularly smart”

“I interviewed at Grey, but my first interview was mainly the HR lady talking about herself. It was weird.”

“Why be a bitch? You work at Y&R. That’s like the McDonald’s of ad agencies: very large and very well-known but not exactly quality.”

“Buchner [of Fallon] still hasn’t gotten over not winning Microsoft. He was certain it was in the bag.”

out again to watch de oranje

After one of the most exhilarating matches of the Euro 2008 tournament, the Netherlands are back in action against World Cup runner-up France this afternoon…and, as you might expect, I will be watching.

Some people are calling this Holland team a revelation and all that, but despite the 3-0 dismantling of World Cup champion Italy I am very concerned that they are just not good enough defensively. And that because of this they will crush me emotionally unless I steel myself beforehand.

We can call them The New Orange after they have won something.

With all of this soccer to be watched, I will be out for the afternoon…and if the game doesn’t go well, don’t worry about me, I’ll console myself by hanging out with some Dutch girls.

Gouw gaat het is a pickup line in some places. I think.

david&goliath rebrand

Based out of El Segundo, California David&Goliath has done work for Kia, Zoo York and Universal Studios and now for itself. A complete overhaul of the logo, their positioning and their website is now complete and they are ready to face the world with all of the fearlessness and vigor of their namesake.

Even better, according to Agency Spy their party to announce their new “we’re totally brave and shit (even though advertising is like the least brave possible profession)” positioning has snakes there.

Indiana Jones would not be happy, but he’s getting old anyway and the idea is pretty cool.