The digital age.

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Call for entries.

Fees are $10 before August 1, 2007 and $15 thereafter. Make checks payable to Ad Aged. And good luck!

Metaphorical hats-off to Goodby.

In what seems like no time at all, Goodby, Silverstein and Partners have made the Sprint brand seem cool, fresh and alive. Work like the ad featured to the left is the apotheosis of "retail" advertising, or "demand generation" advertising. Goodby hasn't resorted to starbursts, screaming prices, exclamation points, store locations, etc. etc. to drive sales, instead, they've created a campaign that's so cool I actually crave what they have to sell.

Let's face it, with the exception of the iPhone or some other phone-nomenon, all the carriers basically offer the same phones at the same price and the same calling plans. Most often the carriers' stores are even in the same locations. So what makes you choose one carrier or phone over another, i.e. what "drives response" is smart work.

Maybe I'm just a child of the 60s, but "Music so fast it's trippy" motivates me a heckuva lot more than "America's most reliable voice and data network."

When to fire your Ad Agency.

I just came across this article in BusinessWeek written by Steve McKee the president of a semi-eponymous agency, McKee Wallwork Cleveland, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

From the way it starts, you can tell it's worth reading. "As a client, you're paying your agency to push you to keep your brand relevant in a shifting competitive landscape, not to simply take orders"

http://www.businessweek.com/@@qEhZxGUQ4PHMRxEA/smallbiz/content/jul2007/sb2007079_829964.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_small+business

George and George Bernard Shaw.

A number of Ad Aged's regular readers have commented on the somewhat angry tone of my posts. That brings to mind something my namesake Shaw said to me one damp and musty morning as he was bouncing me on his bony (and by this time, very ancient) knee "George," he growled with his Irish brogue, "the power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." With those words, the old man let out a rattle and left us for another, perhaps better, world.

If my posts sound angry, it's because we SHOULD be angry. Most big agencies have burrowed their heads in the sand as they wait for the 1980s and the three network hegemon to return. Interactive agencies are designing the crap out of things, but, more often than not, forgetting the value of production values--using, say, an in-house account guy as VO on a web movie, forgetting about thought-leadership entirely and choosing to be a channel-executer instead, and most clients spend their days covering their not-inconsiderable client arses and foisting yet another, at best, invisible ad on the millions of 'ad-ignorers' out there.

Further, the entire marketing world has a semantic virus that often excuses god-awful off-brand work with phrases like, "well, it's not a brand ad, it's supposed to drive sales."

OK. I am angry. If you're not, your dosage is too high.

P.S. There is also a rampant pusillanimity in blogs because of anonymity. Well, I'm not anonymous. Send me a comment with your phone number and I (not someone among my burgeoning staff) will call you to discuss things. There's nothing I'd like more here than a heated debate.

When it's hot in New York...

When it's steamy out, I often think of a poem by Ogden Nash.

A bit of talcum
Is always walcum.

Introducing a new word.

Right now I'm freelancing with my terrific art director at an agency that's called us in to work on an "exploratory." Here's what happens next, every time we do something that doesn't look like or sound like what they've been doing for years, we get castigated. In other words, it's an exploratory but we should only explore the vast expanse that exists between the ever-so-tightly kerned letters A and B.

This isn't an exploratory. It's a conformatory.

This picture goes with the post below.

CMOs DOA?

Advertising Age (the original Ad Aged in that their coverage of un-mass media is esoteric and woeful) has an article in this week's edition "CMOs rapped for having zero impact on sales." http://www.adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=119071

The study cited in the article is by two academics--professors of marketing--and I never believe academic articles about marketing because marketing ain't academic. What's more, did these guys ever sell a product (other than themselves) write an ad or create an insightful strategy? However, I do agree with the authors' conclusions.

Most professional marketers are, in reality, professional bet-hedgers. They fuck-us group everything. They avoid taking a stand. They seek consensus and amity rather that impact. It's safer. Most often they buy work that looks, sounds and feels like someone else's. The irony here, of course, is that by playing it safe--buying safe ads--CMOs apparently are endangering their own jobs.

Lies, damn lies and marketing.

OK, the correct quotation (by either Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli) is: There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. But apropos of marketing perhaps the quotation should be re-written as: There are lies, damn lies and lies that fuck up your brand and drive customers away like a fart in a sleeping bag.

On Saturday I had to add minutes to my daughter's AT&T phone card. Somehow adding $20 to a card cost me $25. Why? Taxes for one. And two, something AT&T calls a "re-charge fee."

So I called AT&T and talked to a supervisor.

ME: What's a re-charge fee?
AT&T: A charge for putting money on your phone card.
ME: So you charge me to spend my money?
AT&T: It's a charge to put money on your phone card.
ME: That's like a store charging me to shop there.
AT&T: We can give you address and you can write a letter.

Someday someone will provide an alternative to this kind of shoddy corporate management. I can't wait.