Thursday, September 13, 2007

DDB's woefully incomplete Wikipedia entry

Even though I chastised DDB earlier in the week for only getting up one lousy post on each of their blogs (they still haven't added any posts since then BTW), I'm really not picking on the agency this week. It just so happens that now it's its turn—in my system of mostly alphabetical order—to be the subject of one of my posts about agency Wikipedia entries. As agency entries go, this one is relatively long (about 700 words), but accurate? The entry, which comes up fourth when you Google "DDB", omits some pretty basic things, not even mentioning its central role in the creative revolution or the revolution itself, and there are no pictures or links to its work from that time. As one example, it doesn't describe the 1959 VW Beetle campaign (at right), except to say that it was the no. 1 campaign of all time according to Ad Age's "The Century of Advertising" in 1999. It also points out that "You Deserve a Break Today" for McDonald's was no. 5 on the list—without mentioning that that campaign was created by Needham, Harper & Steers before the "Big Bang" merger that created Omnicom Group. In fact, its reference to the merger of DDB and Needham doesn't mention that whole part about BBDO at all. The strongest part of the entry deals with the recent history that wouldn't have existed had it not been for the earlier history, giving exhaustive detail on what awards the agency has won since 1998. Funnest factoid I could find: that the agency's role in the Lyndon Johnson commercial "Daisy", an ad which some attribute with helping Johnson defeat Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, landed Max Dane (he's one of the Ds in DDB, young 'uns) on President Nixon's Enemies List. In that, from what I can tell, he was the only ad executive so, um, honored. Picture via Stay Free!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Wikipedia blocked me from posting the following comprehensive history on several of their pages. It is a complete history of the Daisy spot featuring a rare interview with the Daisy girl herself:

http://conelrad.com/daisy/index.php