Tangerine Toad revealed, doesn't have orange skin

Some of us have been watching Tangerine Toad do a slow reveal over the last few months. First there was his picture on Twitter, which started as a Toad and then was a toad with a superimposed headshot on it, and then just his headshot. Later, came a first name, Alan, and then last week, when he posted a link to a 1989 New York Times article in which he was quoted, a first and last name, Alan Wolk. (Turns out we overlapped at JWT for an entire month back then.) Now there's nothing left in his closet. Alan has done a good interview over at AgencySpy. Until recently, he worked at DraftFCB. Thanks for outing yourself, Alan.

Sayonara SuperSpy

Was going to title this post "Sayonara AgencySpy" but that would imply that AgencySpy, the blog is folding, when it's just that the main spy, SuperSpy, is getting out of the blogging business. Says she got promoted and can't spend the time anymore. Trust me, though, she won't be able to entirely stay away. Happened to Copyranter. Happened to me when I left AdFreak. This blogging thing is a little like crack. (Not that I would actually know.) Story was first broken by my partner-in-crime George Parker at Adscam yesterday. Guess he wasn't supposed to do that.

Don't underestimate Mark Kingdon's Second Life

I sensed some surprise earlier this week when Organic CEO Mark Kingdon said he was jumping to Second Life. And some negativity too. Wrote AgencySpy: "Unfortunately, joining Linden Labs [owner of Second Life] at this point is like joining Napster after Metallica finished sodomizing them a few years back -- the crest of the wave for Second Life was at least two years ago and there is nowhere to go but the inevitable fade to oblivion that is a couple of years off." That could be true, but there's good reason not to underestimate him in this situation. First, he is very passionate about social media and was very articulate about what it meant for advertisers early on. Second, and more importantly, most people don't remember what he inherited when he joined Organic, but since I was there—on my way out the door, granted—I do. It was December 2000. We'd laid off 25 percent of the shop's 1200 employees only days earlier, and he comes in as CEO. (Lucky me, I had accepted a job with Ad Age, keeping the wolf from the door for a little longer.) Within the next year, the shop went down to roughly 200 people. Hard decisions had to be made. Most offices had to be closed. Remaining clients placated. And though Omnicom hovering in the background helped, the shop at that point was a publicly-traded dot-bomb flirting with extinction. Obviously, that didn't happen. Not only did Kingdon help get Organic through that, but he stayed on for more than seven years. It's an outcome no one would have predicted, and yet it happened.

Paul Tilley and the irresponsibility project

Wake up people! Amazed that this post on AdFreak hasn't garnered more than one irate comment. Here's the news: Liberty Mutual has actually bought the keyword "Paul Tilley" to link to a site it's calling responsiblityproject.org, allegedly an exploration of "what it means to do the right thing." Those who click on the ad will be confronted by a post once again dredging up the speculation about what role bloggers may have played in his death. As the writer of this post has no more insight than any of the rest of us outsiders do about why Tilley committed suicide, isn't it more than a little irresponsible to continue the speculation and try to enhance traffic about it by buying a keyword? Seems pretty obvious to me. Feel free to leave your comment below the post on the Liberty Mutual site, and don't make your comment anonymous. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: A source points out that Liberty Mutual also bought the keywords of the two blogs most involved in the controversy: "Adscam" and "AgencySpy." LATE AFTERNOON UPDATE: Liberty Mutual has pulled the links. Also I should have credited the Tribble Agency which started this whole gosh darn thing.

And the score is: Adweek, 19 Nielsen mentions; Ad Age, 16

Ever since the job description for the Adweek editor's post started circulating last week, a tempest has been brewing over whether the ties between the Adweek magazines and their corporate overlords at Nielsen are growing. This because the job posting touts that the magazine is carrying exclusive Nielsen data. And while the debate started fairly reasonabily, it's gotten increasingly silly in the blogosphere. (Yes, for those of you who don't know, I used to work at Adweek.)The magazine group, which includes Mediaweek and Brandweek, hasn't shied away from critical coverage of the conversion to C3, the new ratings currency that was adopted for upfront negotiations last year. You can browse the database and find stories critical of Nielsen's C3 ratings currency, carrying headlines such as "Buyers Debate C3 Ratings" and "Buyers Remorse: Want Make Goods, Not Scatter." The debate reached its silliest in a post at psfk.com, which trumpets "AdWeek Mentions Parent Company Services Up To 3 or 4 Times A Day”—and then shows a search of the Adweek database which divulges recent Nielsen mentions. I’ve countered with the visual above—which is a screen grab of competitor Ad Age’s recent mentions of Nielsen. Going back a week, I discovered that while Adweek mentioned Nielsen 19 times, Ad Age mentions the company 16 times, and if anyone writes in to say that proves that Adweek is biased toward Nielsen than they … well let’s not go there. With that close a margin, it probably wouldn't take very long to find a week in which Ad Age mentioned Nielsen more than Adweek. Any situation such as the ownership of the Adweek books by Nielsen warrants keeping an eye out for a loss of editorial autonomy, but so far, we’re not there. There’s a reason Nielsen gets mentioned a lot by Adweek and Ad Age, and that’s because it’s Nielsen. Nielsen has a lot of data. Advertising trade magazines print a lot of data. Period.