Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The Social Media Insider gets lost in the social media universe

Spent a long time today looking for a Social Media Insider column idea and discovered that the real problem was the information overload engine, which had overwhelmed by brain. Read more over at Mediapost. As a bonus, this column also makes reference to dead people on Facebook.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Publicis to stop creating print ads


At least that's my takeaway from Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy's statement during the third-quarter earnings call that the agency holding company plans to become an "all-digital agency." And by the way, they'll be no analog radio or static billboards made at Publicis anymore, so there!

Seriously though, even as a believer in digital, I find proclamations of becoming all digital to be positively cringe-worthy because they have a "hook, line and sinker" quality to them that indicates those doing the proclaiming have had more than their fair share of of Kool-Aid. While it's true that all kinds of media are becoming more digital than less -- including such former stalwarts as TV, there's still a little something to be said for magazines, newspapers and other forms of analog media, isn't there? Isn't there?

Monday, October 26, 2009

Marital infidelity, now appearing on Sprint's Now Network


For reasons that escape me -- something to do with fatigue, I'm sure -- I ended up watching just a little "Desperate Housewives" last night, and thus, came across this brand integration scheme: the Another Desperate Housewife" series sponsored by Sprint's Now Network. Its connections to the actual show, no pun intended, are many: the mischievous music, perfect houses and great-looking people among them.

But, of course, there's also the philandering, and that's where this little homage gets, to me, very off base. Sprint phones figure prominently — as the means with which to prove that your spouse is cheating. So, next time you feel the urge to check up on them, I highly suggest that you use Sprint's Now Network to see if that  text message that just arrived is really from your husband's office. I understand the urge to seamlessly integrate programs with products these days, but do you really want to position your phone as a great way to spy on your spouse? I don't think so.