More on 'Adweek': no layoffs, not a lotta traffic

So, you probably heard by now that Nielsen Business Media laid off a bunch yesterday—around 50 people, though the company isn't confirming the specifics. I was more or less out of pocket yesterday and not up to my usual spelunking to find out more. Here's what I've heard, none of which Nielsen would confirm—there were no editorial layoffs at Adweek and Mediaweek, at least one at Brandweek and the Web editor's job at Editor & Publisher. (That was reported yesterday by Mediabistro's Fishbowl NY.) In addition, no open positions will be filled with one exception: the Adweek editor's post, which Alison Fahey is expected to vacate soon for a publisher/editorial director's role at Adweek magazine.

Given the news out of my former employer yesterday, it seemed a good time to see how the Adweek.com relaunch—which was unveiled on Feb. 4—has been going, so I checked in with Compete.com and Alexa to see what traffic they were reporting. What I found was troubling. The flat-to-down results are below, with Ad Age used as a comparison (granted that brand's mission is larger than Adweek's is, but the graphs look a little naked alone).

Here's what Compete.com has to stay on traffic over the last year:



And from Alexa over the last three months:












Whatever source you use, you'd expect to see a bump there, wouldn't you? Through a spokesperson, Sabrina Crow, who heads the marketing and media books, said, "For us in terms of the success of the launch, we were up in revenue and up in online subscriptions ... those are the metrics that count for us."

More musings on Pereira and O'Dell

Realize I missed yesterday's catch du jour in not posting about the new agency being set up by ex-AKQA execs P.J. Pereira and Andrew O'Dell that will serve both the digital and non-digital needs of clients. For the life of me, can't figure out why this concept is worth $30 million, even if, as the duo told The Wall Street Journal yesterday, the fact that most agencies have a bias toward one type of media vs. another is true. I mean, that's definitely true, but $30 million? Media-agnostic as the new agency hopes to be, getting so much seed money is very Silicon Valley. Tell me if this is a dumb idea, but I think a better start-up concept would've been to do this within a big holding company with lots of ready access to pissed off clients who need better solutions. Having a reliable stream of client connections seems like it's worth more than plain old money. Only problem there is—depending on one's idea of an end game—that eventually cashing out when you're an independent can be a much more lucrative move. It sure worked for Donny Deutsch.

Who will be the first Olympics sponsor to pull out?

Even though the Dalai Lama has come out in favor of Beijing's hosting of the Olympic Games, it still seems inevitable that some corporate sponsor will drop out of its Olympics deal soon. In the last few weeks, the Beijing Olympics brand has become a tainted symbol of a country that gets capitalism, but has a limited notion of human rights. The first Olympics sponsor that does this may not, in reality, be doing it for the right reasons—its biggest fear may be that its image, too, is being tainted—but someone is going to back out. It won't be an easy decision, as most marketers see China as their last, great commercial frontier but, in being viewed as a hero in other parts of the world, who knows what the bottom line benefits could be? (OK, folks. If I'm wrong about this, I'll call myself on it later.)

Soliciting ideas for OMMA social media conference

Hi gang. Today I'm using the blog as an idea generator to help me put together the OMMA Social conference, which I'm chairing in June. (In case you don't know, OMMA is part of the Mediapost empire and stands for Online Media, Marketing and Advertising.) It will be a one-day affair aimed at being the most up-to-the-nanosecond event centered around social media so, although I can't run the conference agenda like a democracy, I still want to gather as many ideas as possible as to who would be mind-blowing keynotes and what would be good, meaty panel topics. No PR pitches please. If you've got something you're really hot to hear about in social media, email me at cathyptaylor@gmail.com—would prefer your ideas travel privately rather than being put in comments below. Thanks.

When green cancels out green

Kinda ironic that in order to give me a reusable Target bag, Vanity Fair had to polybag the current "green" issue.

Allen Rosenshine explains it all

Long-time BBDO chief Allen Rosenshine is one of those people always worth listening to for his ability to float above the down-and-dirty technical aspects of the business and focus on the big picture. Thus, it's worth stopping by this video interview with him at adage.com. Rance Crain plays the interviewer, and he posits the theory that the reason General Motors recently said it would put about a third of its budget into online media was to save money. Not that GM doesn't need to save money, but I think a more accurate way to describe it is that the ROI of digital potentially makes it a better way to spend money.

White Gold is prolific

Whole bunch of new White Gold video has been posted in the last day or so. Mr. Gold, if you're not familiar, is the centerpiece of Goodby, Silverstein + Partners' new "Got Milk" campaign and is a fictitious heavy metal artist (oxymoron watch?) who owes his fictitious success to drinking. A video for the new song "Tame the Tiger" is above. You can also see five :30s here.

Latent trend: menopausal sexpots

For the second time in less than 24 hours, I've been confronted with a commercial that portrays the randy tendencies of menopausal women, for two different products no less. (Can't remember the first one. Think it started with a "V".) Now, I'm not saying that sex drive and menopause are mutually exclusive (not old enough to be in that demo yet), but what's a little odd about these commercials is that they tend to overplay the sex angle, as though once released from the possibility of getting pregnant, that's all gals think about. The second one, for a product called Estroven, takes place in a magical place called "MenopauseLand" and can be seen at this YouTube link. Side note: Why would BrandBuzz put this video on YouTube and not make the html embeddable? Educated guess: someone at the client is not getting this viral thing.

Adverganza's Monday morning picks, 04.07.08

Wherein I scan the Monday morning headlines so you don't have to:

From Advertising Age:

—Story about how Mark Penn screwed up Hillary Clinton's campaign. Little did Ad Age know.
—The difficulties of buying African-American media.
—Good luck trying to market Miller Genuine Draft.
—Company called Lotame tries a new angle on social media monetization.
—Nielsen's got competitors—lots of 'em.
—Obligatory MySpace enters music industry story.
—Carat's suffering digital transition growing pains.
—Digital talent coming from elsewhere.
—How old-fashioned—Sears campaign focuses on branding.
—Bob Garfield finds too much Vietnam in McCain presidential spot.

From Adweek:

—Closed Web chats are the new focus groups.
—Former VW CMO Kerri Martin opens company to help clients get good work out of their agencies. Whips not included.
—Close-up on Mark Figliulo, the man who would be Gerry Graf (sorry, I meant creative director of TBWA/Chiat/Day New York).
—Microsoft be damned! Yahoo continues to promote its new uber-ad platform.
—Coke's social media Alter Ego.
—Barbarian's Benjamin Palmer on the weirdness of global branding.
—Bob Greenberg on the parallels between TV and the ailing music biz.
—If you haven't heard it already, Michael Barrett is leaving Fox Interactive Media.
—Barbara Lippert notes that Christie Brinkley's face hasn't changed much in 25 years. Depressing.

From Brandweek:

—Procter & Gamble and Dell work at measuring branding in the Web.
—Kraft pouring $100 million into cream cheese-filled bagels. Wish they'd work on the quality of the bagels first, but I'm picky.
—Q&A with David Peacock, vp/advertising at Anheuser-Busch.
—Teen brand preferences haven't changed very much.


From Mediapost:

—Procter & Gamble running contest for Crest WhiteStrips in which consumers enter their smiling photos. The Mona Lisa ain't invited.
—AMC pegs upfront audience guarantees to behavioral targeting.
—Wanna watch TV online? Check out PrimeTimeRewind.com.

From The New York Times:

—Yahoo rejects Microsoft's bid again. Here's Yahoo's statement.
—Amazon feels pressure to go digital.
—BMW devotes half of its budget for the 1-Series to online media.
—Multiplex employees promote "Prom Night."

From The Wall Street Journal:

—Nielsen plans to buy IAG Research.

Firing your agency can be pain free!

Just received a link to a site called dearagency.com, which I think is a promotion for an agency in Portland, Oregon called Citrus. It's great. Just go to the URL, answer a few questions, and the site will generate a letter to your current agency that breaks up the agency-client relationship. Great Friday time-waster or agency-firer.

Clip with Keith Richards. All you need to know.

Posting this just because it's Friday and Keith Richards is never not funny. At any rate, The Rolling Stones, pimping for their new movie, are the first in a YouTube program called Living Legends, where the YouTube audience gets to ask questions of uber-famous people. But what-evah. In this clip, Richards appears at the keyboard and sitting on a toilet.

Run, don't walk, to this Adidas site

My Internet connection is very slow today, so I haven't been able to really access this Adidas site. But it's probably worth checking out because Adidas tends to get online media. The site, "March is a Brotherhood" is themed, obviously, around the NCAA tournament with sub-sites for seven (yes, I said seven) teams that were picked by Adidas "as the most likely teams to win the NCAA men's championship." (Hmmm do they know something we don't?). At any rate, there's a lot team-centric content here including blogs from the coaches, team chants and gear and a feature called "Call from Coach" that can be sent to friends. Via Omnicom's EVB.

This contest could get very sticky

In the latest YouTube CGM contest, Post-It Notes is running a "One million uses and counting" contest, which today, anyway, is on the home page. (Beware, YouTube is very glitchy this morning, or is it my Internet connection?) Yes, you can submit your very own video of how you use Post-It notes. In my YouTube travels, though, I found the video above, of the Diet Coke/Mentos guys doing finding an interesting use for Post-It notes.

Doesn't this video sell all the wrong products?

Still think this campaign does more to sell Glaceau VitaminWater, Geico car insurance and the Thriller rerelease than it does Sobe LifeWater, but what do I know? I just blog here. Nice takeover of every square inch of Times Square though.

Social Media Insider column feels the Burn

My latest Social Media Insider column has just been posted. C'mon click over there and discover how you, too, can be one of Coke's lab rats.

On the other hand, Modernista doesn't get it

By now you must know that Modernista has gotten boatloads of publicity over its non-Web site Web site which simply refers people to what others are saying about them online. So, Brian Morrissey at AdFreak this morning reports that not only did Modernista "steer" its Wikipedia entry, but that company founders Lance Jensen and Gary Koepke wouldn't wow anybody with their Web 2.0-o-city. Now, Brian tweets that Wikipedia has posted the following on its Modernista page: " The website for this company obscures our logo with their own, and may lead the viewer to believe that Wikipedia serves as their homepage provider. This is not correct. Wikipedia has no affiliation with Modernista and has requested that Modernista cease this use of our website. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia written from a neutral point of view and does not endorse nor condemn Modernista, but is opposed to being used as a promotional mechanism in this manner for any third party." No one said this Web 2.0 thing was gonna be easy, you know.

Fight breaks out over who owns magenta

The path to this post is circuitous, but it speaks quite eloquently to the power of social media. To recap: I was trolling Facebook this morning when I saw that Crayon founder and man-about-social-media Joseph Jaffe had swapped in a new picture, which you see here--a pretty magenta square with the words "T-Mobile Sucks." So, I followed a link on Facebook to a note from Joseph which says the following: "So as it turns out, apparently Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile thinks it owns the color "magenta" and sent this nasty notice to the folks over at Engadget Mobile (page 1; page 2)." It reads in part, "The color is plainly used in a trademark-related way on this website to highlight the headings of different postings." Of course--quadruple duh!--Engadget fought back by at least temporarily going magenta, and other blogs have done so in solidarity ... the movement even has an official logo. Needless to say, it's magenta.

Ad haikus sum the biz up nicely

There's someone in Ohio who writes poetry about advertising here, but if there's one example of ad-lit that strikes my fancy it's the ad haikus over at The Renegade Agency Confessional. They run on Fridays. Here are some samples:

On account executives:

Remember to smile.
Give 'em the ol' shuck and jive.
You have people skills.

On casual Fridays:

Choked with ties and skirts
I'm dead inside til Thursday
Friday: air it out.

Some of the best, though, can be found in the comments, where other contributors to the blog think up more haikus around the central topic.

Madonna--commercial whore or smart business woman?

Madonna didn't stop with Sunsilk. To grease the skids (dirty hair pun!) for her new album, "Hard Candy," she's also signed deals with Vodafone and Fuji to use their commercial dollars to promote her album. The Vodafone deal lets the company's customers listen to the album pre its late April release. In this story, Madonna's moves are presented as extremely shrewd, which they are. But there's also that perception in the marketplace that if Madonna does this it's smart, whereas if it's some other artist it's selling out. Hey, did you hear it's an imperfect world?

Those Canadian Club ads actually work

Kind of humorous to see that Canadian Club's retro campaign, which uses lines like "Your Mom Wasn't Your Dad's First" has actually worked, though it makes a certain kind of sense since it's so different than other liquor campaigns that it stands out in a crowd. According to Ad Age, case volume increased by 4.4 percent in 13 weeks. Here's to being politically incorrect.