Surge In TV Viewing

According to Reuters, a study by Deloitte released last month shows that the percent of Americans who...
"...ranked watching TV... as their favorite media activity,  (took) a 26 percent jump over 2008..."
This trend was predicted here at TAC over a year ago by the brilliant Susan Bandura who, in a guest post entitled Will The Recession Help TV? wrote...
"Now that even The Wall Street Journal has

Thinking Inside The Box

Last week I spent several days in a drug-induced stupor as a result of a dental calamity.

During one period of semi-consciousness, I had a moment of perfect perspective about our lives and our universe. Of course, there is no such thing as perfect perspective, but with the aid of powerful pain-killers, the mind can do marvelous things.

It occurred to me that we have lost all perspective on who

Ducks Deluxe

Sometimes success in advertising is not pretty.

A perfect example of that is Aflac. Personally, I have always hated that duck campaign. It reminds me of some annoying, gimmicky throwback to the 50's or 60's.

Nonetheless, it was very successful. As a matter of fact, in a category that is replete with advertising that is invisible, lame and ineffectual, it was successful beyond any reasonable

Tech Breakthrough Of The Decade

The new decade is only in its second week, and already science has produced a technological breakthrough that will be a boon to mankind for years to come.

The Ford Motor Company announced today that it will introduce a new feature in some of its 2010 model cars that will read you your tweets while you're driving!

This may very well be the most important technological breakthrough since Coors

Are You Sick Of This Blog?

It's The Heavy User, Stupid
For years, we here at Ad Contrarian global headquarters have been preaching that the key to marketing success in most categories is to attract the category heavy user (if you haven't already read my semi-brilliant book, you can download it here free.) An interesting article on how this idea affects media strategy is available here. (Via George Parker)
Biggest "End of

Conversation With A Creative Director

Recently I had lunch with a head creative guy at a successful agency who works on some very successful brands. I am not going to reveal his identity as his clients may be listening.

He had some interesting things to say.  I will be paraphrasing throughout.

First he said, aside from the paycheck, there are only two good reasons to work in advertising. First, to hang around with funny people. And

10 for '10

Since it's the beginning of a new year, and I'm on vacation, and I'm feeling expansive, and everyone's always telling me how negative I am, and it's a beautiful day, and spring training is only 6 weeks away, and I had a cocktail with lunch, I thought I'd try something new.

So here are 10 ideas that most ad people have never considered that might help us all be more successful in the ad biz in