Super Bowl Vigilantes

Super Bowl Sunday is a great day for sports, a huge day for advertising, and a lousy day for the First Amendment.It's the one day of the year that every interest group and every advocacy group has its thought police on duty (see this from USA Today) looking for any ad that might be "offensive" to them. It's the day that advertisers and agencies fold like single-ply toilet paper when some

Philosophy or Donuts?

Several years ago, a very sincere guy who ran a chain of donut shops came to see me. He wanted to do an advertising campaign."We're different," he explained. "We're a commune. Everyone who works here owns an equal part. We work cooperatively. It's a model for how businesses should be run. It's a vision of the future. I think people will really respond to this if we do an advertising campaign

Branding's Final Absurdity

There's very little fun left in the ad business, but one of the big chuckles we still get (secretly) is watching our clients go through idiotic "branding" exercises.These con games last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes. Nonetheless, there are very clever companies out there making zillions of dollars convincing

David Lynch on New Media

Thanks to Jay Tannenbaum for pointing me toward this and this.SUBSCRIBE TO THE AD CONTRARIAN

Guest Blogger: Obey Your CPM

A cranky post from guest blogger Roger Lewis.Here is an excerpt from AdAge's article on agencies of the year with an A grade or better."AKQA's work for Coca-Cola's Sprite grabbed attention with a campaign that invited consumers to participate in the marketing process through a national contest to create a theme song for TV spots featuring basketball star LeBron James. According to AKQA, the site

Hate To Say I Told You So, But...

New research from Media Life magazine confirms what TAC has been saying for quite some time about ad skipping. TAC has estimated that about 1.6 to 1.9% of spots are missed because of TiVo-ing and the like.Here's what Media Life (Jan 11, 2008) says:"Nearly all ads are viewed in DVR homes. "For the longest time the great fear among the broadcast networks and advertisers was that ad-skipping

Interporn

On October 15th, 2007 TAC predicted there would be a firestorm over the influence of internet pornography on children in the upcoming year.Now, Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy has announced that all ISPs that feed houses and schools will be required to provide a filtering system to protect children from explicit pornography and violence. Of course, Australian civil