Happy Holidays!

The entire Ad Contrarian global staff is off for the holidays. Have a wonderful week and we'll see you after the New Year.

Remarkable Rudeness

Recently my agency was asked to pitch an account.We were given little time and no money to do so. Our assignment was to develop full-blown plans -- including creative and media -- for three different markets.We spent tens of thousands of dollars on the pitch. We had people working nights and weekends -- including Thanksgiving weekend.When we gave the presentation the head marketing person from

How To Select An Ad Agency

The process by which companies select ad agencies continues to get more arcane and bewildering.It is fed by search committees who don't know what they're searching for and consultants who need to justify their fees by creating monumental RFPs filled with grotesque irrelevancies.As someone who has participated in a thousand agency searches, here's how I would do it.Dear XYZ Agency,We are looking

The Complicators Have Won

There are two kinds of people -- simplifiers and complicators.Simplifiers have the ability to distinguish between the essential and the irrelevant. Complicators cannot.In advertising, simplifiers are indispensible. Complicators are disastrous.The advertising business is now in the hands of complicators.From The New York Times, December 2, 2008:...a new breed of companies is...creating hundreds of

Bad Days For Brand Babblers

Times of economic hardship are especially tough on ad people who make their living bullshitting about "brand relevance," "brand integrity," " brand saliency," and other forms of brand baloney.In these times, clients expect their advertising to actually sell something. When it doesn't, they get cranky.Some years ago the ad industry decided that it no longer had to bother itself with the mundane

Social Media Fantasies

From TechDigest, July 2007"Facebook applications are the best thing since...sliced bread...they're mushrooming by the day, as companies and individual developers alike catch on to the potential of having their content splashed over (potentially) millions of Facebook profiles."Yeah, right.Along with so many other social media fantasies, marketers have found Facebook apps to be a pretty good way of

A Civilization Of The Mind

From A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. John Perry Barlow. Davos, Switzerland. February 8, 1996. "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." Yeah, right.Here were the top ten search items on Yahoo for 2008:1. Britney Spears2. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)3. Barack Obama4. Miley