Friday Follow-Up

Me and The PrezLast month I gave my client, the President, some brilliant advice. Like many clients, he seems to be doing a great job of ignoring it. Worst of all, the invoice remains unpaid.

The Last Honest Man In WashingtonJoe Biden, caught on tape yesterday: "It's easy being vice president — you don't have to do anything."

Which reminds me of a great quote from former veep Nelson Rockefeller

Conversations About Brands. Really? Where?

On Tuesday, in 3 Out Of 4 Don't Trust Their Friends we commented on a study out of Edelman that found that 75% of the people they polled don't have a high level of confidence in recommendations about businesses or products made by their friends or peers.

For people who don't read The Ad Contrarian, this finding may have come as a surprise. To Ad Contras, nothing new.

This finding calls into

Social Media Marketing Ecosystem Explained

Here at The Ad Contrarian world headquarters, there's nothing we like better than a good ecosystem.

So when we came across* this awesome ecosystem for social media marketing, well, how do you resist that?

Now, we know some of you Luddites just aren't up-to-date on these things. So, as a service to our readers, we are publishing the attached chart of the social media marketing ecosystem which we

3 Out Of 4 Don't Trust Their Friends

Oh, boy. The social media marketing crowd are going to have a hysterectomy over this one.

According to a new study called "Trust Barometer"* done by Edelman, 3 out of 4 people do not trust their friends and peers as credible sources of information about products or companies.

Not only that, in the past two years, the number of people who trust recommendations from friends and peers has dropped

The Best Idea Is No Idea

Back in the middle ages, when I was a creative director, there was a period in which I used to hear stuff like this...
"We're going to shoot this over-cranked..."
"We're going to use stop motion photography..."
"We're going to take stills and hand-tint each frame..."As I broke the storyboards over the creative teams' heads, I would explain to the them that production was not an idea.

Then there

If Someone Finds My Brain, Please Return It

If you no longer have use for your brain, and you would like to use your cranial cavity for, say, storing Pop Tarts, I would suggest you read "Why Brands Are Becoming Media."

I tried to read the whole thing but my little gray cells started to melt and ooze out my ears.

It is a horrifying example of the kind of social media double-talk that makes me want to go into the street and kill people.

Free Is The New Stupid

In October 2009, Newsday, a popular newspaper in the NYC area, began to charge $5 a month to subscribe to its online content. Newsday has about 400,000 daily readers and about 450,000 weekend readers. After three months, Newsday's online content had 35 paid subscribers.One of the dumbest ideas to have come out of the internet is the idea that everything on the web should be free.

This idea has