Howard Stern called CBS Corp. president Les Moonves “vindictive, vicious and jealous,” when the Sirius Satellite Radio shock jock launched his “I Hate Les Moonves Tour” Tuesday night, writes the New York Post.
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Newsweek has been the recent battleground for a series of “he said, she said” commentary between Martha Stewart and Donald Trump that has the reality TV show hosts defending their respective versions of The Apprentice, Media Life writes.
JibJab founders Evan and Gregg Spiridellis are creating a new online business they describe as a cross between Comedy Central and MySpace - a place for people to share email jokes and meet people with similar interests - reports CNET (via MarketingVox). The brothers expect JokeBox, the ad-supported site, to help diversify revenue beyond that generated by their periodic animated videos. Though entering a market already becoming cluttered with sites that feature user-generated content, the site has an advantage, according to Gregg Spiridellis.
Dave Barry, whose column ran in the Miami Herald for more than 20 years, told reporter C.W. Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle that newspapers are dead. “The era of the writer in the newspaper was in the ’70s and ’80s,” Barry said, “when newspapers were making money no matter what. They’d send somebody off to Fiji for a story. If you knew you had somebody good, you’d just send them. You knew they’d come up with something.”
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If GoDaddy.com manages to get a Super Bowl ad cleared for broadcast by ABC, it may have another hurdle to jump: the NFL plans to review any commercial from the domain name registry company, as well, Adweek reports. At least, that’s what GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons wrote in his blog yesterday.
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JibJab Media has hired MSN to distribute, sell video ad units for, and work with JibJab and its advertisers to develop product-placement opportunities regarding new short films that will be shown on MSN Video and JibJab.com, ClickZ reports (via MarketingVox). MSN will be selling ads that, for the first time, appear outside its own network - for at least the next five JibJab films. It has also secured the rights to show previous JibJab films, which initially spread virally via email and word of mouth, granting JibJab a broad audience.
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As part of a larger survey about media sales people, Media Life asked readers to tell the most outrageous antics and blunders of reps they’d met through the years. Here are a few highlights:
One reader recalled a group presentation where the sales rep was trying to make an emphatic point and took off his shoe to bang on the desk. “Unfortunately, he had stepped in some dog excrement before entering. Let’s just say the shit was really flying that day.”
One sales rep quite generously congratulated a media planner on the upcoming birth of her child during a sales call. “I was not pregnant,” recalls the planner, “just wearing a full skirt.”
Another rep, for reasons entirely unclear to this day, chose to do his entire presentation with his back to the group. The rep held the visuals over his left shoulder.
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On Tuesday, Writer’s Guild of America and Upright Citizens’ Brigade members staged a mock street theater scene at the Madison & Vine session of Advertising Week to protest the use of product placements in TV shows, Media Life reports. They also protested their lack of representation at the talks, which are focusing on branded entertainment and product integration on TV.
One faux Martha Stewart and four faux Donald Trumps, stars of NBC’s “The Apprentice,” hawked their bodies as billboards.
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The procession to kick off Advertising Week that was meant to wow tourists in Times Square seemed slightly askew when a number of ad characters - from the Geico Gekko to the Doublemint Twins - along with O. Burtch Drake, president-CEO of Advertising Week and president-CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, grabbed spots in convertibles and took off through Times Square, AdAge reports. Street teams, hired to hand out goodies to parade-watchers, were left behind.
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The second annual Advertising Week commences today, with about 300 events sponsored by more than 30 trade associations, AdAge writes. Organizers expect attendance to reach 40,000. The week’s festivities launch with a procession of icons - including Mr. Peanut, Charlie the Tuna, and Juan Valdez - from Times Square to the Madison Ave home of DDB. On Tuesday, Alex Bogusky, Lee Clow, and David Lubars appear on the set of “Wicked” during “Creatives on Broadway,” and on Thursday, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart will do a panel with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and Men’s Health’s David Zinczenko.
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After having been told that it is required to submit advertisements to the Advertising Standards Authority before publishing, and after having one ad rejected by the authority, spirits company Halewood International has turned the tables on the regulator by running a new “outdoor” campaign in the very backyard of Halewood’s CEO, John Halewood, AdAge reports.
The story began when the ASA informed Halewood that a certain ad, created by CheethamBell JWT agency and showing three attractive young women “fishing” for an attractive young man, was “in danger of implying that the drink may bring sexual/social success, because the man in question looks quite attractive and desirable to the girls. If the man was clearly unattractive, we think that this implication would be removed.”
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Radio World reports that the Florida anti-pirate law that Governor Jeb Bush signed a year ago has had some positive effects, but not much of an overall change in what the Florida Association of Broadcasters (FAB) says is the state most afflicted with pirate radio stations. One station, WEXL, actually roves about sometimes with special triangulation equipment to help point out pirates to authorities, a practice that in Broward County “can be dangerous,” according to WEXL’s president. The FCC said that it shut down a dozen pirate stations in Florida so far in 2005. The new law allows for felony criminal charges and much stiffer fines.
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Google is the target yet again of a suit claiming it isn’t doing enough about click fraud - the practice of producing fake clicks in order to boost the amount that advertisers must pay for their search campaigns. This time around, the suit is being brought by a maker of anti click fraud tools, which will very likely stand to gain from publicity garnered from the court action. Click Defense, the plaintiff, is claiming at least $5 million in damages and is seeking class action status for its suit.
Another case surfaced in April in Arkansas. That suit was brought by a retailer that used search engines to help market its e-commerce efforts. The Arkansas lawyers in that case, who happen to enjoy access to jurisdictions that have made large jury awards against national firms, have set up as site, LostClicks.com to help gin up additional plaintiffs.
The difficulty of physics being the very reason why people who wind up becoming PR and marketing people often decide to go that liberal arts route, it may come as little surprise that Snapple’s giant popsicle stunt failed today. It seems that the Snapple marketing folks’ attempt at erecting a Guinness Book record-breaking popsicle was called off when they remembered that old rule about phase changes: ice melts in NYC in June. But perhaps contributing more to the fiasco than the English majors was the group from the other hard science escape route: the lawyers. When one got a load of the Popzilla that was about to be erected, it set off the tort alarm bells, shutting down the event for good.
Manhattan’s Union Square, now even sticker than usual, still smells of kiwi and strawberry after the block was flooded with oozing Snapple as the beast melted ignominiously in the sun. The AP reported that onlookers had to scurry for higher ground, although that might be laying it on a bit thick.
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Adrants reports that a nation-wide and very expensive serial outdoor teaser campaign may have been unraveled by the inadvertent inclusion of the punch line in interactive elements of the campaign. The outdoor billboard campaign features a single word revealed each day, with people theoretically curious about what 17-element sentence they will spell out by January 31. An online community, findthemessage.com, links people together to share guesses.
