Swedish

Against his better judgment, Conan O’Brien agrees to do a Bud Light commercial that will only air in Sweden. (:30; DDB Worldwide, Chicago)

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Creative, Superbowl

USA today is running an article arguing that Super Bowl ads bought this year come at the expense of salaried employees. At $3,000,000 per 30 second spot its not an unconvincing argument. This topic is a particularly hot one coming down from a week when 70,000 layoffs were announced.

Read the article at USA Today.

Economic Meltdown

Sage advice from Tribble Ad Agency: “We just wanted to point out that our firm has received a massive increase of advertising agency resumes being sent in for the past week. On average we received 1-2 a day last year… now we are receiving 10 to 40 per day.. roughly 1000 resumes per month … they are literally pouring in. HR is being overwhelmed with the volume of resumes. We’re growing, but not like that… nor will we ever want to grow like that. Irresponsible growth is what forced many of these massive layoffs in the first place.

Just a word of advice, if you are looking for a job, blindly e-mailing your books and resume in isn’t the way to get a job. The way to get a job in this recession isn’t to just peddle your books, the better way to get a job is to setup a search engine friendly blog, post your thoughts on advertising in todays economy, make it robust, complete with your books an examples online.

It’s not the old boys network of BDA’s anymore, and judging on the volume of resumes being sent it, it’s not going to be a BDA world anymore.

Send the agency you are applying for the link to your blog / website via Linkedin , Twitter, Facebook, get your ‘i need a job’ site on the main page of Digg screaming why someone needs to hire you…anything other than blindly sending in an e-mail.

The reason you want to do it this way is simple, it proves you know how to build a decent blog or website, it proves you know how to use social media tools, it proves you understand at least some aspects of how business is being run and advertised today.

Rank for the keywords you feel that agency wants.

The chances are the owner or person in power of hiring will be of course trolling their own search terms in Google (not their trademarked name, but the name you think they are looking for. Trying to rank for their trademarked name will results in lawsuits not employment), seeing your name up there in the results will force them to take a peek.

Trust us on this, sending an e-mail with some Pepsi ad that you created that cost Pepsi millions in print media spends to distribute isn’t cutting it, not by a long shot. (we singled out this one because this poor sap sent in a 30 meg e-mail filled with TIFF images) and a Microsoft Word document as his resume to boot.

You have to keep in mind that the word ‘advertising’ has changed, years ago we had a long conversation regarding the definition of advertising, it came down to the many of the holding companies didn’t view Advertising the same way we did. ‘SEO isn’t Advertising’ ‘Social Media isn’t Advertising’ Big bills and massive media spends were the only things that were considered ‘ads’ hence their lack of investment in our field of advertising, and hence why we are flooded with resumes from Ogilvy, BBDO, Arnold and overall almost every agency of size within a holding company. Our problem is that these ad agencies largely never trained their employees on Advertising… or at least how we define it. … our view is polar opposite on Advertising, what’s the point of throwing up marketing material on print media if no one reads it, or if they do read it.. they can’t find it the generic products name in the search engine to buy it or they are not reading good reviews on individual blogs about the products.

What do we know… we are only the ones collecting BDA resumes.

Good luck and good hunting… worth noting during the interview process it’s fair to ask the HR person if the Advertising Agency is profitable. Last thing you want is after all this hard work to be handed a pink slip again.

”

Economic Meltdown

This new spot from Lexus demonstrates the dampening powers of their ES and features the card stacking of Bryan Berg.

Creative

Erin Ivey of Austin, TX for Reid’s Cleaners. When this stuff works it’s magic.

Creative

via Jon Buch of Gigya

Creative

ADOTAS — Yahoo will be releasing its Q4 results tomorrow, with analysts expecting a revenue and profit drop.
While Yahoo’s search will still be strong, display advertising,  its main business,  is expected to show the biggest dip. Despite massive layoffs, ‘giddy like school girls’ investors will want more cost cutting and a clear plan to win back market share from Google and others. It’s unlikely that they will get that tomorrow.
Speculation is rampant about new talks with Microsoft or a possible deal with AOL. Steve Ballmer has said that he would like to do a search deal with Yahoo, though CEO [...]”

(Via Adotas.)

Economic Meltdown

That’s right, Ad Age reports that all those direct-response TV ads that started a mere three months ago are highly effective. Like 4,000,000 units sold effective.

Industry News

Remember that obnoxious Chihuahua campaign Chiat did for Taco Bell a few years ago? Apparently someone lifted the idea from Joseph Shields and Thomas Rinks, of Michigan. The two have successfully filed a lawsuit against Taco Bell for breach of contract.

Taco Bell in turn sued TBWA\Chiat\Day, unsuccessfully. So now Taco Bell is stuck with the $42 million fine. Aye carumba!

Creative, Industry News

That’s right you can now text your sandwich order to Subway.

Trends