After more than a year of same-store sales decline Gap has decided to ditch Laird & Partners, their agency of record since 2002, and pass the baton to Crispin Porter & Bogusky. CP+B already handles Old Navy’s advertising. The agency will be charged with changing the direction of The Gap’s advertising, an especially difficult challenge for a brand with such iconic advertising campaigns.
To help launch their new version of Windows, Microsoft has invited fanboys of the operating system to host Tupperware-style house parties. The atrocious YouTube video above, with its token black guy and acting so bad it makes you wonder, is it a joke?, is being mocked far and wide by techies and non-techies alike.
What many of the detractors have failed to realize is that Microsoft is giving away free stuff to people who agree to host Windows 7 launch parties and all the slots are full. From here it look like Microsoft achieved exactly what they set out to do.
Wired Mag editor Chris Anderson was at the Mixx Conference during Advertising Week where encouraged publishers to embrace the freemium model (and buy his book on the topic).
Advertising Age has a 3 minute video summary of his talk.
Warner Music Group, one of the few remaining major labels, has apparently struck a deal with YouTube that will bring back music videos from popular artists like Green Day and U2 that were removed in December.
In an article on TechCrunch Shelby Bonnie, the CEO of Whiskey Media and co-founder of CNET, lays out an argument that publishers and buyers reliance on CPMs is stifling creativity. The language gets pretty inflammatory at times but isn’t entirely unconvincing.
“OK, Advertising Week just ended… does anyone else feel like the online advertising industry is the orchestra, playing on while the Titanic is sinking?
We have a problem, folks. And I, for one, think we should start to fix it by killing off the CPM, once and for all.”
Twitter recently had another round of funding that turned the revenue-free lunch-pic sharing service into a billion dollar company.
According to TechCrunch the $50 million round was lead by Insight Venture Partners, an early investor in Photobucket.
Google has unveiled its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a long anticipated effort to bring its display advertising offer up to speed with its industry-leading search advertising platform. The platform is meant to compete against Right Media, which Yahoo acquired in 2005.
DoubleClick Ad Exchange allows ad networks and media buyers to bid in real-time on advertising inventory, a feature Yahoo’s Right Media lacks. Its unclear now how exactly the exchange affect ad networks which are at once its competition and constituent.
The Wall Street Journal’s new mobile app pricing plan asks users to pay a hefty $2 per week fee for the privilege of reading the “paper” on their iPhone or Blackberry. Subscribers to either the online or print editions of the paper pay $1 per week and subscribers to both get the app for free.
Conventional wisdom, if there can be said to be any, in the still-new mobile news market is that you slash your readership by a factor of 10 or more when you charge for mobile content. There are simply too many free options and readers are accustomed to getting their news online for free.
It seems that Murdoch’s goal with this strategy is not to make money from the app but create added value for subscribing to the print and online editions. It’s an interesting approach and consistent with his assertion that news has a real, and very high value.
MDC Partners, the same holding company that owns Crispin Porter & Bogusky, has invested in social media agency Attention. On the company’s blog, founder Curtis Hougland said they chose to partner with MDC over other potential investors because the company “gets it.”
As vague and cliche as that sounds, there’s some truth in the statement. In Hougland’s words,
“we are at an inflection point in social media, the shift from early adopter to early majority, a horizontal skill set requiring more and more vertical market expertise”
True that, Curt. More and more entrepreneurs will be starting these types companies and investors will be hungry to snap them up. It won’t be that long until kids who grew up with social media their entire lives are helming social media marketing agencies.
Agency Layoffs