Advertising Industry Archive

Aegis CEO Robert Lerwill has left the company. The company’s stock soared on the news. Now analysts and investors expect rival network Havas to make a sixth bid for the company. Already, analysts say they expect Aegis to be subsumed. Aegis was suffering from the recent loss of the $750 million Renault cars account to Omnicom. With the auto industry in turmoil, the chances of the company...

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Happy Thanksgiving! BNET Advertising will be retiring for the long weekend, so it’s time to bring you the 10 weirdest ad stories of November. Enjoy. Cameraman in Agency Sex Tape Scandal Fired; Performers Not Two agency execs have sex in their office and are secretly videotaped doing it by a voyeur with a cellphone. The video goes viral on the web, big time. What is the agency’s...

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JWT Dubai has produced a marvelous print campaign drawing people’s attention to the problem of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan spraying acid on the faces of girls trying to attend school. The Taliban banned females from being educated before it was toppled by American forces following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The campaign features a double-spread in women’s magazines and the...

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As cable and satellite TV systems carve up the country for TV, internet and phone service, sometimes the battle comes down to the details. That’s what the National Advertising Division found when it ruled in a dispute between Cablevision and Verizon Tuesday, forcing Verizon to stop advertising some claims for its FiOS service. Verizon had been claiming that with FiOS, “Channels came...

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Several ad agency network chiefs gave their outlooks to analysts recently, and their views are as interesting for the contrasts as they are for the similarities. Here’s a selection: WPP Group chief Martin Sorrell: There is no doubt that the disintegration in the financial markets … has had and will continue to have, a significant negative effect on consumer and corporate confidence...

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WPP chief Martin Sorrell has been given the freedom of the City of London by the lord mayor and other bigwigs. The purely ceremonial honor comes with a number of bizarre privileges dating back to medieval times. Among them is the right to herd sheep over London Bridge. Other rights Sorrell now has include: To go about the City with a drawn sword. To be married in St. Paul’s Cathedral. To...

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You can spend years in the ad business without hearing the name Valassis Comunications mentioned, even though the company controls roughly half the direct mail in the U.S. and pulls in revenue of $500 million per quarter. Two years ago, Valassis came up with a bright idea: sue its main rival, News America Marketing Group, which controls the other half of the direct mail business, for trying to...

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See UPDATE, below: The Ad Store offered clients a free week in an Italian villa in return for new business. “Don’t think of it as a bribe,” the agency said on its web site, preemptively denying the very thing that it would appear to be doing. The offer is a controversial one because most client companies have policies preventing their marketing chiefs from accepting anything...

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More evidence is emerging that the online advertising economy is separating from the traditional ad economy. Numbers out for Q3 adspend in both the U.S. and the U.K. show total ad expenditure declining, but spend on the web still increasing (albeit modestly). The IAB reported: Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008, representing an 11 percent...

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Todd Bishop has crunched the numbers and found that Apple’s advertising success over the last year has paid off. It is Microsoft – square, stuffy, clunky Microsoft – that actually has the least efficient advertising of the pair. Apple spends much less in advertising (and therefore starts with an advantage in terms of effectiveness), and its TV campaign, which shows PC users as...

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