Advertising Industry Archive

Is Peter Arnell deliberately trying to antagonize PepsiCo? He allowed Newsweek to follow him around for a few days and in the resulting article he calls the new Pepsi logo he designed “bullshit” and says of the Tropicana redesign fiasco, “it’s not my brand. It’s not my company. So what the hell? I got paid a lot of money, and I have 30 other projects. You move...

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Vince Shlomi’s week just got worse. The pitchman for ShamWow and Slap Chop (”you’re going to love my nuts“) was embarrassed after it emerged that he’s been arrested for allegedly beating up a hooker in Miami (charges were dropped). Now Gawker has gotten hold of a suit he filed against his former business partners over the profits from a device called the Chopper,...

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With News America Marketing’s settlement/acquisition of Floorgraphics Inc. behind it, NAM can now turn its attention to all the other lawsuits against it. Specifically, NAM is being sued by Valassis, Theme Promotions, and Insignia Systems. Two of those cases are scheduled to come to trial later this year, possibly as soon as May or June. (Correction: Theme won its case and the resulting...

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The Jonas Brothers‘ fan web site wrongly collected the names and cell phone numbers of kids under the age of 13 without their parents’ consent, according to an industry watchdog. The band’s site thus potentially violated a federal law which prevents web sites from collecting info about kids. The site, JonasBrothersFanClub.com, tipped off kids to enter a fake age so that they...

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The New York Post and MediaPost both reported a “rumor” that Brandweek and Mediaweek could be closed and wrapped into Adweek (see here and here). Such a move would be a significant climbdown for Nielsen Business Media. Nielsen spokesman Gary Holmes declined to deny the rumor. He said: We’re looking at many models that could be the next step … we haven’t made any...

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Vince Shlomi, better known as the appealing pitchman for Permission Interactive’s ShamWow, was arrested for fighting with an alleged prostitue in February but the company has yet to drop him from its ads. He continues to enthusiastically tout the sucking power of yellow rags on the ShamWow web site, for instance. UPDATE: It gets worse — Shlomi is also engaged in a bizarre fight...

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What are we to make of the porny new Quiznos commercial, which features a sexy, male-voiced oven persuading a male Quiznos worker holding a torpedo sandwich to “put it in me”? (Video below.) It’s either a tastless exercize in homophobic humor or it’s camp genius. Or both. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The ad begins with the oven, using a bedroom voice,...

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JP Morgan’s Imran Khan predicted a recovery for web advertising in the second half of 2009 at the Pontiflex CPL Summit in New York on Thursday evening. About 50-100 people in the web advertising business attended, including Kate Johnson, personal care consumer relationship marketing manager at Kimberly-Clark; Ross Geisel, assistant director of interactive marketing at UNICEF; Brian...

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Google is laying off 200 sales and marketing jobs — the largest layoff in Google’s short existence, according to Ad Age. The news is not economically significant, but symbolically so. It suggests that even the most successful web advertising operation of all time is vulnerable to the ebb and flow of boom and recession. The company isn’t doing too badly. Revenue was up from...

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Brian Costello, general manager of Valassis’ RedPlum network, gave a little more detail on on whether Valassis will pull more coupons from newspapers this year in favor of shared mail and online downloads. “It’s not the majority” of newspapers, he told the Pontiflex CPL Summit in New York on Thursday. “The majority are still getting free-standing inserts in...

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