Advertising Industry Archive

Lamar Advertising has found a nemesis in South Dakota: State Rep. Mark Kirkeby, R-Rapid City, who wants to raise the state fee for operating a billboard. It costs just $32 a year to operate a billboard in the state, a price which hasn’t gone up since the 1980s. The state Department of Transportation spends $75,000 to inspect billboards but only raises $25,000 from the fees, according to...

More...

UPDATE: It’s “Tide Thursday” and it turns out Ad Age’s story was mostly wrong. No significant price cuts were announced by P&G — in fact, the company may stage some price increases! It seems that P&G learned the lessons of Marlboro Friday better than Age did. Procter & Gamble is set to announce price cuts to its Tide brand on Thursday, according to Ad...

More...

WPP chief Martin Sorrell is asking shareholders to give him a new pay package that could be worth up to $95 million, according to the Times of London. The massive compensation deal has already drawn the anger of the Association of British Insurers, which issued a warning to investors on the matter. Sorrell’s previous multi-year package was worth $69 million (about 44 million). Part of...

More...

Peter Arnell’s Peapod electric car “doesn’t need to comply with U.S. crash test and safety regulations” according to Fast Company. Arnell says that “Message and brand is most important now.” More important than safety, Peter, really? The more we find out about Arnell’s glorified golf cart, the worse it gets. BNET readers learned in January that the...

More...

George Parker at Adscam reminds me that Ogilvy & Mather is about to move from its famed Worldwide Plaza building on Eighth Avenue and 50th Street to 636 11th Avenue at 47th Street. For those of you who don’t live in New York, this does not sound like a big deal. But for the Ogilvy folk it will be like moving to Siberia. Currently, Worldwide Plaza is surrounded by restaurants and bars...

More...

From a single press release shall mighty trend pieces grow! That’s the motto at Ad Age, which took an amusing stat about the growth in sales of personal lubricants and concluded that Americans must be shagging the recession away. Here are their numbers: First-quarter sales of personal lubricants soared 32% to $41.2 million, according to Information Resources Inc., led almost entirely by...

More...

A series of ads created by Ogilvy & Mather for the History Channel that showed America in a bad light were never meant to be shown and were made only as part of a creative exercize, according to Silicon Alley Insider. The ads (pictured) have since been pulled from Ads of the World. The ads said things like: Iraqis killed under Saddam Regime: 300,000 Iraqis killed under U.S. regime:...

More...

A design competition staged by Paper magazine reveals that the inner psyches of America’s ad agency CEOs are anxious, guilty places obsessed with race. George Lois, Alex Bogusky, Dan Wieden, Kevin Roberts and Andy Spade were among the dozen or so creative types who took up Paper’s challenge: How would you rebrand America? (Click on images to enlarge.) The most disturbing response...

More...

Bermuda politicians are continuing to hammer the questionable selection of Globalhue as the island’s ad agency for tourism — and the premier of the tiny nation has used his Facebook page (!) to defend the choice. Globalhue won the two-year, $28 million business without a review. The contract was awarded without competitive bidding even though Bermuda’s auditor general found...

More...

Lamar Advertising has bowed to pressure and taken down a political billboard that criticized the U.S.’s funding of Israel. The billboard had said “Tell Congress: Stop Killing Children.  No More Military Aid to Israel.” It was paid for by the Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel, a Cindy Sheehan-backed organization that wants to stop the next 10 years of American funding of...

More...