Advertising Industry Archive

A Swedish condom company is giving away 100,000 “uniquely numbered” condoms and asking recipients to write on the company’s blog the story of where the condom ended up (geographically, not anatomically) and who the user met. The effort, for the LAFA condom company by ad agency Ester, comes with a cute set of ads depicting various meet-cutes — BNET’s favorite is the...

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Tropicana axed most of the new design elements from its Trop50 package, the last surving part of Arnell Group’s disastrous makeover of the Tropicana brand. Peter Arnell’s shop was the center of a PR disaster when he recast Tropicana’s cartons with a clean, modern look reliant on white space. Tropicana quickly reverted to its old look. But the brand kept Arnell’s look for...

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Get prepared to see your spouse and friends’ faces popping up in those annoying little ads on Facebook. Agency Social Media is scraping Facebook for photos from your albums and then inserting them in ads served on your page. That’s how Cheryl Smith of culturesmith consulting found her face in a singles ad directed at her husband (pictured). Via Adland: Not too long ago, my husband...

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Chris Jaques, CEO of M&C Saatchi Asia, wrote a heartfelt blog post for Media magazine in the UK that asked agency staff to leak to him how many people had been laid off from agencies. He should start by posing that question to Publicis, the only major agency holding company that has so far not developed the cojones to confess how many people in total have been laid off from its agencies....

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A bizarre lawsuit alleging that DraftFCB CEO Laurence Boschetto took part in the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal has again reared its head even though the suit has long been dismissed with prejudice. MyTwoCensus.com, a watchdog blog devoted to news about the U.S. Census, repeated the allegations in the suit yesterday. The blog also suggests that the Census should not have hired the agency for...

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Andy Azula, creative director at The Martin Agency, learned the hard way how not to complain about airline delays after he posted a diatribe against Delta and then — after it embarrassed himself, his agency and key client UPS — took it down. Now his blog has filled up with angry reader comments denouncing him as a self-obsessed whiner who thinks that his “Wall Street Journal...

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JWT’s $100 million traditional media campaign for Microsoft search engine Bing is failing, Adweek reports. BNET predicted in April that the campaign would be a waste of money. It appears that users are happy with Google, despite the Bing ads’ claim that the current search experience delivers a cacaphony of irrelevant results. 25 percent of users tried Bing, but most did not stick...

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Federal law requires all bloggers to write about Twitter at least once a month, so here is my compliance-mandated offering for July: Twitter is testing a new revenue system that could involve selling targeted advertising. TechCrunch has obtained a set of leaked documents from Twitter regarding its revenue forecasts. The company thinks it will generate a “$140 million revenue run...

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Valassis won a directed verdict motion in a Michigan state court case which alleges that News America Marketing employed illegal monopoly practices to dominate in-store supermarket advertising and the newspaper coupon business. After a jury heard several witnesses brought by Valassis, News America asked the judge to find that Valassis had not made its case — that as a matter of law there...

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Burger King appears to be frittering away its hard-fought sales gains and Crispin Porter + Bogusky could end up being used as the fall-guy. Ad Age reports this week that BK’s corporate HQ is trying to rig a vote that will force franchisees to accept a $1 for a double burger promotion — the restaurateurs don’t want it because they can’t make money on it. HQ favors the...

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