The Foosball Red Team Wins 56% of the Time...?

The cool thing about "This is Dare. Are you?" is that it's rare to find an agency recruitment video that doesn't feel like flagrant audiovisual masturbation. And rarer still for an agency recruitment video to make Vimeo's Staff Picks list. Or any list outside the ad blogosphere (if it even makes those), actually.

That's not even all the reasons why it's cool. If you're a potential client, you'll want your depth of interesting and curious information unearthed and treated this way: wittily presented and connected to the present. And if you're a creative, you might just want to leap into Dare's lap. (Of which 57% wear checked shirts and 54% occasionally wear Converse shoes, making the likelihood of encountering one thus-clad Dare-ployee higher than finding a penguin in South Africa.)

Hey, a Mobile-Optimised Agency Site!

I'll warn you in advance by admitting I'm not a developer (a fact that makes me very sad). So if at any point in this article you find I'm talking out of my ass, please correct me, and harshly.

Last month Nick Jones of Narrow Design (@narrowd) and McKinney (@mckinney) published screenshots of how the sites of major ad agencies - you know, the ones that claim to "get" digital - render on an iPhone. Most of them don't at all, or do with limited information, because most of them are heavily reliant on Flash. The list spread like anthrax in the agency social media sphere.

I like Flash and I get that Steve Jobs has a beef with Adobe or whatever. But in an environment where technology evolves faster than you can spin and say "hey presto," your digital front lines should be as lean and agnostic as possible: you don't know where that next client is coming from, or who's going to suddenly want to hit up your site in the middle of a conference from their handy-dandy first-gen iPad.

Humor me ››

AdVerve Episode 45: Digitally Speaking

Play the show now.

Kelly Eidson of Ad Age Gen Next fame, of I Need A New Job So I’m Going on a Job Trek fame, now of senior digital planner at Modea fame, joins us for a discussion on the still-there digital divide.

Sighs matter, because we again attack the issue of traditional vs. digital agencies and who gets a shot at the lion’s share of the work. Plus, we cover the skinny on agency life in Virginia vs. New York City, what defines "really good work" and what happens when a client finally decides to take that wild plunge with you.

We *may* have even taken a shot or two at account people. BECAUSE WE LOVE THEM. So sit back and download some digital love. OR download first and then sit back.

Linkage:
– Stayfree Ultra Thin fun!
– Carmichael Lynch/Harley-Davidson fun!

(Image.)

The Industry Reacts to Humongo

Quite possibly the cutest agency promo in all the land for the next half-hour. I love how Darryl Ohrt has this oh-please-not-me attitude and then, faced with having to rename his agency, he's like, "Oh! Humongo!"

The vid features "reactions to Humongo" by Alex Bogusky, Scott Monty and Ashton Kutcher. Kinda. (You can almost smell his hat hair.)

Can't wait to see the humongo work that'll come out and efface all this self-effacingness. (Can I say either of those words?) Also, if you feel like it, listen to Darryl talk about things he likes in AdVerve Episode 14: Music Madness.

Life Moves Fast; Modernista, Not Fast Enough

Word on the street has it that, following the rise and fall of all those surreal ads that gave us Oasis Project nightmares, and consequently bungling the debut of a really awesome product, Palm has given agency Modernista the shaft.

Sucks for Modernista, given that Cadillac recently also cut it loose. A boutique shop can't afford the loss of too many big-label clients in succession. It also sucks for us, because the ad above, which launched last month, tells us Modernista finally found its Palm Pre stride.

Too little too late. It's not exceptional, but it should've been the launch work: anything, really, that showed how using multiple apps at once, on a nice clean interface, can bring method to a multi-tasker's life.

Better luck next product. And if you're an agency on the market for a flub to fix, here's your chance: Palm's looking.

Thanks to Atif, the haut-tech emperor of Ithaca, for passing this over to me.

Kris Kringle's Team iPhone, Apparently

Mrs. Claus knows exactly how to whip someone into codependence: get honey the device that does all the organizational management for you. For Christmas this year, interactive shop Modea gives us Santa's Lost iPhone.

Futz with apps and buttons, just the way you would a normal iPhone. The Calendar items are cute. Watch out, though; if you hang around too long, Mrs. Claus starts blowing it up in search of her hubby.

A Pulpy Happy Holidays from Crush/Toronto.

Crush's '09 holiday comic, A Very Jolly Holiday, is now available to read (beware: extended scrolling ahead) and to download (for all you creative packrats out thar).

The 8-page oeuvre sports something for everybody: social media douchebaggery, self-effacing Facebook groupage, a venison charcuterie (don't ask) and even some cutback crisis action. GET YOU SOME. Or look at more action-packed clips below.

For those that don't know who Crush is or what it's done, aw, aren't you special. This is the agency that does the cool social media/audiovisual promotional shit for Douglas Coupland's trippy tech-meet-man novels. See the post-post-modern videos they did for Coupland's Generation A, as well as the still-gripping, if less existential, stuff for The Gum Thief.

Humor me ››

It's the AdForum Magical Mystery Tour!

Just FYI: I'm in NYC this week for the AdForum Worldwide Summit. It's the biggest conference for search consultants.

Mostly we're doing tours of agencies and listening to them describe their businesses. Yesterday we heard some PR companies, and sometime this week there'll be a sesh on procurement.

If this lesser-known side of the business of advertising is interesting to you, check out the programme. We're here all week. My posts summarizing the days can be found at the AdForum Summit blog -- and, of course, catch my frenetic tweetage by following AdForum on Twitter.

Gotta run. Lunchtime draws near, my fingers ache and I have to wee like a racehorse.

'So Billy Got Fired ... So Billy Didn't Have a Job ... So Billy's Wife Had Him Killed.'

I love BooneOakley's new website-cum-YouTube video.

It's cool that there's an agency out there that's willing to try new things, and be seriously fucking funny, without worrying about looking chill or getting some faint-hearted person's panties all in a twist.

The RFP that Ate My Life, and Yours, and Twitter's.

Dolla make you holla! Who's In -- and Who's Out -- in the First-Ever TwitteRFP.

Also, this just in: based on the small avalanche of responses, Current.tv has decided to extend the number of RFPs to 17 entrants, most of which will have come from #twitteRFP, instead of the original 5.

Current's Jordan Kretchmer: Originally, the RFP was going to be distributed to 10 total. Was hoping for 5 to come from #TwitteRFP.

Not one to miss an opportunity, Adam Wohl's already come up with a new hashtag for the impending clusterf...

A Charlie Brown Agency Christmas

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Capping the Lens on Shoot! the Day

Here's a picture AdWeek took of my panel making awesome faces:

Gotta love the awkward.

I just posted a fairly complete synopsis of my Shoot! the Day thoughts on Adrants. A few things I didn't say for lack of space:

• PhotoShelter's got passion behind it, including friendly employees and PR people you genuinely want to know. Not to mention good online outreach (they kept hitting Adrants up even when we talked shit, which we like to do), and social media savvy. (I overheard agency peeps and photographers confess to reading PhotoShelter's blog; plus, all panels will be podcasted. Not even ad:tech does that. The irony.)
• I don't think anybody in the audience was Twittering. Okay, totally different world.
  
• The vibe was way casual. Couldn't work out whether it was a freelance thing or a PhotoShelter thing; they probably feed into one another.
• Not much mention of Flickr or Creative Commons, which I thought was odd given the licensing concerns. It's possible nobody really knows about compfight, which enables users to search Flickr specifically for Creative Commons-protected work. It's also possible that most Flickr stuff is hit-or-miss, and most Flickr users simply aren't professionals.

Onto the next project: ad:tech Chicago in less than two weeks!

Agency Diversity? Not So Much.

Here's Ad Age's take on the agency diversity hearing that occurred Monday night. It was a full house -- 27 people! -- but of the 16 major NY ad agencies invited, only two sent reps: Arnold and Saatchi.

For what it's worth, Make the Logo Bigger went too. Apparently things got really heated and a lot of old topics were flayed by newly-angry agency attendees: minorities' inability to afford ad school, lack of ad career awareness in ordinary high schools, and the classic "Where are all the black people?" question.

Collective conclusions:

• Hit agencies in the wallet. Get angry about stereotypes in ads!
• The diversity problem cannot be addressed until agencies admit they have a problem.
• This is everybody's challenge to solve: creative, account management, strategic planning, even clients' (via Kenji Summers).

I suggested Bill cover the event in the style of a pulp comic, but he wasn't amused. I think one of his eyelids twitched though.

As a minority I feel pretty ambivalent about the diversity topic. I have never worked at an agency, so I don't have any real insight on how overt the racial ceilings are. I do know that there are a lot of minorities that are happy to take advantage of condescending "affirmative action" policies, even if those policies tarnish their merits among peers. And there are minorities that would prefer to fight their way to the top without a boost from some guilty white execs. Some see any attempt by Whitey to reach out as a personal affront. (Berkeley was full of these kinds of groups.)

I also don't think most agencies are consciously prejudiced; they might just be behaving in ways they find common and familiar. "This is the way things have always been done. And anyway, minorities stay together; they start their own agencies!"

Seriously. Ever been to ad:tech Miami? The LatAms are pretty stringent about sharing business cards with people they aren't already planning to work with. The diasporas stay together, and they seem to like it that way.

So we've got defensive minority groups on one end and defensive white agencies on the other. Tough nut to crack. And reason #485 why margaritas should be free in Manhattan.

Mad Men Goes High Fashion

Courtesy of Michael Kors, which pretty much puts Mad Men in the same promotional sphere as, I don't know, Lagerfield safety vests.

Top Reasons to Go Into Advertising

Blow in her face and she'll follow you anywhere.

In February, I asked agency professionals what their top reasons were for going into advertising. I also asked whether they had any thoughts for college students with moon eyes for an ad career.

Read their responses (two pages' worth of insights!). But here's a taste of some really good stuff:

Don't get bogged down in what is and what isn't the "right" way to do things.

Once we solve the problem, we need the next one to move on to, if it isn't there, then we go in search of it. I don't think it's overly surprising that there are a lot of gypsies in this business.

It [struck] me that one probably actually gets paid for doing this advertising design thing - in other words not beerless - and maybe even bourbonful, which indeed it was (this was 1964, folks!). So I changed schools and majors. I liked the program, and I love the job that came out of it. Now I get to manage a small agency and some creatives who are just as easily upset by client changes as I was (I am over that now - jaded, I suppose), and I am having fun designing bourbon packages. Is that amazing or what?

The ad biz has taken me all over the world, from NYC to Jakarta Indonesia. Along the way, the friendly folks at JWT, BBDO and a few other agencies have been generous enough to pay me for creating ideas. It’s been a good gig.

Learn a foreign language. Preferably Chinese, Indonesian, or Spanish.

There is NO good reason to go into advertising.

I got tired of all the insipid ads on both TV and Radio. I wanted to provide a creative, (notice the word creative) instead of the simple repeats of someone elses idea for promotion.

For account service, an advertising degree is great, but really - if you have some great internships and experience your degree can be in basket weaving and it won't hurt you.

The opportunities on the interactive side of things are endless. There is a huge shortage of talent in a category that is growing daily. Programmers, designers...pretty much anything having to with the interactive side of things is marketable in many arenas.

As one of the previous posters stated, the most important thing is experience. Intern, intern, intern.

Why did I get into this? Like many others, I fell into it.