MattCreamer.com

My least favorite kind of news story is the breathless discovery of some new media channel, i.e. a new place for marketers to dump ads. The New York Times has had two of these stories in just two days. Yesterday, there was a piece about ad-supported Internet telephone, an idea which offends just about every […]

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If Advertising Week, now in its fourth year, has done nothing else, it’s managed to frame the question of advertising’s value thusly: Are Mr. Peanut, Mr. Clean, the King and their cuddly ilk, good or bad for the business? In years past, Advertising Age has been rather critical of the tendency of the week’s organizers […]

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I spent three days last week trying to track down rumors that Wal-Mart’s new ad campaign, created by an agency selected in January following a review, was something of a composite of strategies and ideas created by agencies who lost the review. In this story in today’s Ad Age, I concluded that the tagline was […]

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this column from The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki is worth reading. Basically, Surowiecki, of “The Wisdom of Crowds” fame,  takes a counterintuitive view on how piracy is impacting the fashion industry. It’s not, he argues, contrary to every other business model based on intellectual property. Since the fashion business’ growth depends on consumers regarding its […]

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Here’s one to watch. Abbey Klaassen, one of my colleagues at AdAge, has some breaking news about Google’s newest high-profile hire: Andy Berndt, who was co-president of Ogilvy & Mather’s New York office. Google’s yet to make an official release, but Abbey writes:
 There has been much speculation over the past year whether Google would try […]

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I’m all for advertisers and media companies taking steps to improve their relevance to their audiences, but this New York Times story about MySpace’s plan to offer customized ads leaves me cold. The announcement, basically, is that the social network’s advertisers will be able to target consumers based on information contained in a person’s […]

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Somewhere Tom Friedman is smiling. Over the course of the past dozen or so years, the Internet has managed to shake up most old-line businesses, making things like geography and borders increasingly irrelevant. The ad industry has resisted or somehow been ignored by flat-earth economics, with agencies, still by and large brick and mortar businesses […]

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After discovering Martha Stewart’s presence on Facebook and MySpace, I wrote  a fairly skeptical piece about the likelihood–zilch, in my opinion-that Martha herself really checks in with these sites. It was prompted by all of the (rather depressing) comments, mainly on MySpace, addressed to her. I wrote, “Direct addresses to a multimedia icon like […]

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