MattCreamer.com

For the past five days, I’ve been consumed by the most salacious legal wrangling to hit the ad business since the whole Julie Roehm/Wal-Mart mess, which, incidentally, looks like it’s going away. What the lawsuit filed against Dentsu by an ex-creative director has that the Wal-Mart saga never did is a stomach-churning level of luridness. Steve Biegel’s discrimination complaint against the Japanese holding company pours on the anecdotes of debauched frolicking to illustrate just how much his former boss allegedly sexed things up. For like 20 pages. Here’s last week’s piece on the lawsuit featuring a prime piece of evidence: a photo of Maria Sharapova (or Maria Sharapova’s midsection) allegedly snapped by the Dentsu chief during a commercial shoot for Canon, a Dentsu client. Here’s my piece today that looks a little at the man–heretofore pretty much unknown–who filed the suit. It’s sure to not be the last word, as Dentsu readies its legal and, I’m sure, PR counterattack.

Also in AdAge: My colleague Abbey Klaassen and I have a news piece on Facebook’s forthcoming entry into social shopping, which basically entails making product recommendations part of one’s Facebook newsfeed.   And here’s my interpretation of a study on agency compensation conducted by the Association of National Advertisers. The big headlines are that performance-based incentives are becoming a huge part of the mix, even though fees-based arrangements still dominate. Translation: agencies are still pretty much getting paid for their man hours, but increasingly they’re seeing bonuses for good performance. Whether they ever trade in the relative safety of the fee system for one that’s based entirely on performance, a trade that would increase the amount of risk they’re assuming, is unclear and probably unlikely. I’m going to post a little more on this study later because it’s rather interesting.