MattCreamer.com

I made a trip to Paris this winter to meet the French financier/corporate raider/industrialist Vincent Bollore. He was pretty much unknown in the U.S. until about a three or so years ago when he took over Havas, the French company that owns a bunch of ad agencies including Euro RSCG. It’s not that Euro’s a […]

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Whenever I talk to non-industry people about hot topics in advertising, the boom in Internet ads comes up. As I’m describing all the hope that the publishers, agencies, and advertisers are putting on the web as an ad-friendly successor to TV or magazines, a look of incredulity usually washes across their face. Invariably, they […]

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There’s been no posting here thanks to the holiday craziness, a bit of travel and because I’ve been immersed in editing Ad Age’s annual package on the agency business. Over the past two years, this has morphed from a straightforward look at a few agencies of the year alongside capsule reviews of 25 or so […]

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Last Sunday, while most were watching football, Dell was announcing its latest agency situation. It’s hired WPP Group, one of the largest owners of ad agencies, to create an agency from scratch to service its $1.5 billion a year that business.  All major disciplines–ads, media, PR, direct–will be under one roof and there’s a single […]

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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. […]

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Honeyshed, the “QVC meets MTV” branded-entertainment project from David Droga, former big-agency muckety-muck who’s now a boutique-agency muckety-muck is now live in beta–and extremely buggy. Probably too buggy to get a good read on its prospects, sincem I think, so much of these online video plays are about execution. That and content, of course. […]

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I’m now in Phoenix, holed up in the Arizona Biltmore, the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired resort compound, in anticipation of the Association of National Advertisers conference, which kicks off later today. Should be a great event this year. Speakers include Al Gore, Steve Ballmer, AT&T marketing chief Wendy Clark, P&G’s Jim Stengel, not to mention a […]

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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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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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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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