MattCreamer.com

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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In this week’s Ad Age, I took a look at whether traditional media companies now struggling with content models–i.e. how to get paid when everything’s going free–had anything to learn from Thom Yorke & Co.

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The biggest business news of the week so far is Sprint CEO Gary Forsee’s decision to step down a couple years after a merger with Nextel, a deal that’s shaping up like a whopping failure. There are a lot of lessons here: the difficulty of combining distinct corporate cultures, the dangers of letting customer […]

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My editor Judann Pollack turned me on to this nugget. Here’s Jane Hilk, a marketing VP at Kraft, on a new push to market cheese slices–yum!–by promoting grilled-cheese sandwiches. Part of the push involves a MySpace video contest called “Have a Happy Cheese.” Pretty badass, right? Kraft agrees.
“I’m not going to deny it; it’s a […]

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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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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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