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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 I’d be remiss if I didn’t spread the word:
 
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE!
FEBRUARY 11, 2008
CONTACT: DEBBY LENING
(615) 860-4084
WOMEN’S FOOTBALL LEAGUE NOW TAKING APPLICATIONS
FOR 2009 EXPANSION TEAMS
The National Women’s Football Association, the largest tackle football league
in the world, has announced that applications are now available for 2009
expansion teams.
The league is looking to start new teams in many […]

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CurrentTV, the upstart cable network where Al Gore is chairman, is getting ready for a $100 million IPO. Besides further explaining why the former veep isn’t where he many think he should be– that is, on the campaign trail getting attacked by Bill Clinton–what’s most interesting is the SEC filings that give a peek under […]

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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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Newsweek’s looooongggg introduction to Amazon’s forthcoming e-book reader, the Kindle, is dominating the tech blog conversation. The big questions there are over design (it looks like it might be ugly), size (shouldn’t it be the size of an iPhone?) and a subscription cost for to access some blogs (why?). The questions not being addressed, like […]

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Well, the returns are in on Radiohead’s experiment in name-your-figure pricing and… it’s not pretty. At least not if you were thinking of model as having broader applications in a world where more and more consumers are ignoring the copyright restrictions that support many content-providers. A ComScore release says that of the 60% of Americans […]

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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 just sat through a really interesting session on private-equity firms’ growing interest interest in the marketing business, whether in brands or in agencies or media sellers. The star was Anton Levy, who led General Atlantic’s deal for a majority stake in AKQA. Levy took a stab at altering the pervasive image of private-equity firms […]

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The big speaker was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who’s trying to change the business community’s view of Microsoft from a stodgy software-maker to a media innovator that’s at the center of digital future. In other words, Microsoft is trying to become a full-fledged ad seller. Ballmer, of course, is bumping up against the perception that […]

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