• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, March 25, 2014

Who knew life after the NBA would involve starting an ad agency? But that's exactly what's happening with former Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat player Jamal Mashburn, who has hooked up with Jonathan Sackett, a former senior partner at Ogilvy & Mather. The pair has formed, predictably, Mashburn Sackett, which will be based in Chicago. Of his desire to get into advertising and why he thinks he can cut it, Mashburn told The Wall Street Journal: "I look at it from running and owning car dealerships and 80 franchises. Trying to understand the advertising component in the car business was the biggest challenge. The car business is very much all about ‘we are going to do it the same old way.’ It’s a lot of ‘we are going to spend X amount of dollars on radio and print and try and figure out this Internet thing.’ So I began asking my general managers ‘can anybody give me a number on what my return is for what we spend on advertising?’  But no one could give me an answer. That got my attention and I got really involved."

In a new book,Fired at 50: A Survivor's Guide to Prosperity, ad agency veteran Phyllis Green tells the story of her rise from obscurity at a small Trenton radio station to fame and fortune as the first female sales manager at New York's ABC TV -- and back into darkness when she was fired by Capital Cities, which acquired the New York television station. But she didn't stay in the dark for long. In 1986 Green founded Green Advertising, which in 1999 was acquired by Pace Advertising, a WPP agency. Currently, she is chairman of Green Advertising, the parent company of GreenAd.com, Stalder/Green Advertising in Orlando, and Vidpop Productions, a video production complex in Boca Raton. 

Are you into content marketing? Native advertising? Do you even know what it is? How it fits into the advertising ecosystem? Writing in Forbes, Lewis DVorkin explains the birth of native advertising (at least at Forbes) and offers up 10 battlegrounds to watch -- from competition to transparency to labeling to presentation to distribution and more -- as native advertising attempts to take center stage. It's a great list of things to keep your eyes on as you march forth into the muddy battleground of native advertising. And no, you will not have the luxury of ignoring it in the hope that it just goes away like the Cue Cat did.

Chris Sheldon, also known as the Depressed Copywriter for a Tumblr blog he ran a couple of years ago, is out with My Parent's Website in honor of his father's website which won a best lawyer site award back in 1997. My Parent's Website encourages people to add their own parents' websites to the collection. Basically, it's a collection of screenshots and links, the purpose of which, the site explains, is to "preserve our parent’s websites forever before they accidentally delete them." So if you've got any creativity hiding inside some website your parents created eons ago, head over to My Parent's Website and add it before, you know, your parents accidentally delete it.