• Will Bud Drop the Bowl?
    Over the past 20-plus years, Anheuser-Busch ads have become sort of a sine qua non of the Super Bowl. The brewer has used the audience of more than 100 million to introduce expressions such as "Whassup" and stunts such as the Bud Bowl into the American lexicon. But oddsmakers wouldn't take the bet that InBev will keep Bud in the Bowl.
  • Anachronistic Front: The Future Perfect
    "My global concept is called Rétrofuturs: Mix the past, the present, the future, and shake it," says designer and former semiotics professor Stéphane Massa-Bidal, who created this series envisioning social media platforms as classic Penguin paperbacks.
  • Novel Excerpt: Ad Asylum
    I'm watching my poor cell phone. I think it's become schizophrenic. I've programmed it with so many different ringtones for so many different things that it's lost its identity. One tone for my clients, one for my boss, one for my work friends, another for my creative director.
  • Double Coverage
    The office is sparsely decorated, but exemplifies the dichotomy between a career left and a new one beginning. A replica Super Bowl trophy is on one side. Directly across are two framed Playbills from Broadway productions he's involved in.
  • Agency of the Year 2009: Client of the Year: Malvertisers
    Every so often, magazine editors like to use gimmicks to convey important ideas and trends that are changing the world of their readers. And more often than not, they use devices like annual awards or recognitions to do this. So in the spirit of Time magazine picking everyone from Hitler, Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Ben Bernanke, and even "you," MEDIA is honoring an unusual marketer as its "Media Client of the Year" for 2009. Tech folks might find the term "client" an interesting double entendre in this case, because we've picked Malvertisers as an entity.
  • Agency of the Year 2009: Supplier of the Year: Hulu
    Given News Corp.'s war on free content, and NBC Universal's future under cable king Comcast, Hulu's path is looking unclear at best. In 2009, however, the joint video venture - between News Corp., NBCU and, more recently, Disney - reigned supreme as the Web's premier platform for premium content and the closest the medium has come to a major broadcast network.
  • Agency of the Year 2009: Boutique of the Year: Spark
    Spark Communications often operates in the shadows of its bigger brethren Starcom and MediaVest, but the entrepreneurial spirit of the media boutique helped it stand out and differentiate itself in a way that the more established Publicis' media brands could not during 2009.
  • Agency of the Year 2009: Department of the Year: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
    For the third consecutive year, MEDIA has selected the media team at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners as its "media department" of the year for 2009. Readers of the past two years' profiles already know how ironic that is, because gs&p claims it no longer has a media department, and has fused media planning and buying with its strategic planning team. Whatever you want to call it, the results have been something all agencies - full-service, stand-alone, integrated or otherwise - should take notice of. The editors of this magazine sure have.
  • Agency of the Year 2009: Agency of the Year: MPG
    All too often, MEDIA's Agency of the Year profiles begin by rationalizing why we made the picks we did. We do that mainly for readers who may not have had the privilege of being exposed to the winner's work, which in the case of media services, sometimes may not be as visible as other forms of marketing communication. We didn't have that problem with MPG, which did some of its best work in the most open of forums - for all the industry to observe and, in fact, to participate in directly.
  • Agency of the Year 2009: Holding Company of the Year: Mediabrands
    Calling Mediabrand's year kind of successful is like calling Super Bowl ads kind of pricey. It took Sherman longer to march through the Confederacy than it took for Interpublic's reimagined media services operating unit to rise from dormant to dominating.
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