• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, October 18, 2013

Of advertising agencies' penchant for jumping on the latest trend and playing buzzword bingo, Bob Hoffman writes, "Every agency also becomes expert in this new miracle, and starts up a department to specialize in it. They 'brand' it (i.e., give it a stupid name) and develop a pseudo-proprietary flavor of this miracle. Although what they do is exactly the same as what every other agency does, their flavor usually contains some kind of highly-evolved methodology with circles and arrows and dotted lines and feedback loops. In other words, it’s a muy grande bullshit burrito." And this is exactly what happened when agencies adopted account planning, when they jumped into social media and when they hijacked the "muy grande bullshit" du jour, big data. But the important thing, and the point Bob drives home is that the only thing that matters is, wait for it...the Big Idea. He writes, "The only real miracle we have in our bag of tricks is the creative one. It’s the only one we’ve ever had." Is he right?

Gleefully jumping on the Owned, Earned, Paid media bandwagon and giving us an example of the aforementioned propensity for agencies to jump on the latest trend and play buzzword bingo, New York-based Jun Group has announced the launch of its "owned advertising" product; a sponsored content ad unit called Overdrive. Yeah, they're calling, incorrectly, the practice of sponsored content (which is actually paid media), Overdrive. In fact, they also refer to the new unit as a form of native advertising which, by definition, is paid advertising. A press release screams, "For the first time, brands can promote their owned-media properties without having to use display or worry about being in non-premium environments." Obviously they haven't heard of OneSpot. Or Outbrain. Or Sharethrough. Or Nativo. Granted, every offering is a bit different but an ad unit that looks like editorial that clicks through to branded (and owned) content is nothing new.

So people get hired, fired or promoted all day long. It isn't really news although it is nice to read about where our industry mates have landed. But what's even more interesting is to read what their new bosses have to say about the hire. Get a load of this quote from Ketchum CEO Rob Flaherty who just promoted Paul M. Rand to chief digital officer. Flaherty said, "The enhancement and consistent delivery of digital and related services at a world-class level are an essential element in reinforcing Ketchum as a go-to resource for sophisticated, effective, trend-setting campaigns across the increasingly important 'PESO' spectrum of paid, earned, shared and owned channels." OK, really? PESO? Seriously? Um, shared is the same as earned but we suppose Ketchum needed to add shared so they could tout their ridiculous PESO acronym. Who comes up with this crap?

Here's one the women will love. At The Three Percent Conference, a conference which aims to change the fact that just 3% of creative directors are women, a panel made up of men to discuss how they helped mentor women with their advertising careers got cat-called as they walked on stage. Adrants, which is on the ground covering the conference, tweeted, "All male panels gets cat-called at #3percentageconf Hilarious!" Hilarious, indeed and probably about time after years and years.and years of demeaning women in this same manner.

Having just been awarded Markerbot, a company that manufactures 3D printing, Droga5 New York aims to educate the public about the technology and to gain widespread adoption of 3D printers. 3D printing, a process that brings to full 3D life things that have been designed on a computer, has, until now, been mainly within the purview of technology geeks. Of the effort, Droga5 Vice Chairman Andrew Essex said, "We're going to be focusing on the communications to articulate the point to people that this is now a consumer product" Hmm. Wait until the porn industry gets a hold of this one.

Former CEO and Chairman of Ted Bates Worldwide Don Zuckert died October 14 after a heart attack. He was 79. Zuckert began at Ted Bates in 1960 and rose to stardom and notoriety when, in 1986, Saatchi & Saatchi acquired Bates making it the largest agency in the world. Grabbing headlines, Zuckert and a colleague, Larry Light, were demoted by Bates CEO Bob Jacoby. Saatchi heads didn't like this and immediately stepped in, canned Jacoby and replaced him with Zuckert who defended the controversial merger saying, “There is the advantage of access to information and technology resources. A bigger agency is better able to accept bigger risks and investments in the business. The future of the agency business is global advertising. Right now, you can count the number of global advertisers on one hand. But within five years you’ll need both hands and both feet and by the turn of the century you’ll need both arms and both legs and the torso.” We'd say he was pretty spot on with that statement.