• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, April 16, 2014

Well here's an interesting tidbit. Fast Company has published a report from Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy which took a look at Fortune 500 companies and whether or not they paid federal corporate tax in the last five years. Of the 500, 111 paid no taxes in one of the past five years. Big companies like Boeing, General Electric are on the list. But guess who else is on the list? Interpublic Group. Yup, that big ass agency holding company headed by Michael Roth. And we wonder why people perceive advertising professionals as highly as car dealers.

It would seem Bing is Madison Avenue's new best friend. The Search Agency, a global online marketing firm and search marketing agency has released its quarterly State of Paid Search Report for Q1 2014 which found that Bing grew at a far faster rate than Google, giving Bing an opportunity to gain more ground on overall spend share. While advertisers spent more on both Google and Bing from the previous year, Bing grew 60%, which is more than double the rate of Google's 29% growth over the same period. And we all thought Bing was dead, right?

FCB rebranded. JWT changed its name back to J. Walter Thompson. So why can't a small, Southfield, Michigan-based agency change its name from MARS to The Mars Agency? Well they can and they should because, let's be honest, having a name like MARS is bound to confuse clients and give them a perfectly good excuse to call you a space shot when you screw up a job. 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Nathalie Tadena examines the burgeoning growth of real-time marketing and ad agency newsrooms. And perhaps coming to the conclusion as to why there are so many brand screw ups in social media, she writes, "It’s a far cry from 10 years ago or more, when marketers would launch an ad campaign maybe once a year. Creating the campaign on that timeline meant months of research, figuring out what TV and print ads would look like; having lawyers approve the ads; testing of ads and figuring out where the promotions would run. It wasn’t unrealistic for the development of a campaign to take six months, ad executives say." Would it not be a bad thing to maybe step back a bit and, oh...I don't know, actually do some planning?

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