In super important local advertising agency news, South Florida-based Woo Creative has been named the 2014 New Business of the Year by...wait for it...the Greater Delray Beach Chamber of Commerce at a recent gala at the Delray Beach Marriott. Yes, it's true. Woo Creative began as a bootstrapped one-man consulting startup headquartered in a local library. In 30 months, Woo grew to a seven-person creative team ranging from young tech talent to award-winning veteran designers. Woo now has offices headquartered on Atlantic Avenue in downtown Delray Beach and anticipates significant growth in the months and years ahead.

Haven't we been through this this whole kissing famous people kissing people thing before? Wasn't it Benetton with Obama and others embraced in a kiss a while back? Now Havas Worldwide Kazakhstan is in hot water for a poster it created showing Russian poet Alexander Pushkin kissing another man. The ad, for a gay club in Almaty, has resulted in the agency getting handed a $188,000 fine by a Kazakhstan court. The agency says the ad was created as an award entry -- ahem, scam ad -- and never intended to appear anywhere. Havas' Darya Khamitzhanova says the agency doesn't …

If the rumors are true -- and they almost always are -- despite the success Kit Kat has seen with JWT London, the rumor mongers are rattling the cage saying that the candy brand is on the hunt for a new agency. While the brand isn't commenting, they do not seem to be saying no, there is no review about to happen. So, JWT London, is it time for all your staffers to start Instagraming their love for Kit Kat the way Leo Burnett employees did when they were defending the Miller Lite account?

In, perhaps the best explanation of the futility of ad banners ever uttered since their introduction 20 years ago, Fast Company writer John Brownlee opines, in an ode to every junior designer's worst nightmare: "Only 0.08% of all banner ads shown get clicked on. In fact, thanks to widespread solutions like AdBlock Plus, most banner ads never even get seen. Pity the young intern designer, then, trying to jumpstart his or her career creating designs that there's a 99.92% chance will never been seen. Imagine if you were forced by circumstance into prostitution, even though you knew that only 0.08% …

Two makes a trend, right? Yes. Yes, it does. And the latest trend is sending agency employees on work exchange programs to inspire loyalty, bolster creativity or to just plain old coddle fickle employees who would sooner jump to another agency before enduring the slightest bit of discomfort or lack of advancement at their current agency. Last week, California-based agency thinkParallax launched Parallaxporation, which offered each agency employee $1,500 to travel to a place they had never been before -- and of course, blog about it. This week, Havas has launched Havas Lofts, a program whereby 20 employees will travel …

That move Cadillac made to New York's SoHo neighborhood in an apparent bid to leave behind the archaic decay and soullessness of Detroit in favor of SoHo's apparent hip factor? It's been slapped down and labelled too little, too late by Team Detroit Chief Creative Director Toby Barlow who told Metromedia, "Maybe Cadillac needs to find its soul somewhere else. It's been searching for it for 20 years." Ouch! But, you know, he's right. Cadillac lost it's cool a long, long time ago. And a new location isn't going to help.

Here's yet another in a long line of ad agency killers that's hyping itself and hoping to take over the world. OK, maybe not take over the world but, perhaps, steal a little more business from agencies. Victors & Spoils, the crowdsourcing poster child, is out with Pearl Street Marketplace, a clearinghouse where creatives can list their services and marketers can post jobs they need completed. Yup, it's like a Contently for ad creation. Victors & Spoils has created a Chipotle-like video in which a farmer dude looking for some creativity hooks up with a coffee shop hipster and it …

Agencies have to become ever more creative to retain talent these days. For decades, loyalty to a company and from a company has fallen to near negligible levels. Combine that with the fact that most people job hop from agency to agency and from client to client to get ahead -- rather than sticking it out and moving up within -- and you've got a perfect recipe for continuous turnover. Hoping, perhaps, to change things up a bit on that front, California-based agency thinkParallax launched a program called Parallaxploration, whereby the agency handed $1,500 to each one of its employees, …

Well, long-time copywriter Rich Siegel is a man to whom I can relate; a man in whose shoes I have walked and a man I want to meet someday. Why? Because he said this about the insanity of over thinking things: "I was in a meeting about a month ago. Actually, it does me no good to pinpoint the date of this meeting because I was in the same meeting two months ago. Two years ago. 5 years ago. And 10 years ago. You know the kind of meeting. A dozen of the agency's top minds gathered to share their …

Commenting on the increasingly fickle nature of today's high-speed advertising landscape, former Leo Burnett CCO Michael Conrad said, "Do you even remember the people who did that video where they had two people meeting for the first time kissing? Of course not. That is the point I'm trying to make," he said, in reference to the viral YouTube video First Kiss. "Social media and the internet are all just new communication platforms that have made things faster." He also thinks creatives, rather than business-type bean counters, should run creative agencies -- and he has a simple solution for client agency …