Say word son.

seen @ Angel on Fire.



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Jay Electronica & Mtn Dew Code Red: Hip Hop is Different on the Mountain

Mtn Dew doing it big, in a real way. How amazing to see them tap Jay Electronica and just let him go. No mention of the product, just flowing. Using Hip Hop in a commercial is nothing new and this won't even come close to changing the game. But it is nice to see a relatively new artist with great skills rep the Dew.

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Movie Poster: MILES Starring Don Cheadle

This will put the "DIG" in digital film. Everything just changed, I can't wait to see this. It's like my favorite artist as portrayed by my favorite artist. I'm going to have to contemplate what this means in my life -- for a few weeks.



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Merry Xmas

Gota
free font by Fontfabric.com

Download "GOTA" from HERE



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Why Creatives Are Always Confused from

Here without permission from the Ad Contrarian

As you stroll the halls of an ad agency you often encounter people wearing baseball caps, wandering aimlessly and muttering to themselves.

We call these people "creatives." They are the ones who make the ads.

They are always confused. Here's why.

They are pressured by their leaders to do "great" work. But when they do, they usually get reprimanded for not being "on strategy."

They are encouraged to win awards. But when they do, they are dismissed as childish narcissists.

They are highly paid, but rarely listened to.

They are told that it's "all about the work" but come to learn that it's "all about the metrics" or "all about the relationship" or "all about the conversation" or "all about" whatever the cliche-of-the-month is.

When they say advertising is an art, their clients say it's a business.

When they say it's a business, their clients say it's an art.

When they finally get something good produced, it fails.

When they produce mundane crap, it works.

When their friends like it, their clients hate it.

When their clients like it, their friends hate it.

They are encouraged to be collaborative. But the more people touch their work, the worse it gets.

They are counseled against becoming prima donnas. But they see that the people who get good jobs are often disagreeable monsters.

If they weren't confused they'd be crazy.


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B2B2BB

I'VE BEEN TOO BUSY TO BE BLOGGING


(FORGIVE ME)


BE BACK REAL SOON.



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Comedy Central changes logo. Viewers still await return of Chappelle

Comedy Central has a new logo and a pseudo-panic ensues. Frankly who cares? Who are these people pretending to have really cared about that old logo. Which by the way, is not in this post intentionally. Because I wanted to you to close your eyes and try and remember what it looked like. Yeah it was in the vid above, but I guarantee you probably still can't fathom it. It's time to stop with the fake brand revolts. Did we really drink minute maid orange juice for its logo? I seriously doubt it. Did the new Pepsi logo cause a notable decrease in the earth's rotation velocity? Well, maybe, but that's one funny logo. But we got over it and life goes on.
But on to more pressing issues; where the hell is Dave Chappelle? I miss the side splitting laughter this man brought us nightly. Not that I don't enjoy the cute 'oh that was clever' chuckles I get from John Stewart. But C'mon thems just jokes. The brother on that network elevated comedy and created idioms. Like, "I'm Rick James... " & I'm Rich Bi... ,"I still wanna see black folks do that in advertising. I think the last person to do that Charles Stone III with them "Whassup" Bud ads.

Did Dave design this logo as a little get-back on Comedy Central? Maybe it's not a 'c" inside a "C" at all. Maybe, just, maybe it's a "D" with a little "c" inside. Oh, Dave... you kidder, good one buddy.


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IMAGES USA selected as Black advertising agency for KFC

One question; Is this an agency of record assignment? Two question; will they do a better job than those Popeye's Annie the Chicken Queen joints?
Atlanta-based multicultural marketing agency IMAGES USA has announced the addition of KFC, the world's most popular chicken restaurant chain, to its roster of brand partnerships. IMAGES USA will work with KFC to elevate the awareness of their primary African-American marketing effort, KFC Pride 360. 

"IMAGES USA proved to have a true understanding of the KFC brand and impressed us with their creative social media and marketing strategies," said Laurie Schalow, Senior Marketing Director, KFC. "We see them as a key partner to developing our initiatives and increasing awareness of KFC Pride 360 within the African-American community."

"We're so pleased to welcome KFC to the IMAGES family," says IMAGES USA CEO and founder, Bob McNeil (pictured). "We look forward to the opportunity to get to know their brand and offer them solutions to help engage African-American consumers." 

IMAGES USA is a leading full-service multicultural marketing communications agency headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1989 by Robert (Bob) McNeil, IMAGES offers marketing expertise to clients wanting to reach, motivate and influence African-American, Hispanic and Asian consumers. 

The agency's client roster includes Amtrak, Choice Hotels, Sara Lee, AARP, Glory Foods, International Speedway Corporation, Brown-Forman, Operation HOPE, and Scientific Games. The agency currently ranks No. 5 on Advertising Age's list of Top African American advertising agencies, No. 20 on Top Hispanic advertising agencies, and No. 286 on Top U.S. advertising agencies and has won over 100 creative honors. For more information on IMAGES USA, including award-winning work and recognitions, visitwww.imagesusa.net, www.multiculturalmarketing.com. Also follow IMAGES USA on Twitter.







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The Slurpee Summit is on

cred:
TracyLocke, Dallas, Texas
Creative Directors: Kyle Jones, Ryan Blum
Associate Creative Director: Craig Bradley
Art Director: Craig Bradley
Copywriter: Alex Harvey
Illustrator: Craig Bradley

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New York Times Says Smaller Print-Ad Drop to Help Increase 2010 Earnings

By Brett Pulley

New York Times Co., publisher of the namesake newspaper, said it expects fourth-quarter print advertising revenue to decline at a slowing pace, helping 2010 earnings top those last year.

Print-advertising revenue this quarter will drop by about 4 percent from the year-earlier period, the company said today in a statement. Print advertising in the third quarter decreased 5.8 percent.

Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson said national advertising, accounting for most of the company’s ad revenue, has improved this year. Digital ad sales will gain about 10 percent this quarter, and circulation revenue will decrease 4 percent to 5 percent, the company said. Digital revenue rose 14.6 percent and circulation revenue fell 4.8 percent in the third quarter.

The print-revenue improvement and cost-cutting efforts will help operating profit excluding depreciation, amortization, severance and special items show “significant improvement” compared with last year, Robinson said in the statement.

The New York Times newspaper will begin charging consumers for access to articles on its website in the first quarter, Robinson said during a presentation at the UBS Media and Communications Conference in New York. Users will be able to read a set number of articles for free each month, and heavy users will have to pay a subscription fee. She didn’t say how many stories are free or give a price for the subscription.

‘High’ Confidence

The company’s Boston Globe newspaper will start a paid gateway to its site in the second half of 2011, Robinson said.

“We will begin directly charging consumers for our content,” Robinson said. “We are very prepared and our confidence is high.”

Times Co. advanced 38 cents, or 4.1 percent, to $9.76 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The stock has declined 21 percent this year.

This month, the Newspaper Association of America said advertising revenue at U.S. newspaper publishers declined at a slowing pace in the third quarter. Ad revenue dropped 5.4 percent last quarter, compared with a 28 percent slump a year earlier, the association said on its website. Print ad revenue fell 7.1 percent and online ad sales rose 11 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brett Pulley in New York at bpulley@bloomberg.net

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The high cost of kids can make you more responsible in the sack

$1,154 for a year of diapers?! Pass the condoms, please.

If Don Draper were walking among us, we're betting he'd count this as a pretty clever sell: Sir Richard's, a new condom startup, is advertising its wares not by promises of hair-pulling, nail-scratching pleasure, but rather economics. Simply put, it costs so much to have a damn kid that you better not have one by accident.

The new brand is the brainchild of TDA, an ad agency based in Boulder, with backing from Kreloff Equity Partners. The goals for Sir Richard's are several: One is simply aesthetic, as the guys at TDA figured that condom packaging had settled into cliches that rendered the product nearly invisible. Another is social: For every condom bought, one condom will be donated to a country in need. And the third is in the marketing. Here, the idea is to simply add up the spiraling costs of raising a kid. The boxes, for example, come with stickers that add up the cost of various necessities such as education and strollers.

The outdoor campaign, meanwhile, is meant to be geared toward different cities. This one for New York shows the cost of sending your kid to the various top-tier private schools around the city.

Of course, therein is a bit of a mystery: These are all very highbrow references. These kind of befit the intended audience, given that these condoms are being sold at Paul Smith, Fred Segal, Viceroy, and Whole Foods. But we're seriously doubting that many unexpected parents end up with Bugaboos and tuition bills from Chapin. Smart as the campaign is, it probably needs more than a little of the everyman touch to truly be relevant. After all, having a kid is expensive, no matter if it's a silver spoon or a tin spoon in their mouths.

from Fastco.

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Brothers & Burgers ( A Tale of Two Kingdoms)

Not so long ago in a land not so far away there were various and sundry black creative who dwelled in a land of wonder. They whittled away all day in their magic shop of ad-like wonders. But one day the King approached and all the little ad elves became gleeful and anxious. As the king always had good tidings of new creative task, often tied to ad shop sustaining budgets and a modicum of fear because said profits were always steeped in opportunities for loss. On this particular day the king bore his trademarked plastic smile, no really it's trademarked. Through those unmoving creep-filled lips came great tiding of diversity and joy. The cherub like black elves roared with delight and murmured of actual budgets and possible real world Agency of Record status. But none such status awaited them. Alas, the king declared I will unify the part of the kingdom (account) that is usually reserved for the least of you and bequeath it to thine other dudes.

The little inhabitants of Uniworld ad land were devastated. And despite their pleas sprinkle with boast of magical knowledge of the "dark" arts. The king still saw fit to let the little black ad elves craft his ad wares and spin his tiny straw-like budgets into black (or green) gold no more. There once happy work shop grew suddenly sullen, the sun shone a tad less.

The king was very pleased with himself and his decision. For he had found a much fairer village  to plunder, I mean lay his blessings upon. Though it were a far and distant land known as Boulderus Colorado. In a place Ad people believe to be veritable Mecca of marketing. There was a tiny village called Crispin Porter & Bogusky. It was indeed a much fairer place, for a practitioner of the "Dark" Arts was seldom seen there. This mythical village was a place that didn't believe you had to understand the "dark" arts to practice them, you simply had to be really good at your form of uber-hubristic arts to do anything. They had a sorta one ring to rule them all approach to creating ad magic. Why doubt it, for years it had served them and their liege well.

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Back to the Days of Blackface

The removed the 'K' and replaced it with an 'L' to soften the blow, but it still 'blows.'

A toothpaste brand popular in China is criticized as racially offensive.


from NewsWeek


Of all the unfamiliar products in a Chinese supermarket, one of the most shocking to American visitors is a toothpaste featuring the logo of a minstrel singer in a top hat, flashing a white smile. Even more shocking: the paste, known as Darlie in English and as Black People Toothpaste in Chinese, is a product of the Hawley & Hazel Group, a Hong Kong–based company established in 1933, which is now owned in part by the Colgate-Palmolive Co.


Darlie used to be called Darkie. According to the book America Brushes Up: The Uses and Marketing of Toothpaste and Toothbrushes in the Twentieth Century, the CEO of Hawley & Hazel saw blackface performer Al Jolson in the U.S. and thought, “Jolson’s wide smile and bright teeth would make an excellent toothpaste logo.” He was right: the firm now claims to be one of the market leaders of toothpaste products in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.

After Colgate purchased 50 percent of the firm in 1985, religious groups, African-Americans, and company shareholders protested the racially offensive nature of the brand. After more than three years of criticism, Colgate switched the name from Darkie to Darlie and modified the logo to a less crude version of a black man. In 1989The New York Times quoted the Colgate-Palmolive chairman as saying, ‘’It’s just plain wrong … The morally right thing dictated that we must change [in a way] that is least damaging to the economic interests of our partners.’’

Yet the Chinese name of the product has remained unchanged. And China is not exactly a paradise of racial harmony. While the crucial dichotomy in China is between Chinese and non-Chinese, many blacks face discrimination in the country. A Ghanaian who lives in China and asked to remain anonymous told NEWSWEEK that a prospective employer told him, “We can’t hire you because you’re black.”

Still, the Chinese don’t view the toothpaste’s name as something reprehensible. “To most people in China it wouldn’t even occur to them that Black People Toothpaste is offensive,” says P. T. Black, who researches Chinese consumers. According to the Chinese news site Southcn.com, Hawley & Hazel has even trademarked the name and image and recently sued two companies in Shenzhen for making toothpaste using a similar logo with the words “Black People.” The court ordered the defendants to pay more than $300,000 in damages.

Yet Colgate is a Western company and, as such, “should know better,” says Kwame Dougan, an African-Canadian living in China. Colgate declined NEWSWEEK’s interview requests, instead releasing a statement saying, “There are different perspectives on this issue.” Hawley & Hazel also declined an interview request. Darlie doesn’t exactly advertise its relationship with Colgate; Colgate’s Web site has only two mentions of Darlie, both of which talk about how the brand is driving growth in the Asia-Pacific region. Darlie products examined in China for this story featured no mention of the Colgate label.

“I think that the brand should simply be retired,” says Laura Berry, executive director of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, one of the organizations that originally pressured Colgate to fix its Darkie brand. Until then, Darlie smiles on.

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Michael Jackson by Arno Bani

from whitezine... wait, what?

A couple years ago, the king of the pop Michael Jackson saw a Time magazine with a photography made by a small french artist called Arno Bani. Michael turned to his manager and asked for Arno Bani to create the artwork of his next album. The photoshoot was made, but the pictures were never revealed, sadly. A couple weeks ago, Arno Bani, decided to release them to the press. The young photographer is now a little bit more famous, a little bit older, and the photographies will be auctionned in Paris on December 13th.

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A Reminder That Nike Ads Once Meant Something

Michael Jordan Shames LeBron James in Ad MashupAris Georgiadis @ AdAge
Making the rounds on YouTube today is the latest video responding to the greatest existential question of 2010: What should LeBron James do? One of our favorite responses is on behalf of the fine citizens of Ohio who have plenty to say to the tune of 3,761,455 views on YouTube and counting. Even "South Park" got into the act, and the comparison is simply scathing. (Here's arecap of the fuss and subsequent discussion.)

The query that's garnered such a reaction was delivered last month by Mr. James in a Wieden & Kennedy-produced commercial, "Rise," on behalf of superstar endorser Nike. That video has racked up 4,136,514 views and counting. The latest response is a mashup (we don't know the brains behind it) of the current spot and an older Nike ad for its Jumpman line that stars Michael Jordan. You can view the mashup and the original ad below. What makes this new response video so poignant is it reminds us that once upon a time, Nike -- along with its airborne athletes and longtime ad agency -- aspired to greatness and, as such, encouraged us lowly, stuck-to-the-ground mortals to "just do it."

As we've said recently, Nike should not be in the business of celebrity rehab. Its best ads remind us that what we should all do is simply hit the damn gym.

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Cyber Selling While Black, who buys from you?

Online shoppers more likely to buy from white sellers than black, Stanford researchers say

When a seller's race is evident in an online classified ad for an iPod nano, black sellers receive fewer offers and less money than white sellers, says a new Stanford study.

BY LOUIS BERGERONOnline shoppers are more likely to buy from a white seller than a black one, according to a study by two Stanford researchers who posted ads on local classified advertising websites across the United States.

The ads offered the latest version of the iPod nano for sale, with each ad containing a photo of either a dark- or light-skinned hand holding the popular digital music player. The ads with a black hand received 13 percent fewer responses and 17 percent fewer offers than ads showing a white hand. Black sellers were also offered less money for the iPods than white sellers.

"We were really struck to find as much racial discrimination as we did," said Jennifer Doleac, one of the researchers and a doctoral candidate in economics. "On average it's a younger, more educated group of people shopping online and if anything they probably discriminate less than the population as a whole."

"We suspect that the negative effect of race would be even larger in the general population," she said.

Doleac and fellow researcher Luke Stein, also a doctoral candidate in economics, ran ads in more than 300 locales, ranging from small towns to major cities, during the course of a year.

The study showed that black sellers were at the greatest disadvantage in the Northeast, where they received 32 percent fewer offers than whites. In the Midwest, black sellers got 23 percent fewer offers, and they got 15 percent fewer in the South. The West was the only region where the difference in the number of offers received by black and white sellers was not statistically significant.

The amount of money offered black sellers was between 2 percent and 4 percent less than the offers white sellers received. The disparity was most pronounced when the ads were posted in locales with high crime rates or where blacks and whites were geographically isolated from each other.

Classified ads featuring a black person’s hand holding an iPod being advertised for sale received 13 percent fewer responses and 17 percent fewer offers than ads showing the iPod held by a white hand.

Buyers responding to classified ads of an iPod for sale made offers 2 percent to 4 percent lower when the iPod was shown being held by a black hand instead of a white hand.


more here.

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