My father was a copy editor for a major newspaper. Facts counted back then- apparently, that skill has been lost- when Ad Age continues to ad to the legend of Crispin Porter + Bogusky by saying an office that opened on Sept. 10, 2001, was “shuttered in the 1990’s.
Advertising Age - Five Crispin Refugees Set Up Shop in L.A.
There’s a new creative boutique gunning for Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s hotshop crown — and it’s staffed with five of the agency’s own.
Setting up shop in Venice, Calif., just blocks from an office Crispin opened (and later shuttered) in the 1990s, are a cadre of the agency’s former staffers — some of the minds behind a handful of the shop’s most high-profile and envied campaigns for Burger King, the “Truth” anti-smoking movement, Best Buy’s Geek Squad, Miller High Life and Ikea. Their fledgling agency will be called Goodness Mfg. and led by three former Crispin creative directors who resigned last week, along with two others who left previously.
The natural evolution of great creative shops should be the spawning of more creative shops. When I visited Portland Oregon about 10 years ago, it was clear that the caliber of the entire market was elevated by having Wieden + Kennedy in the ‘hood. It’s interesting to see that CP+B is spreading its seeds all over- with Alex Bogusky stating that Toy in NYC as a CP+B offspring- and now Goodness Mfg. in Venice.
Mr. Bogusky put the number of Crispin employees at 600, with 80 in the creative department. He also pointed out that this is not the first shop to break away from the agency — the first was Stick & Move, based in Philadelphia. Mr. Bogusky also considers Toy, under Ari Merkin, to be inspired by Crispin. “I think of myself as the father and Chuck [Porter] as the mother.”
However, for the kings of new media- it’s going to be hard for them to land new business- since they don’t seem to have a site up at either www.goodnessmfg.com (16 July 07 update- holding page is up) or goodnessmanufacturing.com and have cloaked their identities through the registrar. Another question arises in a google search where it seems that there is already a “Goodness manufacturing” out there- and it isn’t anything to do with advertising.
Considering that Crispin Porter + Bogusky is considered a leading new media agency, it’s odd that they, or their spinoffs don’t practice what they preach.
One of the things we teach our clients to do is set up a google alert on key terms- so this morning, I got notified of this Flickr photo of me- talking to Salim Ismail (I’m the one with hair on the right) about web 3.0 and how advertising money will drive the Open ID standard, so advertisers can verify their ads are being delivered to the right people.
As always, it’s money that will drive the development of new technology, and the old John Wanamaker adage of “I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half” is going to be solved with Web 3.0 and IPTV- real soon.
As another note: Sally Hogshead talked about “Portable equity” in her book Radical Careering- in fact it’s chapter 5 of the book- and on Salim’s business card- I saw the perfect example of this: he has his e-mail at yahoo-inc, but, for a site- it’s his own blog: www.salimismail.com empowering his voice outside of the corporate Yahoo! channel- the ultimate example of portable equity that I’ve seen.
Of course, he’s also the “Head of Brickhouse” which is their new “skunkworks” type lab for launching new products and technologies- so he should be the first to practice what he preaches.
Is your company ready to step past ownership of your ideas- and trust you to share what’s appropriate with the whole world?
One of the recurring themes by some of the high-level speakers at the 2007 AAF National Convention was the crazy money being spent to snatch up web related ad companies. Another was how to monetize their newley discovered new media vehicle: the web. Yeah, you read me right- they are all rushing to figure out the metrics to quantify the ad buy on the web. Sorry guys- smart advertisers don’t need a third party to tell them if a campaign is working- they get really good stats (much better than Nielsen, the MPA or any other “validation company” ever provided) they have web stats and sales to evaluate.
What is even more sad- was so few of them really had a clue what Web 2.0 is, how it worked, or what it meant to them. Still worried about the silly notion of “control”- they sort of missed the Cluetrain Manifesto back in 1999 while they were busy buying up Web 1.0 companies.
Not only are most ad agency sites not much more than bad brochureware in Flash, most of the excitement about the web is still in an “how do we continue doing business the way we did, only using the web” instead of realizing- your business model is totally broken, start thinking purely about being branded content creators that makes it as earned media- never paid. Yeah, you can try to talk a client into placing ads through DoubleClick- (and get laughed out of the room. Or start talking a language of opt-in, immersive, brand experiences that the consumer builds their personal brand by combining in a unique way.
The endorsers of tomorrow aren’t LeBron James, Oprah or Britney Spears (heaven help us) but every single customer who choses to affiliate themselves with your brand and others- and none of it is under your control.
It’s probably not clear to most people attending the Ad Conference how this post came- since this is a pretty far stretch from most of what was talked about (although I’m looking forward to reading the autographed copy I picked up of Carat Americas, CEO David Verklin’s “Watch This Listen Up Click Here“).
But, this post about a post by Dave Winer- who was the guy who made the cutting edge of Web 2.0 possible (while most other people were still trying to figure out how to install AOL on their computers) about the new digital divide between those who get Web 2.0 and those who don’t:
Dave Winer: “It’s Time for Web 2.0 to Stop Being Exclusive” @ WEB 2.0 JOURNAL
A war of words has broken out in the world of Web 2.0 - between the software developer Dave Winer - who created or was a lead contributor to several of the most popular XML dialects and APIs related to web publishing such as RSS 2.0, XML-RPC, OPML, and the MetaWeblog API - and the founder of O’Reilly Media - the newly self-proclaimed “technology transfer company.”
Winer’s beef? “We need to get all hands involved in what we used to call Web 2.0,” he laments. “It’s time for it to stop being exclusive, and it’s way past time for one company to be controlling who’s supposed to participate.”
Winer’s contention is that events such as “FOO Camp” are harming the greater good, which is to make software easier, better, scalable, more reliable, and more secure, and instead turning Internet technology into an elitist world where it becomes a question not of what you know but who you know.
In Winer’s view, the very future of computing is at stake:
“We need to start doing some real investing in technology, not the BS that passes for technology investing that’s been going on for the last decade.”
In other words, what Winder fears is another Nasdaq run-up, followed by the inevitable explosion:
“But what I do want is to avoid a bloody mess,” he says. “We have work to do here. We have a bubble-pop to avoid.”
Brooklyn-born Winer, who is also the author of one of the first ever weblogs…
The bold italics were added by me- to highlight the big leap ad people need to make- it’s time to start doing real investing in your creative departments, training, molding, challenging your teams to learn how this new paradigm needs to work. It’s time for all of you to get more than six measly pages indexed in Google for your site (like McCann’s site- note McCann bills itself as the largest US agency).
Like it or not, ad agencies today are the buggy whip manufacturers of the turn of the last century. It’s an attention economy, but only for those who understand that it has to be earned, not bought. The more you understand all this, the more Howard Luck Gossage becomes relevant: “People don’t read ads, they read what interests them- and sometimes it’s an ad.”
Well said Howard, too bad you aren’t still here. The bubble’s about to pop, and the sad part is- most won’t understand why.
One of the recurring themes by some of the high-level speakers at the 2007 AAF National Convention was the crazy money being spent to snatch up web related ad companies. Another was how to monetize their newley discovered new media vehicle: the web. Yeah, you read me right- they are all rushing to figure out the metrics to quantify the ad buy on the web. Sorry guys- smart advertisers don’t need a third party to tell them if a campaign is working- they get really good stats (much better than Nielsen, the MPA or any other “validation company” ever provided) they have web stats and sales to evaluate.
What is even more sad- was so few of them really had a clue what Web 2.0 is, how it worked, or what it meant to them. Still worried about the silly notion of “control”- they sort of missed the Cluetrain Manifesto back in 1999 while they were busy buying up Web 1.0 companies.
Not only are most ad agency sites not much more than bad brochureware in Flash, most of the excitement about the web is still in an “how do we continue doing business the way we did, only using the web” instead of realizing- your business model is totally broken, start thinking purely about being branded content creators that makes it as earned media- never paid. Yeah, you can try to talk a client into placing ads through DoubleClick- (and get laughed out of the room. Or start talking a language of opt-in, immersive, brand experiences that the consumer builds their personal brand by combining in a unique way.
The endorsers of tomorrow aren’t LeBron James, Oprah or Britney Spears (heaven help us) but every single customer who choses to affiliate themselves with your brand and others- and none of it is under your control.
It’s probably not clear to most people attending the Ad Conference how this post came- since this is a pretty far stretch from most of what was talked about (although I’m looking forward to reading the autographed copy I picked up of Carat Americas, CEO David Verklin’s “Watch This Listen Up Click Here“).
But, this post about a post by Dave Winer- who was the guy who made the cutting edge of Web 2.0 possible (while most other people were still trying to figure out how to install AOL on their computers) about the new digital divide between those who get Web 2.0 and those who don’t:
Dave Winer: “It’s Time for Web 2.0 to Stop Being Exclusive” @ WEB 2.0 JOURNAL
A war of words has broken out in the world of Web 2.0 - between the software developer Dave Winer - who created or was a lead contributor to several of the most popular XML dialects and APIs related to web publishing such as RSS 2.0, XML-RPC, OPML, and the MetaWeblog API - and the founder of O’Reilly Media - the newly self-proclaimed “technology transfer company.”
Winer’s beef? “We need to get all hands involved in what we used to call Web 2.0,” he laments. “It’s time for it to stop being exclusive, and it’s way past time for one company to be controlling who’s supposed to participate.”
Winer’s contention is that events such as “FOO Camp” are harming the greater good, which is to make software easier, better, scalable, more reliable, and more secure, and instead turning Internet technology into an elitist world where it becomes a question not of what you know but who you know.
In Winer’s view, the very future of computing is at stake:
“We need to start doing some real investing in technology, not the BS that passes for technology investing that’s been going on for the last decade.”
In other words, what Winder fears is another Nasdaq run-up, followed by the inevitable explosion:
“But what I do want is to avoid a bloody mess,” he says. “We have work to do here. We have a bubble-pop to avoid.”
Brooklyn-born Winer, who is also the author of one of the first ever weblogs…
The bold italics were added by me- to highlight the big leap ad people need to make- it’s time to start doing real investing in your creative departments, training, molding, challenging your teams to learn how this new paradigm needs to work. It’s time for all of you to get more than six measly pages indexed in Google for your site (like McCann’s site- note McCann bills itself as the largest US agency).
Like it or not, ad agencies today are the buggy whip manufacturers of the turn of the last century. It’s an attention economy, but only for those who understand that it has to be earned, not bought. The more you understand all this, the more Howard Luck Gossage becomes relevant: “People don’t read ads, they read what interests them- and sometimes it’s an ad.”
Well said Howard, too bad you aren’t still here. The bubble’s about to pop, and the sad part is- most won’t understand why.
From the roundtable this morning, it became really clear that a lot of clubs could use help with their websites. Many people didn’t have a content management system (or even know what one is), were delaying a new site because the chapter was going through an identity changeover, didn’t take credit cards via the web (or offline either), were paying for e-mail programs, didn’t know what RSS is- or know what to use for content.
All these questions and more can be answered by inviting The Next Wave to host a seminar for your AAF chapter. We’ll give a talk at your meeting, give a seminar that you can make money on, and provide assistance in building a site that can help your club grow. We’ll share the secrets of Google, the power of categories and tagging, and answer questions about if you should be on MySpace or Facebook, what to do about your member list, job banks, event calendars, building community- all using open source software and common sense.
Best of all, the information is from someone in your business- not a web geek. We share powerful information on how to get organic search results in Google so you don’t have to spend client budget on ad words- and how ad agencies fit into the new media landscape. We’ll also share our insight on how this technology is changing brand management and the media landscape. We can demonstrate how huge budget advertising is missing a low-budget opportunity for more eyeballs and how to build a better website for every agency.
Web 2.0 isn’t going anywhere- sooner or later your ad association, be it in Honolulu or Houston, Dayton or Daytona, will have to go 2.0. We’re here to help. A day with us will make you smarter- and make your life easier in maintaining your association website.
Call today, or e-mail, or visit our seminar site Websitetology, to learn more about how we can work together to make technology your best friend.
