Tak Tik Boom

Death And Advertising

As all ad contras know, the best way for a loudmouth meatball to grab some cheap headlines is to declare something "dead." The more absurd the claim, the better.

So if you want to be on the cover of Banker's Weekly, just make a speech declaring that money is dead. If you want to be published in Dairy World, write an article asserting that milk is dead. It doesn't matter that you have no facts

7 Things I Learned This Week

Last Friday I started something new called 10 Things I Learned This Week. It actually got some readership, which is rare for a Friday. So I think I'll milk this baby.

Here are 7 things I learned this week.
1. 73% of North Americans say they would rather give up their social networks than their TV.

2. In Portland, they are creating retirement homes for chickens.

3. Most depressing advertising

The Magical Power Of Advertising

One of the untold stories of the new age of marketing is the way it has lead us back to an old way of thinking .

Advertising was once thought to be magic. We had silly books like "The Hidden Persuaders" and dumb-ass movies like "The Hucksters" which propagated the nonsense that people were compliant sheep who were easily mesmerized by us diabolical ad hacks.

As time went on, a more realistic

It Didn't Take Long

On August 29, upon the retirement of Steve Jobs from his role as CEO of Apple, I wrote...
"...one of the first indications of whether Apple is capable of continuing its explosion of creative energy without Jobs at the helm may be found in its advertising. The product pipeline will take years to screw up. But the ad pipeline can be screwed up in no time...About a year from now...the

The Restaurant For People Who Don’t Like Food

In my hometown of Oakland, California, there’s a restaurant I hate.

It’s very chic, and popular with a certain type of person – a person who likes restaurants, but doesn’t like food.

Everything about it is unappetizing. It has a cheerless austerity that appeals to the guilty wealthy. The food is very artfully arranged twigs and pebbles. It’s as if the chef learned his craft working with Tinker

10 Things I Learned This Week

Since it's Friday and for some reason people don't read blogs on Friday, I thought I'd just make a list of 10 things I learned this week.

1. From Steve Harrison's book Changing The World Is The Only Fit Work For A Grown Man: legendary adman Howard Gossage never had more than 13 people in his agency.

2. People in their 20's "change" media 27 times an hour.

3. There was an unconfirmed report out

The Accountability Gap

If there’s one thing us ad hacks hate it’s accountability.

We are forever trying to find ways to inoculate ourselves from the nasty business of actually selling our clients products

We go through amazing contortions to move our clients away from hard, behavioral measures like sales, transactions, and customer counts to soft measures like awareness and attitude.

We are always on the lookout