This week's issue of Ad Age is their whopper 75th Anniversary issue, titled "75 years of ideas."
Sidebar 1: That's 75 years of ideas...not BIG ideas
Sidebar 2: if ideas have been around for 75 years, why is it only recently that coming up with them has become such a hot topic?
Anyway I digress...this post is about how agencies typically fail at doing the thing they are meant to be best at...advertising (themselves)
I decided to critique the slew of agency creatives. Only a few take the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone...stroke Ad Age's ego AND promote themselves. Why should the two be mutually exclusive?
If you take a gander through the issue at hand, you'll see pearlers such as these:
- Publicis - extracted the word "ideas" from the name Advertising Age. Cute idea...but surely you could have purchased a full page instead of one half? Isn't that endemic of the advertising business today...big ideas at half the price!
- McCann Worldgroup - quite beautiful copy-heavy ad which might have made David O smile (oops, wrong agency). Pity about all the TM's (you'll have to read it...)
- TBWA prints, "wow, Ad Age, you're, like, older than Lee" - total insider/esoteric. I get it, but I'm not exactly sure that I have anything.
- Saatchi & Saatchi prints a whole list of big events from the past 75 years including TiVo, liposuction and Y2K, but fails to mention the departure of Mike Burns and the "Saatchi 17"
- Grey posts a mug of Ed Meyer, with the words, "trust me. Life begins at 75" - it does when you get a golden parachute of a gazillion dollars and shitloads of your employees get laid off. Give me a break
- Y&R does a good job at printing "Advertising Ageless"...if only they could be that confident about themselves
- DDB does a Grey and TBWA through a self-created clutter, using tons of Ad Age headlines about DDB's favorite subject...themselves
- BBDO shows a sublime harmony between media and creative by purchasing a spread and with nothing else on the pages except some creases, uses the following line, "what's a few wrinkles between friends"
- JWT (my personal fave), did something completely different
That's not wasted space you're seeing...it's actually white space. In fact all you see is the URL www.tellthemyourself.com and JWT's logo. The pithy attempt both succeeds in coming good on their promise to reinvent themselves (drive to web; move away from the 30-second spot) as well as demonstrating pretty clearly that "it's not about us, it's about you all"
The only missed opportunity here was that once you input your wishes, that's about it...no community board to view other posts and compare notes.
jJ
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