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The world's worst advertising agency scope of work defined by a marketer
I know that no one except lawyers, and some procurement people enjoy reading contracts, but in fact contracts are interesting and important documents as they define the terms and conditions of a relationship between two parties. My legal friends tell me that most litigation is due to the variations of interpretation of the language within the contracts and disagreement over the meaning of those interpretations and the consequences and implications. Therefore imagine my surprise and horror when asked to review a current agency contract worth several million dollars which defined the scope of work of the agency as: “To provide the strategic, creative and production implementation to fulfil the advertising requirements of the <company> as directed by the Marketing Department”. While it is short and simple and could be seen as an excellent description of the services the agency is to provide, it is no “scope of work”.Cannes has wrapped, and that means it is Lion counting time. While big countries such as USA, England, Brazil or Germany can be proud of their mountains of shiny metal, one tiny nation regularly defies the odds: New Zealand. In 2011 Kiwis pocketed 1 Lion per 155,989 citizens. And since they enjoy taking the piss out of themselves as well as sticking it to the Australians, here is a fun film advertising their national ad award (Axis).
The Most Creative Country In The World
Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr The only three true job interview questions are: 1. Can you do the job? 2. Will you love the job?
Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions
Warren Buffett On Housing Market: I Was 'Dead Wrong'
OMAHA, Neb. — Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Saturday that he was "dead wrong" with a prediction that the U.S. housing market would begin to recover by now, but he remains optimistic about the nation's economy. In his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Buffett said he is sure housing will recover eventually and help bring down the nation's unemployment rate. But he did not predict when that will happen. Investors eagerly await the letter from Buffett, 81, the so-called Oracle of Omaha, who built a roughly $44 billion fortune by following a steadfast, no-nonsense investing strategy. Buffett said housing "remains in a depression of its own," but he predicted, in typical plainspoken style, that the housing market will come back because some human factors can't be denied forever.The Credit Card Is The New App Platform
This is a guest post written by Reid Hoffman , Ali Rosenthal and James Slavet from Greylock Partners . Credit and debit cards are ubiquitous, but they’re mostly pretty dumb. That’s about to change. Over 170 million people in the U.S. have credit cards, and the average card holder has 3.5 of them.
Next time you cut your finger and need an adhesive bandage, you could save someone's life in the process. Not your own life, of course—unless that paper cut is particularly deep. You could save someone else's life—someone who needs a bone-marrow transplant—thanks to Graham Douglas, a creative at Droga5. Douglas has come up with an ingenious way of spurring marrow-donor registrations—he's getting Help Remedies to package donor kits with its adhesive bandage products. All you need is a drop of blood to complete the registration—a drop that may well be available if you're reaching for a bandage. Help Remedies—whose strange and compelling advertising we've written about before —introduced the product on Monday.
Droga5 Creative Invents Adhesive Bandages That Save Lives
Ranging from ‘WTF’ weird to ‘offensive-on-so-many-levels’ weird, these beer commercials come to you from across the world and the internet. Note that we use the criteria ‘strange’, ‘beer’ and ‘commercial’ very loosely, and please also note that numbers 6 and 3 contain blood. On that note, we bring you this instalment of Marketing ‘s Top10 – the strangest beer commercials we could find: 10. Japanese beer for kids
Top10 strangest beer commercials
Banks Pushing Plastic Again?
Popular Today in Business: All Popular Articles Finance By GalTime.com , Published February 13, 2012 Could it be a positive sign of the economic times?
The Nike+ Fuelband is a wristband that uses an accelereometer to track the wearer's activities throughout the day. It can measure time, steps, calories and something called "NikeFuel" which the company says "is a normalized score that awards equal points for the same activity regardless of physical makeup." At the announcement in New York yesterday, Lance Armstrong, the former professional cyclist, said: “What’s great about the idea of NikeFuel and the FuelBand is the way it provides real information and numbers to show how much people are doing all day, every day. "That’s what will get people challenging themselves to do more and better their own scores. It’s a tool to get people more active.” Users of the FuelBand can set daily targets for their activity.
Nike announces FuelBand smart wristband
12 Social Loan Opportunities - From Youth-Oriented Finances to Collateral-Free Microcredit (CLUSTER)
In the early 1990s, Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank, which at the time -- due to its social loan opportunities -- revolutionized the way in which business people consider people in the Majority World as a profitable market in and of themselves. The Grameen Bank uses a system of peer-pressure to allow for collatoral-free microcredit. By creating innovative and purpose-driven products, loan providers targeting the bottom of the pyramid prove that it pays off -- socially and economically. That profit, however, is not the only bottom line. Social and environmental factors are increasingly important, of course in the social business space, but also for corporates who are merging toward a middle-ground. This top list of social loan opportunities explores a different way to lend whether it be through community, microfinance or an apt mix of both.
Editor’s note : Contributor David Kirkpatrick the author of The Facebook Effect and founder of the Techonomy Conference , taking place Nov. 13-15 in Arizona. It’s no secret to most readers at TechCrunch that technology is changing the world. Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of people who don’t get it. Many of them, even more unfortunately, are important leaders in business, other powerful institutions, and⎯most⎯governments. To meet the challenges that face us⎯whether as leaders of organizations, as leaders of countries, or as the global community addressing our collective challenges⎯we will only be successful if we unreservedly embrace technology and innovation as essential tools. For those of us who believe in the vast potential of technology to solve problems, it is both an exciting and a frustrating time.
How To Be An Optimist In A Pessimistic Time
Today being Wednesday, the odds are better than any other day you’ll share this post with someone else. Or so say the stats from social sharing service AddThis , one of several it compiled into an infographic. Other interesting stats? People tend to share the most around 9:30 Eastern Time (so we cunningly timed this post for just before that peak moment), 75% of clicks on a share will happen within the first day that the content is shared Most users click within 2 minutes of a share Copy-and-paste to share can be used up to 10 times more than those social sharing buttons out there
Infographic: How, When & Where People Share Content
by Shiv Singh | 11:45 AM November 10, 2011 Television advertising has undergone significant changes in the last 30 years. However, it is arguably on the verge of its greatest changes ever. From where I sit as the Global Head of Digital at PepsiCo Beverages, charged with navigating our brand's foray into the digital world, I see three big changes: --The value we put on an advertisement will change as we seek to account for engagement metrics in the pricing.
TV Ads' New Digital Role - Shiv Singh
Your smartphone is an incredibly powerful tool--one that we mostly waste by just using to make phone calls and check email. But it’s really an advanced bundle of sensors that is with us nearly 24 hours a day, collecting massive amounts of data. Doctors and health professionals are only now starting to understand the opportunity this data can provide. Take a new app that helps silently identify diabetes patients who might be slipping with their treatments. Almost one in 10 people in the United States suffer from diabetes (and millions more people are on the brink of getting the disease). Having diabetes can often mean developing mental health issues, including stress and anxiety.