Advertising

This email is probably fake, but we kind of love it anyway.
Blogger Leo says he got this from a friend who works at an ad agency in Chicago. Supposedly the friend received this farewell e-mail:

"I'll spare everyone the cliche farewell and share my real thought[sic] instead."

The top ten list includes "I've put on a solid 15lbs since I took this job. Nobody commented on my weight gain but you said it with your eyes." and "I've gotten 3 job title promotions since I've been here but no raise. I'll bet if I asked to be promoted to Senior Media Planner Ninja-Czar, I'd get it with a pay freeze until 2010."

It's not all that funny, really, but only because it's true.

P.S., the poster of the e-mail blacked out the company name but did so uncompletely. Does this look like the beginning of a Chicago agency to y'all?

WPP Chief Executive Martin Sorrell says that the ad industry will never be the same.

While most ad execs are in agreement that the worst is over, nobody knows when things will really bounce back. Clients have gotten used to paying less, reports the Wall Street Journal, and the pressure is still on to keep prices low.

"There is no one in the industry whose clients haven't said, 'We are under pressure, so you have to cut fees,"' David Sable, vice chairman and chief operating officer of Wunderman, a direct-marketing firm owned by WPP, said recently. Some marketers have even slashed prices retroactively, meaning that they're getting paid less for work they already completed.

Yesterday WPP reported a 48% drop in first-half profit to $177.3 million.

Contrary to what economists are saying and what media forecasters have predicted, media buyers and planners don't see the recession ending this fall.

A new survey from Media Life magazine shows that just 12 percent of planners and buyers think the recession's over.

Half of respondents said business at their agency hasn't gotten any better over the past six months, and four percent reported a noticable uptick in business.

Those surveyed predicted overwhelmingly that the ad economy would rebound in the second quarter of 2010, which feels (we'd like to add) years away.

Check out the full survey results at Media Life.

Oh, diversity. Such a hot-button issue. But it's one that draws eyeballs (and feet), as more than 950 people showed up to hear Ad Age's 2009 Women to Watch honorees give an hour-long roundtable discussion on getting ahead in the business.

Tiffany Cosel, Crispin Porter & Bogusky's VP-creative director, said that until recently, her world was like a real-life version of Mad Men.

"The field is wide open now for women creatives, but there's a fine line to walk," she said. "You have to walk this tightrope while still being seen as feminine and aggressive. Women don't need to be like men, we just need to be confident and strong. Ultimately, all it comes down to is the ideas."

Another perspective: "Advertising in general has had a problem with diversity," Vida Cornelious, a former creative director for DDB, Chicago, who recently took on a similar role at GlobalHue to focus on multicultural marketing. "But the cultural nuances and the ethnic perspective of where we're headed as a country made me want to be a part of what's next."

Wieden & Kennedy in London is launching a "talent hub" in September for 12 people with non-advertising backgrounds to work solving W&K client problems and take on clients of its own.

The project, called Platform, isn't officially called an internship, but the staffers can work there for a maximum of nine months, be paid fairly low wages, and have the prospect of being hired on at W&K full-time after. Sounds like an internship to us.

Platform's an outgrowth of a smaller project which employed four people without advertising backgrounds to do basically the same stuff.

"[Clients] love the fact that we are experimenting," Sam Brookes told AdAge. "It's exciting for them—they have nothing to lose and are getting added value. The people involved tend to be culturally curious, passionate and keen to prove themselves, which makes them very prolific."

The pay is £250 a week, which in London, doesn't go very far, but it's better than the agency's Portland, Ore., intern program where 12 students pay to work there.

Interested? Visit platform.wk.com, but you'll have to sell yourself: candidates need to solve problems and post a video résumé just to be considered.

The ad market doesn't look quite as bleak from outside the States, Media Life reports. London-based media agency ZenithOptimedia forecasts worldwide advertising growing by 1.6 percent this year, after an 8.5 percent drop this year.

Of course, this forecast also predicts that North America won't recover until 2011. Some analysts here had predicted the second half of 2010 or even sooner...

Here, after the jump, are excerpts from MediaLife's Q&A with ZenithOptimedia's head of publications Jonathan Barnard. See how he knows we're bottoming out and whether newspapers can return to their 2007 levels (answer: yes but no!).

continued...

Local mobile advertising is growing, and fast, so maybe that's where you want to be in the coming months? Newspaper groups like Belo, Hearst, MediaNews Group and Cox think so— they've all inked deals with a company called Verve Wireless, which publishes and monetizes mobile content. Verve now "mobilizes" 450 media properties and covers the top 200 DMAs in the U.S.

Mobile advertising as a whole is predicted to jump 26 percent this year while overall marketing spending drops 7 percent. And Microsoft is also getting in on the mobile search party. Corporate VP Scott Howe believes that mobile advertising will grab 5-10 percent of total media spending in the next five years, which partially explains why Microsoft's just-revamped Bing search engine is aimed partially at capturing mobile search users (it takes fewer clicks to search).

Digital ad agency Sapient Corp. is buying traditional agency Nitro Group LLC, in what the Wall Street Journal calls a reversal of the recent trend of trad agencies buying digital shops.

It used to go like so: Traditional Agency realizes that all of the money it used to be getting was going to the upstart digital kids. Unwilling or unable to build itself its own digital practice, Traditional Agency finds a nice digital firm and snaps it up for a few mil.

Now, digital firms are being asked to cover the traditional side as well as marketers look to consolidate, Vidya Drego, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc., told the WSJ. And again, they're not willing or able to build up their own traditional skills fast enough, so it's acquisition time.

Sapient paid about $50 million in a combination of cash and stock for Nitro.

Via AgencySpy: BBDO Detroit has confirmed that it is sending about 425 of its 450 employees on a two-week unpaid furlough ("break") this month. Just 25 employees or so are remaining to support BBDO North America's other accounts, and of that 25, some are getting a week's furlough as well.

"According to one source," AgencySpy writes, "spirits are high, noting 'it's better to have 2 weeks off than 52.'" Indeed, just two years ago the Detroit location of the massive worldwide ad behemoth employed 1,200 people, according to Hoovers.com. Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

We're always talking about how media companies need to reinvent themselves to survive in the new world, but this is a bit extreme:

We got this press release last night. It begins:

"Gyro Worldwide, the Philadelphia ad agency known for its iconoclastic makeovers of some of the world’s largest brands, is undergoing a metamorphosis into a new creature, like caterpillar becoming a butterfly."

Gyro, the release says, is now Quaker City Mercantile. They have a kick-ass logo. And now instead of "just" working on ad campaigns for other companies, QCM is getting its fingers in its own business lines--it's bought a stake in a brewery and is launching a new drink it calls Root.

Founder Steve Grasse has purchased a farm in New Hampshire where he'll experiment with growing "artisanal products" that QCM will then sell.

What's the impetus behind all this?

“The go-go excesses of the millennium is over," Grasse said. “Now America needs to get back to fundamentals—hard work, brilliant inventions, and the manufacture of useful things. After all, the ‘manu’ in manufacture comes from the Latin root manus. Manus means hand. I’m ready to move out to the country and make stuff with my hands..... “I aspire to be a true Renaissance man. A pre-robber baron capitalist in the tradition of Franklin, Jefferson and Washington."

Well, that's a reinvention if we ever saw one.