Advertising

Letters Of Note is such a great blog you should be reading it even when the letters are not about media people. But yesterday’s letter is from advertising great David Ogilvy and in it, Ogilvy explains how he works.

It begins:

Dear Mr. Calt:

On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:

Ogilvy describes being completely ruined by distractions at the office and instead, going home to write with research material, an outline, and other background material. He talks about growling at his wife (“worse since I gave up smoking,” he adds), being terrified of failure, and his if-all-else-fails solution of drinking half a bottle of rum and listening to Handel records. He then calls himself “a lousy copywriter, but a good editor.”

In other words, just your usual creative genius. Though with an exceptionally good alcohol tolerance.

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An art director takes to the Xtranormal (talking animals) movie engine to make this clip of an art director home for the holidays trying to explain to Mom what it is, exactly, that he does. “Did you take the picture of the steak in the ad?” “No, a food photographer took the picture.” “Did you cook the steak?” “No, a food stylist cooked it.” And so on. Har har. Having a job nobody outside the ad world understands is definitely a bummer.

Want a career in advertising or marketing? Take a programming class and brush up on your math.

The most in-demand advertising careers require “hard-core quantitative, mathematical and technical skills,” as the New York Times puts it, and people with those skills can fetch six-figure salaries easily.

Advertising is becoming about analytics. About capturing data and finding trends. New hires must write code, crunch statistics, and develop Websites.

But if you’re looking at this list of skills with your jaw hanging open, thinking you’ll never be able to do all these things let alone some of them, take heart. Some recruiters are advising agencies to be realistic.

“Something has gone terribly out of whack in looking for realistic talent,” Erika Weinstein, president of the executive recruitment firm Stephen-Bradford Search, told the Times. “Many companies are looking for ‘a five-headed monster,’ focusing on creative and highly technical skills and a strong business acumen. Agencies, Ms. Weinstein said, needed to ‘get realistic not only about what they want from the candidate, but what are they going to offer.’”

Thanks to Agencyspy we’ve seen what happens when creative directors and those they direct hit a rough patch:

Ed Burgoyne, a freelance ad professional (or at least someone claiming to be Ed), has put up on eBay two pieces of “NYC advertising history,” a jacket from W+K and a bag from TAXI.

“This messenger bag is/was a “bonus,” for both me and you, since that’s all they handed out that year during the Holidays,” he says in the description.

The auction is at $20 at the time of this writing. Quite the deal for a “crappy (but warm)” coat and a messenger bag that “will fit a macbook air, or a macbook, or a few moleskin sketch books filled with ideas and concepts that will never get produced and some flash drives.”

“Items were worked hard for, although there may be some embedded tears on the right sleeve. I’m not saying these tears came from one single random event working for one particular ad agency, but it may have been from the realization that I would have to work yet another holiday weekend producing some concept that was given to me on a cocktail napkin by an ECD in a half drunken/stoned state (sent via iphone no less) who was partying at some new hip club while I was just about to leave the office. Oh, and yes, I still love advertising, working those long hours and producing ideas from crazy ECDs and creative teams, just take this stuff away from me, its been cluttering the hall closet.”

Indeed.

Actually, we don’t know who you are, dear reader. But we assume, if you have time to read this blog, you’re at least slightly less powerful than the top dog at an ad agency.

So it might be kind of amusing for you to realize that those high-up people have OKed some pretty ridiculous things lately.

Exhibit A: Goodby’s new campaign for the California Milk Processor Board, which basically equates PMSing women with crazy psycho bitches. “We are very happy with the response to the campaign so far. We knew it was going to be a little controversial,” a Goodby rep told Adweek.

Exhibit B: Tide’s new commercials that, as Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten said, “mistakenly declare their product incompatible with cleanliness:”

And that, readers, is your giggle for the day. Ta!

Thanks Big Fuel! from Big Fuel on Vimeo.

New York-based Big Fuel’s new recruitment video looks like the kind of thing that would come on between Maury and The Price Is Right, but the message is much better: instead of selling paralegal certificates, Big Fuel wants you to come work for them.

The video claims the agency is hiring in all areas, including client services, creative development, analytics, and basket weaving (though we suspect you might want to leave your crafty skills off the resume, regardless). But it’s true, there are a lot of open jobs. Many are based in New York, but some are in Detroit (Big Fuel is the agency of record for GM) and Seattle (Microsoft’s a client).

You want to be a copywriter? Community manager? How about a job where you make Powerpoints? Good luck!

(H/t AgencySpy)

Twitter promoted trends, which cost $25,000 for a day when the feature launched last year, now cost $120,000 for a day, ClickZ reports.

That’s a huge increase in just over a year, making the sell, if you’re in marketing or PR, that much harder to the folks who hold the purse strings at your company.

But out of Twitter’s 600 advertisers, Twitter’s director of revenue Adam Bain said, 80 percent come back for repeat business. So despite the price increase it must be working for Twitter’s advertisers.

At the same time, Twitter’s “promoted accounts” ad product, which allows companies to gain more followers based on a bidding system, is averaging out at $4 per new follower, Bain said.

That seems high to us.

But Bain told ClickZ it was “a pittance because the ROI is insane. …once they have a follower, they can keep marketing to that guy as many times as they want without worrying about where they are across the web or what kind of mindframe they’re in.”

Incidentally, today’s Promoted Trend is #Super8Secret, which Paramount purchased to promote “secret” preview screenings of the movie “Super 8.” Peter Kafka notes that 1) this purchase is part of a year-long marketing contract Paramount signed with Twitter, committing it to a full year of buys. and 2) the movie’s pretty good.

‘We’re back, just like that,” says former Chicago Sun-Times media columnist Lewis Lazare, using the royal we on ReelChicago.com.

Lazare was laid off from the Sun-Times earlier this year after an 11-year tenure at the paper covering advertising, marketing, and TV.

He “always told it as he saw it, in an entertaining and thoughtful manner, although his critiques stung if you were the stingee. And he always coughed up an apology on those rare occasions when it got it wrong (believe me, it happens),” wrote ReelChicago’s Ruth Ratny at the time. “Nonetheless, Lazare’s moving on leaves a huge gap in agency news coverage and adds to the impression that Chicago’s ad community is sinking slowly into obscurity, instead of boasting how big, important and impressive it actually is.”

Now, Ratny has hired Lazare to write more or less the same column for her website. “We like breaking news,” Lazare wrote, “but profiles and perspective pieces will have their place in the mix as well. We hope to keep it interesting. Relevant. Readable. And fun. Why not?”

So if you’re in the ad world you know all about Please Feed The Animals’ Erik Proulx, who was a laid-off copywriter blogging about the ad world until he got the idea to make a movie about all the other laid-off ad guys who had started new, better jobs. And now he’s not even an ad guy at all but a film director doing commercial shoots for, like, big-name clients.

He posted a blog entry recently explaining exactly how he got from there to here. Like many career paths, it’s not really straight or even vaguely linear.

Proulx started as a journalism grad(!) writing ads in an alt-weekly’s personals section for singles. (“29 yo man seeks woman for long walks along the Esplanade. Must share passion for leather masks.”) Moved into advertising by necessity. Bounced around multiple cities, multiple jobs.

And it keeps going, till it ends with Proulx directing films for Dell and Yahoo. Not bad, and definitely not what anyone would have predicted looking at Proulx’s start almost 20 years ago.

The lesson? You have no idea where you’ll end up five years from now.

Maybe that’s why we find that interview question so tough.

Hitwise crunched some numbers and found that visits to NYTimes.com were down 5 percent to 15 percent during the first 12 days after the introduction of the website’s new pay wall. However, there was actually an increase Saturday, probably thanks to readers staying on top of the possible government shutdown.

• NYT visits down as much as 15% a day since paywall debut (via Romenesko)
• Research: YouTube Beats iTunes For Consumers’ Music Attention (via paidContent)
• Brandweek, Mediaweek to be consolidated into Adweek next week (via Romenesko)
• NY Post: Regis Philbin Eyeing New Talk Show (via TVNewser)
• ASNE board elected, Ken Paulson becomes president (via ASNE)