Do as I say ...

They are paid to sell others' brands, but how do ad agencies sell themselves? Chris Green finds out

How adland sells

Next Gen.

You thought the Boomers were conspicuous consumers? Watch out—here come The Millennials

The Global Millennial Generation

In Sync?

Godin can be light on details; he's better at painting the big picture. But something is happening here, and you had better know what it is. He sounds the alarm for those whose idea of New Marketing is a gloppy company blog. "There's a whole new set of rules," Godin told TIME. "Let me not just try to buy some sizzle. Let me rethink what it means to be in business, to run an organization." A tall order, but this clever book is a good place to start.

Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?

ZOG On

Procter & Gamble Co. will eliminate 15% of its general-manager positions and an unspecified number of underperforming brands while keeping overall employment flat to negative, in a bid to accelerate productivity amid rising commodity costs and tougher competition.

P&G's New Austerity Plan: A Small-Scale Restructuring

Gen Y

A new entry in the bottled water market, Y Water, comes fresh out of Venice Beach ~ has a playful bottle designed by Yves Behar ~ and can be built into crazy structures… oh, and they are also targeted at kids, and are organic, low calorie drinks chock full of vitamins and minerals! “Y Water’s attention-getting names—Muscle Water, Bone Water, Immune Water, and Brain Water—communicate the idea that the ingredients are the building blocks of healthier bodies.”

Y Water
ywater.us

Obey Obama

The reason for this design rut is simple: conventional campaign imagery is usually produced by mainstream advertising agencies slavishly following old formulas lest they make a truly novel statement that might offend a single voter.

Beyond Red, White and Blue

Air Neutral?

The Beaverton, Ore., company's new sneaker is neither the first nor the only shoe in the industry to be touted as "green." For Nike, though, the Air Jordan XX3 is at the forefront of a broader effort that is intended to please not just environmentalists and jocks but also Wall Street. It represents a systemic shake-up of the company that is supposed to result in manufacturing operations that are both carbon neutral and cheaper.

New Nike Sneaker Targets Jocks, Greens, Wall Street

Done.

All in favor of executional elements as connective tissue, say Aye.

Here ... but not Here.

In Your Face, Colonel

Touting the Nati

"We have an international reputation of being a center for advanced brand design - an aggregation of large firms: LPK, Interbrand, Landor and Deskey - many companies here with the scale and reach to manage complex design branding initiatives."

The cradle of brands

The WO POV

"But surely it's possible for designers to possess the knowledge-based skills that modern businesses require, and yet still produce work that is engaging and different? If there's anyone who can claim to have consistently done this, it's Wolff Olins."

Wolff Olins' Intuitive Branding

King of Hoaxes

"Burger King has been conducting deprivation studies for several years, getting small groups of people considered core customers by the fast-food chain to voluntarily forgo eating Whoppers. As part of the experiment, the people kept food diaries so Burger King could analyze what they ate instead."

Hey, No Whopper on the Menu?!
"No More Whoppers"
The Burger Switch

Telling the Brand Story ... With Clay!

Squandering RAZR's Edge

"Somehow along the way, they could not disseminate the success of the RAZR and the story ironically becomes a case study for the limitations of design. I still believe design can be transformational, but it cannot be divorced from the corporate culture or values that a company believes in."

The Power + Limitation of Design

Anti-Tipping Point Arguments About to Tip

"In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure."

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Super Bowl Ad Critique

Deconstruction ... Now With Febreze!

"To assess the Tide logo in the contemporary marketplace, I consulted J. Duncan Berry of Applied Iconology, a consulting firm. Berry has a Ph.D. in art history from Brown and for a time taught there and at the Rhode Island School of Design, but these days his specialty is semiotic analysis of package design for consumer-product companies. What this means is that he applies the close-reading analytical skills you might associate with deconstructing a novel or a work of art to the breaking down of logos and packaging to their 'constituent parts' and 'indexical signs.' He seems to enjoy it."

Clean Look

Terry Tate Forever

The 25 Most Memorable Super Bowl Ads

Master of His Domain

"His mastery was essential during an internal battle in 1984 over the naming of the new liquid version of Tide laundry detergent. Usually, when P&G developed a substantial innovation of an existing product, the new product got a new and entirely different name, but in this case, Lafley saw good reason for breaking precedent."

P&G: Using the Past to Invent the Future