Werbach Sells Out to Saatchi

This morning Werbach announced that his San Francisco sustainability consultancy, Act Now, has been scooped up by none other than the lovemark-man himself: Saatchi & Saatchi's Kevin Roberts. The new company, called Saatchi & Saatchi S, in which Werbach will remain CEO, plans on bringing sustainability to the ad agency's clients, which include A-listers like P&G, Toyota, and Visa.

Fast Company

These Games Brought to You by . . .

But let’s be honest here: if the real point of sponsorship is to use the Olympics to reach potential customers — of which China has a staggering 1.3 billion — it’s hard to see what Adidas gets for its $100 million (besides a black eye in the West for refusing to speak out on Tibet). Nike and Li-Ning will be every bit as ubiquitous as Adidas. So I can’t say I was surprised when I heard, during my recent trip to China, whispers from marketing experts that expressed what no one dares say out loud: Olympic sponsorships may not be worth it.

New York Times

Desperate Chives Marketing Board Launches 'Big Bowl O' Chives In The Mornin'' Campaign

"There's nothing like a hearty, fragrant helping of chives to jump-start your day," celebrity spokeswoman Jessica Alba says in one of the new "Big Bowl o' Chives in the Mornin'" commercials, which feature the actress smiling broadly with chives stuck in her teeth.

The Onion

Top Advertisers Add Meaning to Marketing

Bridge's alternative, according to Mr. Woffington: "How do you make sure your marketing is held up to the same standard the product is? ... P&G says their products improve people's lives. But how about the marketing? Does the marketing itself improve consumers' lives? ... That's a much higher standard than just selling more product."

Trying to answer yes to that question is an approach, he said, that's helped Bridge attract talent to grow staff at double-digit rates for more than five years (currently more than 200) in a place not widely seen as a digital mecca. But it's also one Bridge believes is working for an ever-wider variety of clients, including not only P&G but ConAgra Foods, which has attracted more than 2 million visits to a healthful-lifestyle site since January, and Kroger Co., which has gotten more than 1.2 million votes on more than 35,000 designs in a contest to create the grocer's national reusable bag.

Ad Age

Innovation Advice from Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley

The boy from Chingford who puts the bite into Apple's iconic design

Apple is unique, Ive says, by being in the hardware and the software games; design permeates through everything. "We have a very clear focus that all the development teams at Apple share, a focus around trying to make really great products.

"That can sound ridiculously simplistic, almost naive, but it's very unique for the product to be what consumes you completely. And when I say the product I mean the product in its total sense, the hardware and the software, the complete experience that people will have. We push each other, we're very self-critical and we'll take the time to get the product right."

The Independent

Can a Dead Brand Live Again?

Marketers like to talk about something called brand “equity,” a combination of familiarity and positive associations that clearly has some sort of value, even if it’s impossible to measure in a convincing empirical way. Exploiting the equity of dead or dying brands — sometimes called ghost brands, orphan brands or zombie brands — is a topic many consumer-products firms, large and small, have wrestled with for years.

New York Times Magazine

Can I Take Your Order?

From Logic+Emotion

You're It.

The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people's heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.

Brand Tags

Bezos On Innovation

A: My view is there's no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough—and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about. For us, it's such a deep-seated belief, I'm not sure we have a choice.

Business Week

In the Air

Who says big ideas are rare?
By Malcolm Gladwell

The New Yorker

Dove's 'Real Beauty' Pics Could Be Big Phonies

If true, the news could be devastating to the nearly 4-year-old Dove campaign. The most famous execution to date -- and one that won both a Cyber and Film Grand Prix for Unilever at the International Advertising Festival last year -- has been the "Evolution" viral video, which shows an attractive but rumpled woman transformed through a variety of makeup, styling and retouching tricks into a billboard bombshell. The kicker: "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted."

Ad Age

Different by Design

That kind of response is generating more and more heat in the emerging field of transformation design--a hybrid of business consulting and industrial design. Firms like Humantific, whose founders are designers, apply the same process used in designing sleek MP3 players and ergonomic teakettles to unwieldy intangibles like cell-phone promotions and hospital organization, transforming their effectiveness. Along the way, the field is creating some unusual teamwork between designers and business people.

Time Magazine

Two Heads are Better than One

"The brand will be rolled out gradually on the Web and in conjunction with product launches beginning in the fall," according to Rich Walker, Intuit media relations. "This refreshed brand will place new and broader emphasis on the Intuit name. It will serve as our corporate brand and as the master brand for our small and mid-sized business products."

Under Consideration

The coming backlash over green marketing

The easiest marketing promise to make is to say you'll do something green if people consume what you sell. That you'll support one green cause or another. No one is in charge of checking out your story, and my guess is that 90% of the time, it leads to a net negative--more landfill, more carbon, more waste.

Seth Godin's Blog

P&G Boosted by Basics

Procter & Gamble Co. made its numbers last quarter, and that should be no surprise. How it did so, however, is a little more interesting, with less glamorous businesses such as diapers, paper towels and coffee pulling up results dragged down by beauty.

Ad Age

Making P&G New and Improved

Procter & Gamble is a place you'd look for wash-day miracles, not management revolutionaries. Yet A.G. Lafley, CEO since 2000, proved otherwise. He drove relentless change at the famous but once flailing company. In The Game-Changer, written with management guru Ram Charan, Lafley explains how P&G flourished by organizing around customer-driven innovation. He talked with TIME's Bill Saporito.

Time Magazine

Don't Try This At Home.

Tried & True > New & Different

Understanding, however, has lagged behind spending. It's often impossible to separate the impact of what marketers buy, such as in-store TV and radio or shopper circulars, from what they really hope to get for their money: special displays that can pay off big but often aren't explicitly purchased.

Unilever Finds That Coupons, Signs Beat In-Store Tech

Brand Obama Update

But the Obama endorsements seem not simply expressions of support, but of something more like fandom. Dan Ariely, a behavioral-economics professor at M.I.T. and author of the recent book “Predictably Irrational,” has gone so far as to compare it to romance, citing research about the early stages of dating as a comparison point: “When we get partial information about others we tend to fill in the gaps optimistically; we assume that they are wonderful, just like us and that they share our exact values and preferences.” He figures part of Obama’s charm may be the way fans are filling in the blanks.

The Art of Politics

2nd Logo for 3rd Place

This is the second time in three years Starbucks has trotted out the brown mermaid, inspired by a Norse woodcut. Back in 2006, she was resurrected to mark the chain's 35th anniversary. This time, she is a messenger for Chairman Howard Schultz, who is trying to restore some of the goodwill and warm feelings for the brand that have gone by the wayside because of increasing coffee prices, machine-made lattes, and bad press.

Starbucks' Retro Logo

Book It.

Co-authored with management consultant Ram Charan, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation focuses on how innovation has been the cornerstone of P&G's turnaround and on what lessons business can draw from Lafley's experiences. Admittedly, a huge amount has been written on innovation—so much that the very term has become a business buzzword. But The Game-Changer stands out thanks to its concrete explanation of P&G's method and the rich company examples that Lafley provides. As in other Charan co-productions, the authors employ a tag-team approach, with Lafley taking us inside P&G and Charan providing external management analysis. Still, Lafley's voice comes through clearly. "We were trying to do too much, too fast, and nothing was being done well," he says of the mess he inherited.

How P&G Pampers New Thinking

Whut, Whut.

The launch of TAG Records is part of an initiative to cultivate relationships with the urban community through the development of programs that provide opportunities for aspiring hip-hop talent, P&G said.

P&G has funky hip-hop plan

TREND: Status Stories

STATUS STORIES: As more brands (have to) go niche and therefore tell stories that aren't known to the masses, and as experiences and non-consumption-related expenditures take over from physical (and more visible) status symbols, consumers will increasingly have to tell each other stories to achieve a status dividend from their purchases. Expect a shift from brands telling a story, to brands helping consumers tell status-yielding stories to other consumers.

April Trend Briefing

Yes, We Can ... Brand.

The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news. What has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well. Politics, after all, is about marketing -- about projecting and selling an image, stoking aspirations, moving people to identify, evangelize, and consume. The promotion of the brand called Obama is a case study of where the American marketplace -- and, potentially, the global one -- is moving. His openness to the way consumers today communicate with one another, his recognition of their desire for authentic "products," and his understanding of the need for a new global image -- all are valuable signals for marketers everywhere.

The Brand Called Obama

Grillin' and Chillin'?

Kentucky Fried Chicken customers will be greeted eventually by lighted "Now Grilling" signs, starting in coming weeks in select U.S. cities. Storefront signs will be altered to promote the new product -- called Kentucky Grilled Chicken. Even the brand's ubiquitous chicken buckets will get a makeover.

"This is transformational for our brand," said Doug Hasselo, KFC's chief food innovation officer.

KFC Cooks Up Grilled Chicken

There Goes M&M's Business

The ardor of the ad business to adopt the technical tools of biometrics — measuring brain waves, galvanic skin response, eye movements, pulse rates and the like — is increasing as consumer spending, the engine of the American economy, slows.

In other words, in hard times ads must work harder to move the merchandise.

“Instead of hypotheses about what people think and feel, you actually see what they think and feel,” said Joel Kades, vice president for strategic planning and consumer insight at Virgin Mobile USA in Warren, N.J.

“I’m not such a huge fan of ad testing,” he added, but measuring biological responses is “absolutely useful.”

Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All

Who's Got Next?

Brand Next , a Wolff Olins point of view, describes how brands of the future will be very different from brands of the past. Taking an aspect of the Brand Next thinking, The Store for Tomorrow explores the idea of brands as platforms for action, helping people do more and do better.

Brand Next

DIY ... Design It Yourself

In making their personalized crests, Scion owners can choose from among hundreds of symbols, all designed by a professional graffiti artist. The symbols range from an eagle, a jester, a king’s crown and a worker’s fist to Japanese anime-style flowers, a three-person family and a yin-yang circle. Customers can download their designs and have them made into window decals or take them to an auto airbrushing shop to have them professionally painted onto their cars.

Do-It-Yourself Logos for Proud Scion Owners

Burst.

7. Synthetic Authenticity

In Authenticity (Harvard Business School Press), they argue that the virtualization of life (friends aren't friends unless you "confirm" them on Facebook; reporters are now all bloggers, and vice versa) has led to a deep consumer yearning for the authentic. America has "toxic levels of inauthenticity," Gilmore and Pine argue: most of the e-mail we get is fake. It's so difficult to reach a real person via an 800 number that we had to invent a heretofore unnecessary locution—real person—to describe the entity we are trying to reach. People live fake lives in Second Life. Corporate deceit reached epidemic levels after the dotcom bust. Depending on your politics, you might add that there were no WMD.

10 Ideas That are Changing the World

New Smokes

The Camel's New Clothes

Cheap Interaction = Advantage

Brands are perhaps the most intuitive example of cheap interaction’s atomizing hand. Yesterday, they were a potent source of advantage. Today, the game has changed: investing in traditional brands is yielding fast diminishing returns, and leading more and more players directly into value destruction. That’s why it’s not just revolutionaries like Google, but also mass-market giants like Nike and P&G, who are rethinking orthodox branding.

The Shrinking Advantage of Brands
How to Build a Brand on the Web? Ask Unilever

How Do We Do It? Volume.

In his pensive, reedy voice, Gotlieb will typically lay out his vision of the future: billions of consumers in a global bazaar of digital media, advertisers seeking them out with hyper-targeted ads, can't-miss analytics. And he will inevitably explain why his media-buying company, GroupM (WPPGY), will remain central even as the world moves online.

An Ad Man Tests the Limits

Fight for Kisses

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

Saatchi Goes Green

The goal of the venture is to establish a "sustainability agency of record for brands," said environmental activist and Act Now CEO Adam Werbach, who will lead the new unit, "as opposed to [environmental sustainability] being a philanthropic or PR afterthought."

Saatchi Opens Green Consultancy

Don't Stop Diddy, Diddy

Who among us has not considered changing our names to match the brand we originally created as an ode to ourselves?

Rebranding Diddy

TREND: The Expectation Economy

"The EXPECTATION ECONOMY is an economy inhabited by experienced, well-informed consumers from Canada to South Korea who have a long list of high expectations that they apply to each and every good, service and experience on offer.

Their expectations are based on years of self-training in hyperconsumption, and on the biblical flood of new-style, readily available information sources, curators and BS filters. Which all help them track down and expect not just basic standards of quality, but the 'best of the best'."

February Trend Briefing

Think Glolocal

"This time, Novak's idea might be the right one at the right time. The menus at East Dawning restaurants don't offer overtly American fare but still attract Chinese consumers because of the quality and service associated with an American brand. The formula developed by Yum's other banners overseas--cheap food delivered in cheerful surroundings--has provided a welcome mat for the company. Diner Frank Li, a project engineer on a trip from Suzhou, says the restaurant's link to KFC and Pizza Hut is a draw, not a drawback. 'Those places are good quality,' he says. 'You know what you're going to get. They are a very professional company that must know what it's doing, and I think the quality here shows that.'"

Kentucky Fried Rice

Lighting Up a New Identity

"A branding effort being introduced Thursday will seek to play down the full name and instead highlight the nonprofit’s initials, U.N.C.F. An updated logo will seek to communicate the changing direction of the group while putting renewed emphasis on the well-known slogan."

Revising a Name, but Not a Familiar Slogan
UNCF Case History by Landor

Now On Sale

"It's a growth rate issue, not an absolute product positioning issue. The ones they're selling aren't growing as fast as some other brands," said Bret Parrish, principal and portfolio manager at Johnson Investment Counsel in Monfort Heights.

Why is P&G on selling spree?

Are You Not Entertained?

Watch this. Smile. Chuckle. Nod knowingly. Pass it on.

The Mail on Sunday

A Good Reminder

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

— Winston Churchill

Brand U

“While a traditional approach to brand building works for products that have identical characteristics, it is difficult to apply to service organizations, and other non-profit organizations that benefit from their complex characteristics. If we follow this view with respect to colleges and universities, then we understand the necessity to get as many people within the organization as possible involved in creating experiences that provide meaning and benefit.”

Two Schools of Thought on Branding Education

Aroma-Sell Fresh

"Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an unplanned purchase of a new sweater -- even when told they were on a tight budget -- than those randomly assigned to a room with a hidden unscented candle (67 percent vs. 17 percent)"

Aroma Of Chocolate Chip Cookies Prompts Splurging On Expensive Sweaters

Book It

"Smart managers will focus on innovation during the tough months ahead and come out swinging by the end of the year. This is what Apple tends to do so look to Apple—not for its products—but for its strategy."

10 Best Books On Innovation To Get You Through The Recession.

Auto-Rad

"Brown emerged as a luxe stand-in for black in the early 2000s, when Valentino, Donna Karan, and Yves Saint Laurent, among others, showcased suits, ball gowns and knits in saturated chocolate, toffee and caramel shades; the color recently filtered into automotive preferences. In 2007, 25% of Buick Enclaves sold were painted 'Cocoa Metallic,' and BMW AG's 2009 Mini Cooper Clubman will soon hit the streets in 'Hot Chocolate,' a warm brown."

How Clothes Make the Car

We're All a Little Misunderstood

New logo? Copy.

"Xerox and Interbrand, a brand consultancy that is a unit of Omnicom Group, spent more than 18 months interviewing some 5,000 people across the globe about their associations with the Xerox name. Then they set about figuring how they could best retain the nice things it stands for (dependability and stability), jettison the not-so-nice (formal, somewhat stodgy) — and, most importantly, add in such attributes as modern, innovative and flexible."

Xerox Hopes Its New Logo Doesn’t Say ‘Copier’
Xerox, The Very, Very, Very Shiny Company

Green Bee Gone?

"Today, the couple’s quirky enterprise is owned by the Clorox Company, a consumer products giant best known for making bleach, which bought it for $913 million in November. Clorox plans to turn Burt’s Bees into a mainstream American brand sold in big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Along the way, Clorox executives say, they plan to learn from unusual business practices at Burt’s Bees — many centered on environmental sustainability. Clorox, the company promises, is going green."

Can Burt’s Bees Turn Clorox Green?

Boxed In

"Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, 'When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.' In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself."

Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike

Under New Management

"Mark Serrianne, owner and CEO for the past decade of Cincinnati's Northlich, is stepping down and selling the agency to longtime Chief Operating Officer Kathy Selker."

Northlich Ownership Changes Hands but Stays Independent

Now About That Resolution ...

Navigating New Waters

"In Roberts' formulation, the brand navigator devises an overall message, then subcontracts the work to the relevant people--interactive shops, direct marketers, and so on. He is attracted to the concept, in part, because Saatchi would get paid based on the performance of the entire campaign rather than on the hours spent making ads. That would help him extricate the agency from the flagging traditional ad business. Roberts isn't the only advertising executive scrambling to reposition his agency as a brand navigator. Big names like TBWA, BBDO, and Ogilvy & Mather are doing so, too."

Struggles of a Mad Man

ShiftHappens

Provoking thougts for a new year.

Your Moment of Zen

Finding Religion?

"While True Religion is part of a new iteration of premium-ness, it faces a very old luxury dilemma: how to keep revenue growing without undercutting that 'aspirational' image."

Outlet for Exclusivity

Snapple Re-do

"As I mentioned earlier, these bottles and the logo are slick — this is half compliment and half condemnation. Everything is very well considered and composed, from the textures in the background, to the fruit imagery, to the typography, but in everything that they have gained in execution they have lost in attitude. And, as I see it, these new bottles are perhaps a bigger reflection of an overall slump in the delivery of the Snapple we have grown accustomed to."

20 Degrees of Separation

Some Experience Required

"In this environment, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley's investment in design as a differentiator in product experience will be put to the test. Lafley has placed much emphasis on retail considerations—what he likes to describe as the "first moment of truth" with consumers. And for national marketers like P&G, point-of-sale consideration is taking on new urgency as they compete in a proliferating retail universe of SKUs (stock-keeping units) and the increasing credibility of store brands. And the company doesn't stop at packaging. Lafley has set out to make P&G as much about design as technology or price point. "

'Product Experience' Drives Performance

Color Me Blue?

"AT least one color authority, Pantone, has taken the plunge and announced its favorite color for 2008. To be sure, this news doesn’t seem as delectable as People’s Sexiest Man Alive or as snugly affirming as Time’s Person of the Year. You probably did not even know that chili pepper red was the color for 2007."

Pantone's Color of the Year Is...

Music is my Bag. Or not.

"But only the best bags make the cut. So stores, sensing a marketing opportunity, are racing to transform bare-bones bags into lavish, thick ones that will become free advertising."

Never Mind What’s in Them, Bags Are the Fashion

A Creative Approach to Education

"In fact, even within the taught arts is a hierarchy that regulates some of the arts to a lower level of importance than others. A dangerously crazy condition when we stand back and measure the importance of creative ideas in our access-flattened world."

Connecting the Dots

Rage Against the Machine

"This is no small challenge for ad agencies, particularly megasize ones like Publicis, which were cobbled together during a wave of consolidation premised on the idea that scale, not precision, was the key to success. Now Lévy and his ilk are watching smaller, nimbler shops -- especially those built around interactive work -- routinely chip away at accounts they long thought secure."

A Mad Man Gets His Head Together

TAG ... you're not It

"However, as the onslaught of holiday ads hit, there are likely to be less of these familiar refrains as many marketers are using their taglines sparingly or not at all."

Advertising: Taglines Lose Their Starring Role In Ads

So Fresh and So Clean (clean)

Some very cool new work from Pemberton & Whitefoord for new Tesco grocery Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market.

www.p-and-w.com

Power Couple

"Kathman, who has led the world's largest employee-owned brand design firm (formerly known as Libby Perszyk Kathman) for a decade, says the design business 'is a small, but global industry.' That means he and his wife - they recently marked their 25th wedding anniversary -are frequently on the road and not together. Grubow, who has led brand identity programs for Olay, Pantene and Herbal Essence, makes six trips a year to China."

Look Who's Talking

Extractable Presidential Units

Reading Tea Leaves and Campaign Logos

Wait For It ...

The 10,000 Hour Question

"The thing I find myself worrying about is 'expertise in what?'. What have I spent 10,000 hours learning? As I do more and more stuff that's not advertising I think I'll start to find out just what it is I've learned. I'm looking forward to that. But, more importantly, what are we asking people at the start, or in the middle of their careers, to spend 10,000 hours doing? Will it be any use to them 10,000 hours later? Are we making them experts in something that won't be around 10,000 hours later, or are we giving them expertise in something that will last? That seems like an important thing to wonder about."

chicken-sexing, expertise and 10,000 hours of something

TAXI!

If the new NYC Taxi logo does not seem to be the smoothest work of design, that may be because it traveled a bumpy road on its way to more than 26,000 yellow cab doors.

Reviews Trickle In for New Taxi Logo

Globally Relevant

"Ford was once one of the 10 most valuable brands in the world. They're no longer on that list, but Toyota now is. How did Toyota—and the other nine companies—do it? There are 5 characteristics that all top global brands have in common."

Why Global Brands Work

When In Doubt, Simplify. Then Simplify Just a Bit More.

"'Keep it simple, stupid.' That's the advice every executive has received on how to share strategy with employees. The subtext is often, 'Keep it simple, because your people are stupid.' But you don't need to embrace simplicity just so your people can comprehend your message. The point of simplicity is more fundamental: Simplicity allows people to act."

Analysis of Paralysis

This Would Never Happen on my Watch

Redesign of the Week

A BusinessWeek for a Busier World

Persuading the Functions

"Clearly, the job of building a design practice that spans a global enterprise like HP is at least as much about management as it is about design. Lucente has taken on the task with a deft political hand. 'At HP,' he says, 'it's all about persuasion -- making our best effort and then letting people decide whether they want to take us up on it.'"

Streamlining HP

Connecting Beyond :30 Intervals

"Many large marketers are taking huge chunks of money out of their budgets for traditional media and using the funds to develop new, more direct interactions with consumers — not only on the Internet, but also through in-person events.

"Adventurous companies like Nike have been experimenting with these alternatives since the 1990s. But now, even the most conventional marketers are making these alternatives a permanent — and ever bigger — part of their advertising budgets."

The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life

2007 MoD

Fast Company Masters of Design

Designing a Better Manager

"RitaSue Siegel, a headhunter who has placed myriad designers in upper management and executive positions, insists that all major corporations offer executive training programs to high-potential employees, including designers. She points, for instance, to Procter & Gamble (PG) where 'designers get training in memo writing, giving winning presentations, and finance for nonfinance managers.' As an example, she singles out Jon Denham, a former associate director of design for P&G hair care, whose broad business training helped him land a job as first-ever vice-president of design at another major consumer products company (a move soon to be announced)."

Wanted: VPs of Design

Onslaught

New Bravia Ad Multiplies Like Bunnies