TED curator Chris Anderson challenges the ad industry with 'Ads Worth Spreading' contest

By Eleftheria Parpis

TED curator Chris Anderson challenged the advertising industry to create "Ads Worth Spreading" at an Advertising Week session on Tuesday hosted by Jon Kamen, chairman and CEO of @radical.media.
  Advertising on the Web is largely failing, said Anderson, who invited the ad community to create digital ads that are "every bit as intriguing and inspiring as the talks that are on the [TED] site." Ten winning campaigns will be selected to premiere at TED2011, which takes place from Feb. 28 to March 4, and will replace the paid advertising on TED.com for a week. "An ad worth spreading is one that the community it is targeted at really wants to see. They like it so much that they will want to share it with their friends," said Anderson. "It might be hysterically funny, it might be gorgeously beautiful, it might just be wickedly ingenious, it might be a multimedia production or just an employee talking to the camera about her ideas, visions hopes."
  Each winning submission will have a page on TED.com, where visitors will be able to discuss and share the work. One way of thinking of an ad worth spreading, said Anderson, "is to make it look like a TED talk. You put the CEO in front of a camera and have them share what they actually care about, their values, visions for the future."

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September 29, 2010 | Comments (33)

David Kenny and the rise of the machines

By Brian Morrissey

Speaking in the same room where he announced, more than a decade earlier, that Digitas was going public, David Kenny returned to the ad industry this week in a very different role. Now president of Akamai, Kenny is fully focused on the infrastructure of digital media rather than the agency business.
  The former VivaKi managing partner believes those in media and marketing underappreciate the speed of change driven by faster and more powerful digital content delivery. In five years, high-definition video content of all kinds will be delivered through Internet protocol. What that means is a sea change for the ad world, Kenny predicted in a keynote address at the OMMA Global Conference on Tuesday, part of Advertising Week.
  The result: The Internet will become more like TV, dominated by video, and TV will be more like the Internet, with interactivity and personalization. For agencies, that means a return to the basics of creativity. "No algorithm will connect with people," Kenny said. That doesn't mean Kenny isn't enamored with technology. He noted the difference of working for a company with 44,000 employees to one with 2,000 employees and 73,000 servers.
  "Every year you pay them less," he said of servers, "they never whine, and they work on Christmas."

September 29, 2010 | Comments (17)

Mary J. Blige and Richard Branson

From New York Market Radio's "Rated R" event Tuesday at the Best Buy Theatre.
Photos by Jeffrey Ufberg.

September 29, 2010 | Comments (10)

VIDEO: Larry Woodard on advertising's rehab

Adweek's critic, Barbara Lippert, spoke to Larry Woodard, president and CEO of Graham Stanley Advertising and a director of Advertising Week, about advertising finally admitting it has some major problems—with diversity, with digital, with clients and compensation—and how to go about solving them. The first steps, he says: Acknowledge the problems, announce that you really want to change, and bring in people from the outside to help effect that change. Video after the jump.

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September 28, 2010 | Comments (28)

Lloyd Braun on his 'stupid questions' at Yahoo!

By Brian Morrissey

Hollywood exec Lloyd Braun had a memorable run as content impresario at Yahoo! from 2004 to 2006. When he was hired, he was heralded as the marriage of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His short tenure ended up being a cameo in the long slide suffered by Yahoo! Braun came in promising the I Love Lucy of the Web and ended up leaving after internal backbiting, including a memorable profile that claimed he tried to get the company to give him a plane and berated a gift-store employee over an umbrella. Braun recounted a couple of his own stories from Yahoo! on Tuesday, not surprisingly painting himself in a more positive light.

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September 28, 2010 | Comments (14)

VIDEO: Ogilvy executives on 'big dumb agencies'

Adweek's Barbara Lippert met up with Ogilvy's Steve Simpson, John Seifert and Lars Bastholm before their event on Tuesday to talk about why being a so-called "big dumb agency" might not be the worst thing in the world. Video after the jump.

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September 28, 2010 | Comments (14)

Lars Bastholm on a (small) life in advertising

“It is wildly disappointing to me that ad execs don't live the life they were rumored to. I crossed the ocean for that.”

—Lars Bastholm, chief creative officer for Ogilvy & Mather New York, at the agency's "Inside a Big Dumb Agency" panel.

September 28, 2010 | Comments (14)