As we hoped, more information on the AKQA situation we reported yesterday has come to light.
We told you about a creative director at the agency who walked out when some of his team was let go. Well, the mystery addie is Jerome Austria.
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The move apparently had something to do with ECD Lars Bastholm, “who reportedly is horrible at managing people and does nothing but send cool web links and take credit for work he had no part of.”
It takes a lot of guts to stand up for the people you work with like this, especially in the commercial design world where it’s a lot easier to keep your head down.
Check out Jerome’s portfolio for some truly brilliant integrated advertising campaigns.
Andrew Bush’s Vector Portraits are an incredible collection of “photographs made while travelling 50 to 70 mph in Los Angeles and other parts of the Southwestern United States” from 1989-1997. [via Neatorama]
Raw for 30 Days is kind of like a reverse Super Size Me. The film follows several people with “normal American diets” and type-2 diabetes who undergo a drastic lifestyle change as they go on a completely raw diet. Within a few weeks they don’t need their insulin shots, and by the end of one month, they effectively cured their own diabetes. They also became much happier and emotionally balanced as a result. Check out the trailer above.
“Are you in the campaign or commitment business?” Joseph Jaffe asks as he rips into Sprint, Sony, T-Mobile, and Starbucks for their “Social Media Mistakes.” Basically Jaffe’s point is marketers and brands should engage every customer genuinely by approaching marketing as a conversation (with two equal sides) rather than a one way street.
Practically what that means is: less lawyers, don’t fake it, follow through, and address customers directly. Jaffe argues for shifting money from the media budget to staff customer service representatives and to be agile as new opportunities to extend a brand appear independently from campaigns. Good stuff.
If Advertising Age let me embed their Brightcove player I would have posted the video. Here’s a link.
In case you missed it, here’s what’s been going on with oil:
The oil industry continues to make record profits as prices at the pump skyrocket. Congress summons oil execs to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain their “exorbitant profits.” Oil execs claim it’s actually the restrictive policies of Congress that are causing the high gas prices, specifically to open up more federal lands “and allow us to responsibly produce more American oil and natural gas, which can supply us for decades to come.”
When you think about the fact that we’ve got China and Cuba drilling closer to the United States — the coastal United States — when American companies aren’t allowed to drill. It’s just insane.
Today was supposed to be a day for the record books: Mozilla hopes to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Unfortunately the Mozilla site wasn’t ready for the million or so users who pledged to download Firefox 3 today. For several hours after the scheduled 1pm release the site wouldn’t even load.
And then there’s the odd moment when the Firefox 3 page was up, but still linked to Firefox 2. Read that fine print.. By 5pm EST on Tuesday, the Firefox 3 download page was down, and was back to Firefox 2. By 8pm EST they seem to have finally sorted things out.. What happened?
“Hulk. Smash!” Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk’s USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk crush all hopes of entertainment. Hulk in boring film. Film co-written by star. Edward Norton. Norton in it. Norton write it. Norton not need gamma-radiation poisoning to get big head. Thing is: Hulk head weirdly small. Compared with rest of big green body.
