TheSpunker - by Ben Popken. Published by Gattaca, Inc.

Neil French's Parthian Shot

Neil French composed a full reply, finally, to October’s sexist comment scandal. It’s awesome and done up in his classic copywriting style and will be published in the Trade Press. He retrenches, but he’s definitely chastened and even apologizes, but not for what you think. You get to learn a new word, anoraked, meaning “hooded,” as in “those dastardly cloaked bloggers.” Good for him for making a full response but demerits for waiting and seeing how it played out before doing so.  Truly revealing, however, is the intro prefacing the ad on his site...word to Mr. French, they're called it's femi-nazis, not feminist nazis...  via. archival version.

Fenske serves it up

Mark Fenske has a new post up, supportive advice to his VCU students. It makes you feel all nice inside like the deep fried turkey his brothers are cooking here. Nice that he's still staying connected even though he left this semester to go work on Coke at W&K.

So that's how they get all their press...

Adpulp: "John Keehler of Random Culture says let's give credit where credit is due. He points out, rightly, that Campfire and The Barbarian Group, played huge roles in the development of Audi's "Art of the Heist" campaign and BK's Subservient Chicken campaign, respectively. Yet, McKinney and Crispin Porter seem to get all the accolades. Can't we all just drive our Audis to Burger King and bask in the glory?"
Contagious: "Is the advertising industry like a giant Russian doll, with networks being held up by regional offices, regional offices being held up by boutique rich media hotshops, and boutique rich media hotshops being held up by individual geniuses?"
Debate continues at Soflow.

Brandweek Launches Newsletter

Brandweek launched an advertising email newsletter. Undoubtedly it will be both boring and possessing a greater readership than this blog.

WOMMA Training on Auction Block, Slips

WOMMA is raising $20,000 for charity by Ebaying passes to its upcoming Word of Mouth Basic Training. The confo is in Orlando on January 19-20, 2006, a 2-day fete of "learning the best ethical word of mouth marketing practices." WOMMA opted to display no product shots on the auction pages, perhaps they just feel like violating basic marketing tenets in a display of ethical buzz marketing? It would be nice to attend and learn what 'ethical' word-of-mouth marketing is, why it matters, and how massaging it is more cost-effective than making a superior product.

Typepoo

The Spunker is livid. Typepad, SixApart’s hosted blog platform, which The Spunker uses, was down this morning until 5pm EST. As you can see, even after being up, all the old images are unavailable until this weekend. Lame! Typepad blogs displayed embarrassingly week-old posts on their landing page.  Typepad is unequivocally the best and easiest blog service out there but I’m seriously considering going through the hassle of installing the free single-user Moveable Type platform, which means Typepad will lose out on my monthly fee. I especially don’t appreciate that there’s no way to put a notice on my page informing readers that I’m not just being lazy. This comes after a surge in degraded service about a month ago which prompted Sixapart to offer rebates to its customers. If Sixapart can’t respond to demand surges by scaling its servers and systems, it may go the way of the Teddy Ruxpin.  Something satisfying about using their own system to lash out, like Wuzzadem, "First of all, thanks for giving me a break from posting to my blog, or for that matter reading any other TypePad blogs for the last 16 hours or so. I needed a break from posting, and eliminating TypePad blogs from my reading choices allowed me to focus on all the great non-TypePad blogs out there."

Drop Shadow Hell

"There's nothing worse than seeing an object with a drop shadow effect," soft-rants Kenny Bania, "It makes the entire piece of work look like a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out...All you have to do is look around you. Pick out an object in the room you are sitting in right now. Notice how it has two shadows (an umbra and a pen-umbra...). Notice how the shadows react to the positioning of the light source. Notice how they react to the surrounding surfaces. Now recreate it. It's not that hard." Anonymous replied, "I think the shadows in this shot are completely real. Obviously, the cow was tipped over onto white seamless."

MSNBC Buys Ton of Blogads

In a landmark moment for the Blogads network, MSNBC bought ads this weekend on over 800 blogs (including this one), the biggest Blogad buy ever. According to Henry Copeland, Blogads CEO, this is more ads than Blogads.com sold in the entirety of 2003. The ads will promote MSNBC's "digital day" this Wednesday, where 3 back to back show will cover internet viralness, porn and internet addiction. More on the buy at NYT. Show teasers here. Meanwhile, Paul Berger of the Online Journalism Review writes, ""a traditional ad campaign is deemed successful if the response rate is 0.5 percent feedback. Budget's Blogads campaign was 17 times that." The bottom line? Give us money. We're more than worth it.

Mini USA - Clingy?

The lighter side of Butler Shine & Stern's Mini Cooper account win, NYT, "Ms. Hardy and Mr. McDowell (Mini USA marketing execs) notified Butler, Shine's employees that they won the review in a nontraditional way: A bulldog was sent into the agency's office, wearing a collar decorated with clues to the decision written on replicas of California vanity license plates. Some of the clues: "W8ZOVR," for "Wait's over" "GR8JOB," for "Great job"; and "RURED E," for "Are you ready?" - to take on the account. The final mock license plate invited the agency's employees to join the Mini USA executives at a nearby restaurant for a party." Really? Sounds gay. The bulldog should've also had one of those barrels around the neck filled with M&M minis. That'd be even more precious. Just like the cuter, Mini Cooper! As Adpulp says, "After being left at the prom by the prettiest agency in class, it looks like Mini wants to prove they're a fun client to work with."

Are You a Rattle or a Needle?

Seth Godin is a father figure. Sometimes overly finger-wagging and "sage." Other times, right on, like while ruminating on marketing/ advertising in The Needle, the Vise and the Baby Rattle: "The needle uses...pressure to a tiny, carefully selected area and you're going to get penetration...The vise is about providing increasing amounts of pressure over the entire area...agencies have been backed into a corner and mostly do [baby] rattling." But Seth, the rattles are so pretty and jewel encrusted.