This Saturday, as I watched USC thrash the overrated Ohio State football team (sorry Gabe), I couldn’t help but wonder how the ad business might benefit from having referees and umpires watch over the creative process. The following are some of the calls I suspect we might see if such supervision came to pass: 
Holding: client or account exec doesn’t forward necessary information to complete assignment.
Penalty: creative team gets an extra 5 days to complete assignment.
False Start: assignment started before creative brief approved by client.
Penalty: current deadline is void. new schedule to start once brief is approved.
Delay of Game: creative team…
Recall my blog back in March of this year, “CP + B Slated to Combat Microsoft’s Humiliation” where Microsoft announced that my former employer, Crispin Porter + Bogusky of Miami and Denver landed the $300 million account to restore the Windows brand.
Here is one of the first ads rolled out this week during the NFL opening night. The ad stars Comedian, Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft Corp. Chairman, Bill Gates.
Crispin is known for their unconventional creative strategies, where viral marketing and the buzz surrounding their innovative concepts propel their campaigns into the limelight.
This is the first of what I’m expecting to be several…
For a business built on creativity, agency thinking can be pretty uncreative; we staff up when we win business and staff down when we lose it. Besides being an incredibly demoralizing process for everyone, this crazy job rollercoaster runs completely counter to the challenge of finding, hiring and nurturing creative talent.
I recently read about an agency in Atlanta called the SuperGroup who came up with a much better — and much more creative — solution to layoffs. Instead of letting people go when business is slow, they encourage their creatives to pursue their own creative endeavors. Employees were told that as…
