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It looks like everyone is going to have to start thinking outside their narrow confines if they are going to be successful in 2009. The same old thinking in silos is just no longer going to cut it. It's not what clients want and it's not what's going to keep your agency profitable.

The NYT ran a story yesterday about LG working creatively with Conde Nast to develop print advertising. While creative honchos may snub their noses and say the work sucks, they are missing the point.

Its partnership with Conde Nast makes a lot of sense; the magazine publisher has celebrity PR agents knocking on its doors 24/7, trying to get stories. There's no way the magazine can meet all these requests, but it can siphon off the good ones to its creative department and find ways to help these celebs partner with brands. It's a great use of resources and access.

Then there's the recently breaking story about the Michelle Obama fashion blog, Mrs O. Various critics seem to be up in arms that it's the work of an ad agency, in fact, a subsidiary of BBH. Who cares? If the content is good and people want to read it, does it matter who is behind it?

In 2009 and beyond, it's not about borders and boundaries, but good ideas that can appear anywhere and be created by anyone. The trouble is much of our business still lives in the past, a past that's defined by old rules and old paradigms of creativity.

It's clear that in the coming 18-24 months, those with inability to grasp the new model and seize the myriad of opportunities that now exist, will simply be left behind.


Posted by Ed Cotton Boing-Boing is the breakout blog, the one that most people have heard and perhaps even visited.

The wacky commentators that trawl the web daily for their weird, funny and compelling stuff are now breaking out of their blog home and moving onto and into a new format for them, one called television.

The team promise that this experiment will not be television as usual.

Here's the first taste of fun, so you can decide for yourself.




Posted by Ed Cotton It appears that PR companies are way ahead of the curve in coming to terms with understanding bloggers as an important audience.

It's interesting to see what this means for media planners and buyers.

Are bloggers on media schedules?

Who is dealing with them?

Do they get forgetten about and left to the PR agency to handle?

If it's about doing more with blogs than running banners, then there's some potential overlap here.

Ogilvy PR recently took the unusual and important step of issuing a code of ethics that defines how they plan to work with bloggers.

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea> for every social media campaign.
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

It will be interesting to see what bloggers make of this.

Via Karl at Experience Curve


Posted by Ed Cotton