1.Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman, Crispin Porter + Bogusky
He shattered the rules of 20th century advertising with campaigns that resemble multi-media hijinks, rather than commercials. Brands like Burger King, Old Navy, and Microsoft flock to his Miami-Boulder shop for his brand of irreverence.
2.Lee Clow, Global director of media arts, TBWA\Worldwide
The originator of West Coast-style advertising has spent 45 years elevating the humble slogan to Hollywood-level entertainment. In addition to dreaming up the Energizer Bunny and the Taco Bell chihuahua, Clow's also been Steve Jobs' ad henchman for the past two decades.
3. Jeff Goodby, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
The former copywriter led one of the industry's most graceful transitions from traditional shop to new age interactive agency.
4. Dan Wieden, Co-founder, Wieden + Kennedy
The creative mind behind decades of Nike work built one of the largest independently owned ad agencies in the world.
5.Robert Greenberg, CEO and global chief creative officer, R/GA
The special effects geek had the foresight to evolve his 1970's production house into one of the most technology-driven interactive powerhouses on Madison Avenue.
6. Michael Francis, CMO, Target Corp
He led one of the most radical reputation facelifts in retail history by transforming the discount big box chain into an icon of design chic.
7. Robert Saville & Mark Waites, Co-founders/Co-Creative Directors, Mother/London
The creative entrepreneurial Brits (along with their other cofounders) kick-started the new model for the 21st-century ad shop more than a decade ago.
8. Paul Woolmington, Founding Partner, Naked Communications
The media maestro successfully disrupted the U.S. advertising scene with his agency's approach to media agnosticism.
9. Greg Hahn, Executive Creative Director, BBDO
One of the most awarded copywriters in the industry continues to give a human voice to corporations like Citibank, eBay and HBO.
10. Noah Brier, Head of Strategy, Barbarian Group
His knack for guerilla social media anthropology continues to inform interactive advertising campaigns for brands like GE and Dove.
After yesterday's FBI raid, Obama's new CIO, Vivek Kundra, is suddenly taking "a leave from his position," reports NBC. FBI agents raided Kundra's former office, where he was CTO of the Washington, DC district. Two former employees of Kundra's, information systems security officer Yusuf Acar and Sushil Bansal were arrested in a federal bribery sting. Computerworld's Eric Lundquist also reports that according to the affidavit, the alleged committed crimes are less sophisticated hacking, than traditional scam artistry, including "ghost
employees on the payroll, contracts that overbill for what was
delivered and a plan to head for parts unknown if the cops start
knocking." Either way, this is far from great news for Obama's platform of transparency and innovation.
Last fall, Jim Stengel, arguably the most powerful person in marketing, left his post as P&G's Global Marketing Officer with no trace of where he'd be heading to next. Today, Stengel revealed to Fast Company that he's now taking his own brand on the road. His new gig, The Jim Stengel Company LLC, includes consulting, authoring a book, and serving an advisory role to MarketShare Partners.
Stengel, who spent over two decades at the consumer package behemoth, gained his influence and street cred by using his $8 billion ad budget to earn numerous "Marketer of the Year" accolades, along with twenty-five straight stellar quarters. Last year, after taking home Cannes "2008 Advertiser of the Year" award for the first time, Stengel says he realized he was ready for the next chapter of his career. "I had done everything I had wanted to do," he told me, "It was time for me to hand the role off to someone else and pursue another dream."
The dream, these days, goes beyond Pringles and Pampers. He's now consulting for tech and healthcare companies, neither of which he can specifically name. Stengel's new platform is all about forcing marketers to face their existential crisis head-on ("I want to inspire a movement," he says). He believes every brand needs to hold itself hostage its core mission, starting with employees that believe in it, then products that live it--which is what ultimately seduces customers.
While none of this is exactly new marketing enlightenment, I have no doubt any brand will fork over the big bucks to get some of Stengel's special sauce, if not his cache. And for those who can't afford the marketing missionary in person, don't worry--he's shopping around a book that's in the works for next year. "I don't like business books. I think they're shallow and not helpful," admits Stengel, who's already starting to tap his vast network, like TBWA's Lee Clow, to produce a more 2.0 kind of read. "For my book, the whole interactive element of the content will make or break it."
Just the other day I wrote about Obama's newly appointed CIO, Vivek Kundra, and his love affair with Google, RIM, and Apple. Well, Microsoft may be in luck after all. This morning twelve FBI agents reportedly stormed the Washinton, D.C. CTO's office, where Kudra left his post last week. According to WTOP, the FBI says it's part of "an ongoing criminal investigation." With Obama still trying to fill the federal CTO post--and so much excitement around fresh blood like Kundra pioneering the government's technology efforts--let's hope the FBI leaves empty handed. Just this morning, Kundra told an audience of government and tech folks at the FOSE conference that "transparency and open government is going to be a key agenda item of this administration."
Breaking Update: According to D.C.Wire, Yusuf Acar an information systems security officer in the D.C. government's office of the chief technology
officer, as been arrested in a federal bribery sting. Acar worked for Obama's new CIO, Kundra.
Breaking Update (11:56): According to Washington City Paper a second arrest has been made: Sushil Bansal.
We've heard the story before: Brand wants to inspire user generated content. Brand inspires user generated content. Brand hires lawyers, and shuts down user generated content.
Think, record labels and Napster users. Think, Mattel and Scrabulous. Think, AP and today's lawsuit against Shephard Fairey (that just broke today). Now, add Mars and Poke to my running list of counter-cultural branding moments.
The latest tone-deaf brand to fall into this trap is Snickers. According to ad blog AgencySpy, the digital shop Poke randomly built Snckrz!, a nifty little Website where users could customize any phrase into a Snickers logo. Eighty-thousand users later and at zero cost to Mars (Snickers' parent company)--Poke wasn't even their agency--Mars sends a cease and desist letter to the shop, demanding it kill the site! Snckrz! will be eviscerated by 6 p.m. this evening.
I just don't get it. Marketers spend millions of dollars on market research, focus groups, ad agencies, digital shops, so on and so on, just so their brand can catch fire with the cultural zeitgeist. It almost never works (check out Snickers' latest lame "snacklish" campaign). Yet, when it actually does, usually by accident, control-freak corporations don't know what to do other than bring out the litigious arsenal. When are they ever going to learn?
What do Northern Ireland's environmental minister, the president of the Czech Republic, and Sarah Palin all have in common? They're climate crisis deniers, of course!
In the spirit of the Heartland Institute's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change that wraps up today in New York, The Guardian's George Monbiot decided to shine the spotlight on the "Top 10 Climate Change Deniers." For those not familiar with the "climate crisis" conference, let me first clear up that it's not exactly a problem-solving confab. Instead, it's a gathering of 600 scientists, academics, and politicians calling the universal bluff on man-induced global warming. According to the MIT professor who keynoted the event, the rest of us are part of the “climate alarm movement". Watch out! I bet Exxon, which in years past helped sponsor the event, is grateful it refrained from this year's theme: "Global warming: Was it ever a crisis?”
Make sure to guzzle some gas, blast all your lights on, and burn some coal while you enjoy Monbiot's list:
Wal-Mart announced today that it's joining the digital medical records race. With Obama designating $19 billion of the stimulus package to digitizing this leap, it's no wonder the most powerful retailer in the world has decided to join the ranks of the most powerful tech companies--including Google, Microsoft and IBM--to solve this behemoth challenge, as well as try to cash in.
Wal-Mart's pitch: who better to tackle this expensive, beastly undertaking than the low-cost, high efficiency aficionados from Bentonville? Its partnering up with Dell and eClinicalWorks (a software company) to target the digitization of small medical practices. It's no small coincidence that Sam's Club already has a direct link to doctors--roughly 200,000 of them--through its memberships. However, right now it looks like the cost of the service is extremely pricey: available in the spring, it will range from $10,000 to $25,000 per physician, along with a roughly $5,000 yearly fee.
Meanwhile, last week Google just announced it's stepping up its free Google Health medical records service, which launched in May, by allowing patients to share records with friends and family. Records include everything from lab test results to prescriptions. Additionally, Google also just revealed that it's pairing up with fellow tech powerhouse, IBM, for a software that enables people, like diabetes patients, to transfer data from glucose meters and other personal-health monitoring products directly to their Google Health records.
All of this comes on the heels of Google's rival Microsoft, that introduced its online medical records service, called HealthVault, in 2007. Microsoft's offering actually helps interpret records (a whole other dicey issue) in addition to the ability to share health data with family and doctors.
Although privacy watchdogs are less than psyched about these developments, it's impossible for the new administration to ignore the gaping hole we have in our supposedly modern medical system. That's why Obama, once again, has set the audacious goal of computerizing ALL health records within the next five years. Let's hope one of these companies lands on the killer app: today only about 8% of hospitals in the U.S. have digital record keeping systems.
After years of being teased for Internet hubris, Al Gore once again is taking his MO back to the Internet. Today, he and his group, the Alliance for
Climate Protection, will be lobbing for a new ".eco" domain that would be available to environmental websites. Gore's not going about it alone. His latest campaign is in partnership with Dot Eco LLC, an org started by tech entreprenuers whose mission it is to make .eco ubiquitous.
Although the prospect of this new self-defining environmental URL seems empowering at first glance, my fear is that it could end up being an insular badge that's potentially polarizing (environmental website Grist brilliantly dubbed it ".eco Chamber"). And while the domain would be reserved for organizations that, according to Gore's press release, "distribute a majority of their profits to
support environmental causes" I can already envision the corporate explotation and subsequent rapid dilution of its meaning altogether.
Gore and his crew of .eco-ers will have to wait, though. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN) will review the proposal, which won't be decided until later this year. However for all the Internet teasing Gore gets--and surely this campaign will instigate a whole new round of comedic fodder--folks shouldn't forget, as we pointed out in our April 2007 cover story, that Gore, after all, is a master entrepreneur.
If Obama had a long lost environmental brother, he'd be Van Jones. Born of the same oratorical cloth, Van "green collar" Jones, who we first profiled last April, today was just named by the Obama administration as the special adviser on green jobs. When I saw Jones speak last November at Greenbuild, it's no wonder he was deliriously giddy over the Obama win. There were the obvious reasons--like a President who gets environmental issues--but he certainly had an inkling his own green job was about to be elevated. Now Jones--who "flaunts the looks of Denzel Washington, the poetics of Obama, and the comedic timing of Chris Rock"--is officially charged with divvying up his share of the stimulus package to create jobs this country is desperate for. Now's his moment to move beyond inspirational rhetoric, and prove that he actually knows how to make things happen.
Ocean Spray 100% Cranberry Juice has more sugar than a can of Coke? Beef has a carbon footprint three times the size of chicken? Companies like Nestle and Dole have been implicated for labor rights violations recently? That's what Dara O'Rourke wants you to know, the founder of GoodGuide.com, a public-private partnership that brings transparency to consumers by rating products based on 140 criteria that factor in health, environmental, and social practices. Last year O'Rourke launched the site rating hundreds of personal care items, cleaning products, and toys. Today, GoodGuide is unveiling its new food section, which evaluates 5,000 food brands--primarily the ones you feed your kids.
The goal of GoodGuide is to distill complex information into a simple 1-10 point rating system that helps consumers make more informed buying decisions (check out the GoodGuide's handy iPhone app for when you're out shopping at the drug store or supermarket). To do that O'Rourke, a Berkeley environmental science professor who's been studying supply chains for more than a decade, has pulled together a small cast of science geeks and technologists from Google, Amazon and eBay to analyze hundreds of governmental, academic, scientific and corporate reports. Eveything from whether an ingredient has been banned in another country to whether a company has had chemical spills is considered, then funneled into an algorithm that calculates a rating (for those who want to see the data, the site allows consumers to dig down into the specifics). "People want a simple way to choose better so I decided to translate all this academic work into something useful for the public," says O'Rourke, who helped uncover the labor scandal around Nike's factories in the 90s.
As a supply chain junky (and concerned parent), O'Roarke has another agenda too: to get consumers so fired up about what's in their products that they put pressure on companies once they discover its nefarious ingredients and practices. Look up your favorite products and you'll be shocked--Suave ranks higher than Method?! To complete the communication channel between consumers and corporations, next to each GoodGuide product rating is a link for consumers to email their complaints directly to the company. Of course best way for companies to listen is to also vote with your dollar.
Even though the site is still in Beta, it's already proving its potential for impact. After GoodGuide went up last year, Clorox contacted O'Rourke, dissatisfied with its products' low ratings which were being dragged down because of its lack of ingredient transparency (except for its new "eco" Greenworks line, none of its other brands historically have revealed their ingredients). Then, two weeks ago, Clorox suddenly posted all its brands' ingredients on its site (O'Rourke concedes, "They'd never admit they submitted to pressure from us."). Now GoodGuide can dive into Clorox's never-before-disclosed ingredients, re-rate their products, and the consumer pressure cycle continues. Then, just last week, SC Johnson announced they are going to disclose all their brands' ingredients and phase out phthalates. Of course, transparency is just the first step. Now that GoodGuide has access to these ingredients, it can then analyze them and recalculate their rating.
In the age of crowdsourcing, where consumers seem to have a bigger pedestal than corporations with million dollar ad budgets, I challenge outraged consumers to rechannel their energy to websites like GoodGuide. Over the past few months there have been passionate instances of consumer activism: the mommies who demanded Johnson & Johnson kill their baby-slinging Motrin ads, the millennials who protested that Facebook changed its terms of service, and of course the OJ-guzzling design snobs who rallied that Tropicana revert back to its old logo. All three companies submitted, and changed their ways. However, I wonder why the same doesn't happen when it comes to issues that really matter, like toxic ingredients in our shampoos, food, and clothing? Why aren't consumers--the LOHAS, the enlightened Obama-galvanizing Gen Ys, the green MBAs--expressing equal outrage at the corporations who design products that are way more damaging to our bodies than a generic-looking OJ brand logo is to the eye?
I suggest the next time you decide to lambast your friends on Twitter about the latest superficial corporate faux pas, try to make sure it's over something worthwhile.
*Note, for more productive Twittering, check out GetSatisfaction.com, where companies often respond to brand complaints. I know I will.
After 
Last fall, Jim Stengel, arguably the most powerful person in marketing, left his post as P&G's Global Marketing Officer with no trace of where he'd be heading to next. Today, Stengel revealed to Fast Company that he's now taking his own brand on the road. His new gig, The 
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Ocean Spray 100% Cranberry Juice has more sugar than a can of Coke? Beef has a carbon footprint three times the size of chicken? Companies like Nestle and Dole have been implicated for labor rights violations recently? That's what Dara O'Rourke wants you to know, the founder of 
