Millennials Get It

The first blog writing assignment I gave my student last week was to answer the question, do you consider yourself a Millennial? We watched the CBS News report on this new generation and I asked them to find at least one other reference to Millennials, and link to it in their blog post. You can watch the video here.

Most of them wrote about how offended they were by the negative characteristics being attributed to their generation, so I thought I'd direct your attention to a very positive review of Millennials that was recently published in Advertising Age magazine (and available for a short time on AdAge.com). It's called "Plenty of Skill and Smarts in Class of 2008" by Beth Ann Kaminkow. She writes,

The Class of 2008 already knows a lot of things the current work force is still trying to figure out. They've lived in an online and offline world that makes them comfortable bringing new thinking to agencies that are working to bring their clients' brands closer to consumers. They "get" the idea of convergence -- in media, in technology and in the way people live -- because that's how they live. So we need to be willing to learn, as well as teach and mentor.

So, like it or not, those of you who were born in the 80s and are coming of age in the first decade of the new millennium have been given a label: Millennials. Dreaming up labels for the generations is something the media has been doing since the phrase Baby Boomer was coined, and personally, I think yours is much cooler than that one.

I still like mine best, though; maybe because mine, Generation X, was invented by Canadian author Douglas Coupland.

Summertime, and the students are blogging

I'm teaching a summer section of a course called Electronic Media and Culture (RTVF110, for those of you at SJSU), and, in an effort to be green and, more importantly, to really engage with new media, the students are blogging again.

Look over to the left to see a list of links to these new student blogs.

Welcome to the blogosphere, all of you!

My friend, the Advertising Council

The Advertising Council, a trade organization that coordinates the production of public service announcements which are created pro bono by advertising agencies around the United States, has its own MySpace page.

Fascinating, but I'm not sure I want to be its friend.

Who's a Smooth Canadian?

There's a fascinating article in this weekend's New York Times book reviews by Paul Collins. It's called "Smoke This Book," and it's making me want to have a cigarette... but I digress.

Cigarette ads used to be common in paperback books. And not just cigarette ads, but ads for other products. Collins tells us:

The story of paperback advertising started innocently enough: with babies, in fact. In 1958, the Madison Avenue adman Roy Benjamin founded the Quality Book Group, a consortium of the paperback industry heavyweights Bantam Books, Pocket Books and the New American Library. Despite the lofty name, the group’s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” A 1959 Pocket Books print run of 500,000 included advertisements by Q-Tips, Carnation and Procter & Gamble. By 1963, a 26-page insert in Spock was commanding $6,500 to $7,500 per page, and ads were spreading into mysteries and other pulps as well.

Just when I thought I was getting used to the fact that cigarette advertising is still permitted in America, I hear something new. In Canada, it was banned in most forms of media more than twenty years ago, and today tobaccco companies aren't even allowed to sponsor events. No advertising of tobacco products is permitted at all.

Please don't cross me off your list!

This ad was placed in the New York Times this week by Consumer Reports, and while I don't dispute the truth of the message, I have always used gift cards I've been given for Christmas.

With glee, I might add.

I'm just sayin'.

The greatest thing since... sliced bread?

Seth Godin asks, what did people say before sliced bread was invented? Watch his video on the subject, recorded at the last TED conference. It will make you a better person.

Staking my claim

It's about time I claimed this blog on Technorati.

If the shoe fits...

Hey, I'm not the one saying Paris Hilton is vapid, they are:

Will CP+B open a Toronto branch?

Canadian company MDC Partners, an "agency network" (that's code for conglomerate), now owns 77% of Miami-based Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

For those of you who might have been living in an advertising cave for the last few years, CP+B is the agency that won, in 2003, the Grand Prix in four — count 'em, four — categories. That's right, all in the same year.

This commercial won the Grand Prix for Film that year, and remains in the Top Ten Greatest Ads ever:

A Few Good Creative Men

To really get the humor in these videos, you need to work in the advertising business. For those of you aspiring to, watch and learn something about how creatives feel about management, and vice versa.

First, Jack Nicholson as the overworked, misunderstood, and unappreciated creative:



Next, a terrifying suggestion: What if your copywriter taught the other people in your agency how to write? Click here to watch this shocking and tragic video.

Then, see if you can guess, by watching this video, what common complaints from clients drive creatives insane.

Finally, the classic most of you are probably not familiar with, Truth in Advertising.

This short film, which depicts what the world of advertising might be like if everyone said what they really meant, was originally produced in 2000 by Avion Films of Toronto, to be shown to a group of industry insiders at an awards banquet. It immediately became insanely popular, even outside the industry, and was widely circulated online. It's probably because it's been around so long that it's impossible to find a good quality reproduction. Here it is on YouTube, where it looks like crap but sounds okay. It's more important to listen to what they're saying than to see them clearly, anyway: