After a long self-imposed blogging break, I decided to take Tribble up on their offer to use this as a platform to come back and check in with all you kids.

Since my disappearance, the ad industry has lived up to its reputation of being a cesspool full of douchebags & clueless pinheads who do shit work and steal money from their clients while produce easily forgettable campaigns that either:

1) People hate
2) People never recall — even under the threat of torture (which usually amounts to having to watch the BDA reels)

In other words, nothing has changed at all since I bailed out from my former blogging platform.

Over the past few months, I have been keeping up with “The Founder” and feeding him bits & pieces here & there…but thought since nothing good is happening in the industry… now might be a bloody excellent time to come back and reinforce the level of disgrace the industry hurls upon itself on a daily (if not hourly) basis.

Like Parker, I’ll probably swear a little too much and go off on non-ad related tangents every so often– but I have yet to reach the age of senility where I am fascinated by Kate or Hitler (give it time…but then again I’m not writing a book any time soon either so nothing to shill.  i’m not sure Founder will let me post random tits on his respectable blog either — one has to show a modicum of sense…at least in the first few hours on the case.)

I’ll have more (hopefully substantial) things to say later…but for now… hope the lights are on and the booze is flowing… because little else in the industry is worth going ape-shit about

In the words of Dennis Miller (before he became a right-wing douchebag lunatic who performed sexual favours for the Bush administration):

“But That’s Just My Opinion. I Could Be Wrong.”

(but who are we fucking kidding… I’m never wrong…and if I am…I’m not going to admit it on my first post here, am I?)

This just in from Austin… The “Agency of the Future” has fired all the creative directors, they have taken ninety nine percent of the content out of the website (it’s just a list of offices now.) Torrence Boone is toast after they promoted him to CHAIRMAN, in charge of “special projects.” That lasted all of one month, and then they just bounced him out altogether. Gone. Fucking gone! And no one has a clue where he went.

Talk about game over, this is a complete disaster for WPP group plc. Not that the world didn’t see this coming for years. We even built a countdown clock (that we felt no need to update since Enfatico has been for the most part shut down for some time now)… but part of the new news is that Torrence Boone has been escorted out… and no one knows where he has gone… pretty shocking stuff. What is he up to these days?

See the problem is we can’t blame Torrence, he was given an impossible mission. You can’t build an ad agency like this, not the way Enfatico was built.

A robust advertising agency needs more than just one client, you need to have some sort of cross between industries, some things that work well in one industry might make sense if adapted to another. You need fresh ideas.

Enfatico had no ideas, it was a one trick pony that never actually even got off the ground. For the record, this last paragraph of the report most likely has more weight to it than anything else.

If I was a WPP shareholder I’d have some pretty hard questions for Sorrell before he picks up his $96 million performance bonus!

I felt that over here.

Honestly with a list minus Parker in the space is like having a search engine ranking site minus Google. It can’t be anywhere near honest without the leader.

I am vouching for George, and I strongly urge the power 150 to include Adscam on the list. If you agree please retweet this, publish it on your blog and please leave a comment below.

I will be making sure that the powers that be will read this and see the general feeling of leaving Mr. Parker off the list.

To sign the “petition” literally just leave a comment below with your support for George.

That’s hot stuff, get a mass following by setting up a twitter feed for a media company, a few months down the road they will buy it from you! It’s a new growth industry! …. ha! Parker you owe me cash!

The problem we have is that Parker, though a genius at adversing, doesn’t fully grasp the potential of a free service to send text messages to your customer base. It’s direct Mail George, but without the postage, printing or any of the other costs associated with it… and instead of going to your mailbox.. it goes wherever you are.. directly to your cell phone. Complete with instant feedback… from “your stuff stinks” to them just unfollowing you… the point being you’ll know instantly if you are doing a good job or a poor one.

Cost to send text message to a million people using Twitter in a fashion that isn’t spam = $0
Cost to send a million snail mail messages to people using the post office = $1,000,000

The ROI is so incredibly high using twitter (properly) that it can’t be ignored in any modern marketing mix. It just takes hard work and a honest effort to get your brand out. It takes effort…. but it doesn’t take a million dollars…

http://www.twitter.com/adscam

George, The reason we did it was actually somewhat selfish, Twitter is almost like an RSS feed for humans.. and it allows me to know the second you post something on adscam on my mobile… so I can be reading the very latest on adscam anywhere I am.

All it’s doing is pulling from your RSS feed… so there is nothing more you have to do at all.

So don’t make us pull it down… it’s automatic.. and requires no work from you at all… please let us keep it!

Edit: We got got this from Twitter “George Parker is now following you on Twitter!” ROFL!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

We’ll be ordering the book today.. and post a review in a few days after we crunch though the paperback. We’ll admit we’re biased.. we like George Parker… he tells it like it is… that Advertising Agencies are screwed beyond belief as the model is so broken it’s a structural problem. Well please purchase his book.. it’s worth it! The chances are it’s a sinister look at life for advertising agencies.

If you are looking for a practical approach for advertising, James Connor’s book “The perfection of marketing” is a good purchase as well. We have read this one, and parts of it focus on recessionary marketing… not a bad idea in this current economic crisis. Amazon has it for sale

We also like Steffan Postaer’s book, The Happy Soul Industry. We are about 1/4 of the way into it.. and it’s worth the time… not a bad book at all!

Who’s the old guy on the left holding the beer?

For $10,000 you can do an “on-screen” tribute to Sir Martin… Here’s the specs… Please send your 6” x 6” full-color tribute ad in JPG or PDF format, 300 dpi preferred. Type should be no smaller than 12 point, and we recommend limiting the word count for the best presentation. Email files to galatribute@paleycenter.org or call 212.621.6815 with questions. Indicate “Gala On-screen Tribute” in subject.

We want George Parker to raise the funds to place the image behind Sir Martin’s tribute. All of us fully expecting some sort of Dwarf Picture with some Great Depression theme… or better.. to be the backdrop for Sir Martin’s gala.

Please contact George and see how you can wire a donation for the spectacle, trust me, it will be roughly as expensive as a movie ticket, yet provide more than 2 hours of laughs….

I contacted George Parker prior to publishing this article to get permission. Generally I’m not in the business of publishing people’s houses without permission. Though George granted me permission to publish this, I still did however remove references to the actual address in the below screen shot. I also choose to post an angle that shows little more than just a hedge and parts of his roof. However there were dozens of angles that were available that would of shown more detail. It’s not like it’s impossible to find, I did.. and the chances are you can as well.. but we should leave it to George to publish the details if he chooses.

The reason I am pointing this out is because Google street view is a privacy nightmare. Driving around snapping photographs of people in business districts, fine… but street view in residential neighborhoods? I’m not so sure this is fine.

It might not be illegal, but it’s tasteless in my opinion. I find myself lucky that Google hardly has a decent overhead view of my location, much less a street view, but of course like everything else, that is only a matter of time.

I’m calling for Google to rethink it’s policy on residential neighborhoods. It’s not right, not by a long shot. You could have some estranged husband looking up his wife’s address for something less than honorable. The point is there is a level where too much information isn’t a good thing.

And to think this is the house that the Dwarf hates so much.

this is the shit that happens when you have a one client shop, and the client gets in trouble. You can’t say I didn’t warn those fucktards.

Now in all honesty we somewhat agree. We feel that though Enfatico will not “shut down” soon as per say… in our opinion they are going to have to do layoffs before they are even fully staffed…. the shut down part might show up later….

Dell has frozen hiring (Just like WPP!) And is offering workers five day, unpaid vacations. Well that’s fucking generous of them. And that brings up the question of Enfatico, which seems to have been on a paid vacation for the first ten months of the relationship. Full Story

One thing we have learned.. is that Parker may or may not be right all the time… but his arguments are based on a fairly solid understanding of how Advertising works…. remember, this guy has been doing advertising for decades..

Also worth noting, Enfatico wouldn’t be the first startup to face extreme problems during this recession.

Have you walked the halls of that ghost town lately? Seriously, have you? Word spread quickly when you showed up at the agency and Wnek tossed $25K your way for some project that never saw the light of day. But it did effectively buy your love.

and:

oh yeah, YOU get on the high horse now. listen, you were the one who wrote a fucking puffpiece about wnek and FORGOT to mention that he fucking paid you for it. but nooo, YOU be all righteous about it.

In short, things turned really dirty. Total war broke out on the site, with Parker making multiple posts in the series.

Enfatico was paid nearly a billion dollars per comment on the main page of their digital nomads site. Currently there are 4 comments total (on the main page). What works out to be about a billion dollars per comment per page :)

yea it’s a joke to an extent.. because of course they are doing much more work than just that site (something that is still debatable as another agency has taken some claim to it)…

But we really haven’t see much work come from the agency… and the if this is all they have to show for it other than a minor campaign … and evidently some littering that turned out to be good toilet paper for people relieving themselves.

The contract is 3 years long, in which we keep track of.

. The current first page has 4 posts and 4 comments. If you go back to the home page when it kicked off on August 12th. The first, very long, very fucking boring post spells out how we are all now Digital Nomads and that Dell is going to bring you the second coming of Christ or something as you trudge the digital highways. There are 6 comments. Full Story

Have a problem with the math… take it up with Parker..

The rumor states that they want to hire someone to literally bring the quality up to par, and finally push out some ads in a reasonable timeframe

Good luck with that.. . no one of any sense will take a job that expires in 799 days, 13 hours, 12 minutes, 33 seconds.

This of course was picked up by Industry Vet, George Parker, that launched a scathing attack on not respecting the client.

The point is, if the client is paying to keep the lights on, perhaps some respect is needed regarding using their products.

How can you support a product if you don’t have your advertising agency use them to create the ads in the first place?

This story appears to be developing… What miffs us the most is that in the Enfatico case, they were not limited to Vista… they had an Ubuntu option… that they didn’t take.

So on face value, it appears that both Microsoft and Dell are paying to make ads for Apple Computers… pretty amazing stuff.

Want Proof? Some guy even looked into the files… and found Apple all over it.

One of them is George Parker having a literal field day on Enfatico …. and other is AgencySpy is running an Exclusive: GSD&M’s Fires CD over E-Mail Scandal; Internal Paranoia Skyrockets

Woah — so a quick visit to agency spy includes some wonderful gems… Evidently there is more than one Mark Taylor… well as least as far as e-mail goes…

creative director was apparently fired last Friday after he allegedly created a Gmail account in the name of the agency’s ECD Mark Taylor. We hear he/she sent out an e-mail (at least one, we’re told) to other CDs in which he/she asked their opinions about the work, salary and other issues pertaining to other creative department employees. That’s hot stuff.….

Then the Enfatico Diaster that actually forced Tribble (yep this site) to update it’s clock via Steve Hall’s Request

Parker went hog wild on the agency, “The first work from Enfatico… I fucking hope not!!!”

That’s how it starts… then it get’s only worse:

The blog was last updated TEN fucking days ago, the YouTube site has been up for 22 days and has a pathetic 17 subscribers (most of which probably work at Dell and Enfatico, or the Poisoned Dwarf has had all his elves sign up under pain of death.)

Happy Thursday.. it’s only gonna get worse…