This is “boxgate” in terms of scandal. How bad do you have to be to keep their personal property Ogilvy?

Of course Ogilvy you are not a crook

These people now freshly entering the workforce will be facing the most dire circumstances, they now have no job, and no one is hiring in the industry.

The problem is these individuals have rent, mortgage payments, kids, credit cards and cell phone bills that now will go unpaid, furthering the economic disaster.

Perhaps Milton Friedman was right, we do need a helicopter drop. Milton Friedman argued that deflation can be fought against by “dropping money out of a helicopter”

Well we have deflation, we have mass layoffs… but we don’t see money dropping out of Helicopters for the average individual. Though the banks are seeing large numbers of the CH-47 Chinook overhead.

Which way to AIG, we got newly printed dollars ready for the drop!

Coffee and doughnut chain Dunkin’ Donuts breaks a new $100 million advertising campaign today that features the slogan “You Kin’ Do it,” the chain said on Monday.

The new effort, which was created by Dunkin’s Boston-based advertising agency Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos Inc., is the latest iteration of the chain’s “America Runs on Dunkin’” ad campaign. Full Story at the Boston Business Journal

Great Depression or not… people still want their coffee as long as it’s under 5 bucks a cup.. (hint hint Starbucks). Dunkin’ Donuts has always been this authors favorite coffee. For $2 dollars and 11 cents I get this Xtra Large Cup of piping hot coffee though the drive-thu.

You can’t go wrong with that…

The January 2008 issue of Allure Magazine had nearly 70 pages of ads, while the January 2009 issue had only 41, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, a decline of 41 percent.

It was an ugly January not just for Allure, but also for Condé Nast magazines in general. New York Times is reporting

Condé Nast is one of the better publishers, with some very strong digital assets such as Wired Magazine (one of our popular reads), but even Wired Magazine is in deep trouble. Wired, which is usually loaded with consumer electronics ads, was the worst hit in their asset base, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages.

Prediction, watch them switch to advertorials to keep them afloat during this time… and since this is nearly the great depression.. we can’t say we would blame them as long as it’s properly marked.

No mention of SEO or SMO was in the release sent to us.

Though it’s a step in the right direction, it’s still painfully under where they need to be in terms of what the clients are demanding.

The problem stems from everything from a sinking economy (read: second great depression) to mismanagement of resources, allocating purchases of the past 5 years to non wanted assets (read: anything not SEO / SMO) when that is exactly what the clients are screaming for.

The unemployment rate nationally is expected to hit double digits within 90 days at current projections. This sucks.

You’ll also notice his name image is called “File:Human Trash .jpg”

click image to enlarge

Sir Martin Derty Cow Sorrell

WPP group plc is set to fire off a new round of layoffs, it’s to target thousands of Americans according to a report from Reuters

Most of the job losses are expected to come in western Europe and North America, although the group is set to expand staff numbers in South America, eastern Europe and Asia, the paper said.

This is on top of the other thousands of layoffs they announced 3 weeks ago and the hiring freeze they announced 3 months ago.

These layoffs are to be severe, really severe.

“Twitter Engineering and Operations are on the case but if you receive a Direct Message with a blogspot.com link in it that redirects to what seems like Twitter.com do not enter your Twitter credentials. If you look at the URL, you’ll notice that it is not really Twitter but twitter.access-logins.com—a sketchy phishing site.”

So don’t click on that… it will be bad for you.

http://status.twitter.com/post/68196572/dont-click-that-link

It appears that at least 100 firms have figured a way to make money from Twitter, other than Twitter itself. This firm offers to spam your twitter account for a fee for example. Considering we are in the new great depression, you’d think that Twitter would work towards a revenue stream, however that isn’t case. Twitter has yet to publish anything even closely resembling a way to make money from millions of tiny 140 character posts.

Yet a host of 3ed party companies appear to be making revenue from Twitter, it’s shady however. It’s akin to e-mail spam when all is said and done.

See here’s the problem, anyone can duplicate twitters functionality nearly 100% with Wordpress and a few plugins. We did it for a test environment, we used a simple theme provided by Automattic, added a few plugins… and bingo.. it works. Each time a tester made his comment, it posted it and if the user specified, it sent them an SMS. People have the ability to follow, unfollow, ban… etc etc…

We even got a rudimentary API working for it.

Now the reason we have it sitting in beta and closed. Because this system has no revenue model. None… the problem isn’t the technical specs, anyone can build a twitter clone in a matter of hours using Wordpress and a few plugins. The problem was making money from it.

Sending Ads via SMS is a big no-no…. littering the site with mobile friendly ads is a no-no… in short, people don’t want ads on their mobiles… end of story.

How twitter monetizes this is beyond us. In order for them to turn those millions of tweets into a revenue model they will have to break some taboos, and in the process opening up the door for millions of competitors to show up within hours… many of those competitors are their current users.

These are wildly differing disciplines.

SEO and SMO firms don’t view Flash as digital marketing or advertising, not by a long shot. They complain that Flash does not spider in the search engines properly, requires plugins and is virtually useless for client ROI. To make matters worse, it doesn’t even render properly on many mobile devices.

Advertising Agencies are focused on flash because it’s the closest they can get to a “shiny new site” that mirrors a “killer” TV look as possible.

Virtually none of the ad agency holding companies have invested in the first discipline but have extensively invested in the second leaving a gaping hole in their capabilities. It’s a shortfall of extreme measures.

So next time an agency pitches you, ask them to define digital… if you get answers that don’t include SEO and SMO… keep walking.. because what they are talking about isn’t exactly what you are.

It’s embarassing because this could of been prevented… but it wasn’t.

Evidently the pink slips will be flying on January 15th according to Engadget

We ran an article yesterday regarding the ongoing disaster at WPP group plc and the question still remains. Does Dell Inc. even need a dedicated ad agency during this depression? Will their ad spend even come close to the projected $4.5 billion that was noted prior to the recession when this contract was signed?

In the latest casualty of the great depression, Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Jarvis has been canned, he was a lead supporter of handing over $4.5 billion dollars to Sir Martin for advertising. The model so far has turned out little despite running now for over a year. 396 days, 11 hours, 41 minutes, 1 second to be exact.

We have seen a blog called “digital nomads” that hasn’t been updated in some time and has a less than handful of comments. Enfatico evidently ran an ad in India, and another ad that was considered littering in Texas.

Overall from what we have seen they might of received about 45k worth of advertising for their $4.5 billion. I stress from what we have seen.

Evidently Enfatico and Richard at Dell has placed us to the ban list for new material (read the comments).

Enjoy the last bits of 2008… 2009 is going to be ugly.

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE…CORRECTED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE UPTON NY
826 AM EST WED DEC 31 2008

…STRONG WINDS EXPECTED THIS AFTERNOON INTO TONIGHT…

.LOW PRESSURE WILL RAPIDLY DEEPEN AS IT TRACKS EAST…JUST SOUTH
OF LONG ISLAND…TODAY. THE STRONG PRESSURE GRADIENT IN ITS WAKE
WILL PRODUCE STRONG AND POTENTIALLY DAMAGING WINDS THIS AFTERNOON
INTO TONIGHT.

…HIGH WIND WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 1 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO
MIDNIGHT EST TONIGHT…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN UPTON HAS ISSUED A HIGH WIND
WARNING…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 1 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO MIDNIGHT
EST TONIGHT.

EASTERLY WINDS WILL SHIFT TO THE NORTHWEST AS RAPIDLY INTENSIFYING
LOW PRESSURE PASSES EAST OF THE REGION THIS AFTERNOON. ONCE THE
WINDS SHIFT TO THE NORTHWEST THIS AFTERNOON…THEY WILL QUICKLY
INCREASE TO 25 TO 35 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO 50 MPH…CONTINUING INTO
TONIGHT. DURING THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM….LATE THIS AFTERNOON
INTO EARLY THIS EVENING…A 1 TO 3 HOUR PERIOD OF 30 TO 40 MPH
WINDS WITH GUSTS UP TO 60 MPH IS LIKELY.

THESE TYPE OF WINDS WILL BE CAPABLE OF KNOCKING DOWN TREES…TREE
LIMBS AND WIRES…AS WELL AS DESTROYING LOOSE HOLIDAY DECORATIONS AND
OTHER UNSECURED OUTDOOR ITEMS.

DRIVING WILL ALSO BE DIFFICULT IN THE HIGH WINDS…ESPECIALLY FOR
HIGH PROFILE VEHICLES AND OVER BRIDGES AND OVERPASSES. NOT TO
MENTION…BLOWING AND DRIFTING OF THE NEWLY FALLEN SNOW WILL MAKE
FOR HAZARDOUS TRAVELING CONDITIONS AS WELL.

IN ADDITION…THESE WINDS WILL BE USHERING AN ARCTIC AIRMASS INTO
THE REGION…WHICH WILL HAVE WIND CHILL READINGS FALLING TO FIVE TO
FIVE BELOW ZERO BY MIDNIGHT.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…

A HIGH WIND WARNING MEANS A HAZARDOUS HIGH WIND EVENT IS EXPECTED
OR OCCURRING. SUSTAINED WIND SPEEDS OF AT LEAST 40 MPH OR GUSTS
OF 58 MPH OR MORE CAN LEAD TO PROPERTY DAMAGE.

The concept was to take the entire Advertising Budget for Dell, and dump it into one newly formed ad agency. At the time it made little sense, and now it makes even less sense. Ad spends overall have taken a dump of epic proportions, and the question is if Dell now needs it’s own ad agency during the second great depression as it appears we are entering into at an ever increasing rate.

The contract between Dell and WPP is set to expire in 700 days, 11 hours, 24 minutes, 9 seconds. Enfatico went out and took out 10 year lease for their expensive Manhattan offices that however will expire in 2,900 days after the current Dell contract is over.

Leaving a shortfall of just under 8 years between the end of the Dell contract, and their lease.

The agency has fallen off the blogging radar over the past several months due the economic crisis, however in light of the downturn it’s undoubted that more pressure has been placed on Dell to increase sales, which in turn allows for a pretty fair bet that the pressure has fallen on Enfatico as well… both in terms of it’s performance or even it’s very existence as Dell’s advertising agency.

If those thousand or so WPP group plc employees are let go, it would be just a footnote in the long list of layoffs that we are currently seeing happen across the planet.