via http://www.worth1000.com/default.asp

After trimming jobs throughout the year, Madison Avenue is bracing for even bigger layoffs in 2009.

Ad executives and recruiters expect agencies, which have been cutting in dribs and drabs, to hand out a flurry of pink slips early next year as the ad downturn worsens.

The talk in industry circles is that the major agency holding companies - Interpublic, Omnicom and WPP - are planning deeper cuts to ring in the New Year.

“Close to 50 percent of agencies are owned by holding companies,” said Joanne Davis, a longtime ad-industry consultant. “The public markets are putting pressure on these companies to perform.”

WPP agencies are bracing for cuts across the board in January after CEO Martin Sorrell acquired UK research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres, sources said.

The $2 billion deal raised concerns about WPP’s debt load just as the ad downturn hit. WPP owns creative shop JWT, media-buying firm Mindshare and direct marketer Wunderman.

At the same time, Interpublic is bracing for things to get even worse for the auto business. Interpublic agencies Campbell-Ewald, McCann Erickson and Deutsch all have a piece of the General Motors account.

Interpublic is mulling layoffs in the event GM slashes its ad spending even further or reduces its stable of car brands. Interpublic agencies employ an estimated 900 people in Detroit with ties to the auto business.

“Everybody is focused on Detroit, where there will be significant cuts,” said one source close to the situation. “Anywhere that you have an agency that touches the Big 3, you are preparing for spending to be down 25 percent.”

Several Omnicom agencies, which include BBDO, DDB and TBWA, have cut jobs this year, and industry watchers expect those agencies to make additional cuts next year.

Several ad execs estimated that the big agency holding companies have cut at least 1,000 jobs this year. Agencies usually try to keep layoffs under wraps to avoid appearing weak to clients, making it tough to get a total tally.

ZenithOptimedia, part of ad firm Publicis, predicts ad spending in North America will fall 5.7 percent in 2009, down from an earlier forecast of 0.9 percent growth just two months ago.

The last two ad recessions in the early 1990s and then again a decade later during the dot-com bust led to the loss of thousands of agency jobs, many of them in the high-flying ad center of New York.

“My phone usually rings off the wall the beginning of the year, but there isn’t going to be any hiring,” said veteran recruiter Susan Friedman. “When people quit, they are not being replaced.”

 http://www.nypost.com/seven/12082008/business/ads_subtracting_143211.htm

Today on BBC, they uploaded pictures that related to my last post on the importance of creative space.

A really nice collection of photos that portray life itself in a very sincere way.

Two pictures two people one fish

Tom Sachs was born in New York on July 26, 1966. After studying briefly at the Architectural Association in London in 1987, he received a B.A. from Bennington College in Vermont in 1989. Throughout the 1990s, Sachs developed a technique based on the concept of bricolage, a sort of “do-it-yourself” ethic that he deployed in both video and sculpture. Hello Kitty Nativity Scene (1994) is a traditional depiction of the Christian Nativity with modern characters such as Hello Kitty and Bart Simpson substituted for the religious figures. This work, along with others such as Prada Toilet (1997) and White Ghetto Blaster (2000), epitomize Sachs’s humorous approach to object making. Nutsy’s (2002), a model of an imaginary city complete with “ghetto” and “modernist art park” areas and featuring sculptural, mechanical, and video elements, is intended as an amalgam of the Modernist utopianism of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation housing block and the capitalist modernism of McDonald’s.

http://tomsachs.org/

wow?

http://www.manystuff.org/?p=3003

BLACKBIRD FEATURES

• Black Search
• Black News Ticker
• Black Bookmarks
• Blackbird TV
• Social Bookmarking
• Email Manager
• Social Network Manager

The Blackbird Browser gives you access to Internet sites just like Internet Explorer, plus more community-specific features when you want them. For example, Black Search moves important information from African American sites higher in your search results. Try the Blackbird Browser and see how we are customizing the web experience just for you.

http://www.blackbirdhome.com/index.html

here’s the site that teaches you how to make these bentos!

Evan Owen Dennis is a director, designer and illustrator residing in the Lower East Side of New York City. Find his work over at Next Season.

taken from my phone camera in Dekalb ave station.

YUANLIN, Taiwan (Reuters Life!) – Mommy, daddy — and Hello Kitty — welcome newborns at a cat-themed Taiwan maternity hospital that hopes the Japanese cartoon icon will ease the stress of childbirth as well as boost business.

The 30-bed Hau Sheng Hospital in Yuanlin in central Taiwan claims to be the only institution of its kind authorized by the popular cartoon cat’s parent company Sanrio Co Ltd.

Source

Nothing is more personal than our own studio, where we generate great ideas, daydream, sing aloud etc. .. Here’s an article from BBC that links personal spaces to creative minds.

Are we able to think clearly when surrounded by mess because chaos is inherent in all our minds, even those of the great writers and thinkers, asks Clive James.

“It’s in chaos. The pontificator with plans for fixing the world can’t organise his own desk, and as for what lies beyond the desk, forget about it. The evidence that I’ve spent years forgetting about it is all out there. Piles of old newspapers and magazines. Stacks of box files containing folders containing memos about the necessity to buy more folders and box files. Hundreds of books uselessly hidden behind hundreds of other books. A small statue of a Sumo wrestler, or else a life-sized statue of a small Sumo wrestler. A bag of random receipts that my accountant might have found quite useful in their year of origin, 1998.”

Continue article at BBC

It’s been said that the US Air Force uses this for fighter pilots. They are expected to go for at least 2 minutes.  Give it a try but be careful…it is addictive!!
http://members.iinet.net.au/~pontipak/redsquare.html

1998, Photographer Zana Briski, began traveling to Calcutta to photograph life in the red light district. She literally lived in the brothels for months at a time, and while the prostitutes slowly came to trust Zana, it was their children who accepted her immediately. The children didn’t quite understand what Zana was doing there, but they were fascinated by her and her camera. She let them use it and showed them how to take pictures. She thought it would be great to see this world through their eyes. It was then that she decided to start formal classes in the red light district and teach them photography. Zana thrived on teaching them and the kids eagerly captured their lives and environment through the lens of their point-and-shoot cameras. The results of their work were exhilarating. To do that, they inspired a special group of children of the prostitutes of the area to photograph the most reluctant subjects of it. As the kids excel in their new found art, the filmmakers struggle to help them have a chance for a better life away from the miserable poverty that threatens to crush their dreams.

After winning the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in 2008, UNIQLO is to produce an official T-shirt for the same Grand Prix this year. We have decided to invite people from all over the world to design a memorable T-shirt suitable for distribution at Cannes Lions 2009 awards in our Cannes Lions T-shirt Grand Prix competition.

The subject for this UNIQLO official T-shirt design competition must focus on the “lion”, the symbol of the Cannes International Advertising Festival. As long as the basic material involves the lion theme, the applicant is free to design the T-shirt however he/she wishes. 10 entries from among the submitted designs will be selected and the one entry to receive the Grand Prix. The Grand Prix winning design will be commercialized as a T-shirt for distribution to guests and members of the media at Cannes Lions 2009 next June. And, all of 10 entries will be sold in UNIQLO stores.

http://ut.uniqlo.com/utcannes/en

from http://campfirenyc.com/2006/11/09/viral/

I was once at a TV pre-production meeting and the director was going on about something or other, when the agency creative director interrupted him saying, “Let’s not beat a dead horse here.” The director shot back, “Let’s examine that proposition. What’s wrong with beating a dead horse? I mean it’s better than beating a live horse.”

I’m telling this story because of the repeated abuse of another dead horse: “Viral video.”

Let’s examine that proposition. Why do we now call any short marketing video, intended to be watched and forwarded by YouTube addicts, “Viral?” How do we know anyone will watch or forward any video so it goes “Viral?””

We don’t talk about a new film going into release as a “blockbuster” film, right? Or a just published book as a “Times bestseller” book?

So why do advertisers and agencies assume any short video tossed onto YouTube will go “Viral?”

This is not just an argument about semantics, but more importantly, methodology and effectiveness. The ad industry, for years, has made all sorts of false assumptions about TV commercials and their effectiveness; I believe the industry is now trying to apply those same mistaken assumptions to the “New Marketing.”

There are upwards of 30,000 video uploads and 40,000,000 downloads a day on the Tube. There’s no way a random video or two can be counted on to automatically go “Viral,” projecting a brand’s message. Nonetheless, we run into this misconception everyday. From lots of smart and talented people.

In the new era of consumer engagement, the real issue is what’s the big, persistently engaging campaign surrounding the video, moving the content? And what’s the big idea that drives that campaign? A video or two might be part of it (we used many in our Audi Art of the Heist campaign , but the real question is how are you engaging the audience overall so they look for your goddamn “Viral” videos?

Might this misconception be a hangover from the 30 second spot culture? Back in the day, you simply produced a spot and it went into a black box called the media department, and that black box – which created great wealth for agency networks – stuck the spot on some demo relevant shows.

If eight million people watched a show, the assumption was eight million people saw your 30 second spot. Simple. There are questions being raised now about this dead horse as well. And people began asking these questions long before “Tivo.”

It turns out that when you work in the New Marketing, a truly measurable medium with extensive metrics, and where viewer participation can be easliy judged, the old set of assumptions are no longer relevant.

I may be beating a dead horse here, but given the level of bullshit industry buzz about viral videos, I suspect not.

Personal family snapshots erased layer by layer with a rubber eraser to expose the white base of the photo paper. The title of each piece is a memory that the photograph recalled.

That summer we were apart, we met in New York and stayed in that beautiful hotel, didn’t we? 

http://codytrepte.com/index.php?/erased-photographs/

Is it possible to make a photograph of New Jersey regardless of where you are in the world? is the title of a photo exhibition curated by Laurel Ptak, raising questions on how the internet and globalization has changed our idea of place.
The layout of the catalogue and the website is inspired by the way search engines deals with visual content—images are treated without respect for visual qualities and are instead arranged based on meta data.

http://www.aphotographofnewjersey.com/

via http://www.konst-teknik.se/traceaface

An owner of a Fuji apple orchard printed up custom stickers of iPhones and the Apple logo. He then put the stickers on his Fuji apples while they were still young and on the trees.

A month later after the apples had matured, he removed the stickers. As you can see the lack of sun reaching the apple cause them to keep the stickers original design.

http://www.weirdasianews.com/2008/12/04/apples-apples-talk-geek-fruit/

In the American context, historians use the term Judeo-Christian to refer to the influence of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament on Protestant thought and values, most especially the Puritan, Presbyterian and Evangelical heritage. These founding generations of Americans saw themselves as heirs to the Hebrew Bible, and its teachings on liberty, responsibility, hard work, ethics, justice, equality, a sense of choseness and an ethical mission to the world, which have become key components of the American character, what is called the “American Creed.” ^[6]These ideas from the Hebrew Bible, brought into American history by Protestants, are seen as underpinning the American Revolution, Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Other authors are interested in tracing the religious beliefs of America’s founding fathers, emphasizing both Jewish and Christian influence in their personal beliefs and how this was translated into the creation of American institutions and character. ^[7]

To these historians, the interest of the concept Judeo-Christian is not theology but on actual culture and history as it evolved in America. These authors discern a melding of Jewish thought into Protestant teachings – which added onto the heritage of English history and common law, as well as Enlightenment thinking - resulted in the birth of American democracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian

this is freaky

Directed by Cesar Kuriyama

Director of Photography Tommy Agriodimas


No Video cameras were used in the production of this music video. It was created entirely from 45,000 Photographs taken by a Nikon D200 DSLR.

Who needs original footage if you can sample…Maybe some of you have seen this, if not enjoy.

“How many of the 41 commercials mashed up into one music video can you recognize? How many brands can you name?”

via adlabs