Again this year, ECU will send a group of students to the Advertising Women of New York’s Advertising Career Conference. This year the conference is November 16-17th. ECU Pirates will travel north on November 14th and return on the 18th.

This annual event brings together approximately 700 students from around the country to learn about the various career opportunities in advertising. It provides college students who are interested in careers in the advertising industry many opportunities:

• To be exposed to industry leaders in the field of advertising
• To hear advertising case studies related to each major job area
• To discover career planning techniques for landing the job they want
• To network with advertising executives
• To benefit from resume building workshops and hear suggestions from experts in advertising placement

Take a look at the happy faces from last year’s group! They toured Dentsu America before the AWNY conference began. This year, our group will visit Dentsu America once again and visit BFG9000 and M80!

Applications are due by September 10th!

ECU Students visit Dentsu America

The crowd at Med Men Live

On Tuesday night, Advertisers at Work was featured at the New York Public Library! I led a panel discussion with three of the amazing advertising luminaries featured in the book: Eric Kallman of Barton F Graf 9000 (BFG), Doug Fidoten of Dentsu America, and Jayanta Jenkins of TBWA Chiat/Day.

About 100 people were in attendance for this informative and hilarious discussion (including, to my utter delight, several former students from both Virginia Commonwealth University and East Carolina University). The panelists kept us thoroughly engaged and entertained commenting on their daily lives, pitches lost and won, and their predictions on how the advertising industry of today might be depicted on the Mad Men of tomorrow.

We even had a surprise visitor! David Oakley of BooneOakley made it to the event and joined us for a delightful dinner after.

My thanks go out to Doug, Eric, and Jayanta (and all of the people who participated in the book project), to Sadhika and her team at Apress, and to the New York Public Library for its support.

Please come out to the New York Public Library and join us on July 17th!

• Product placement in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

  In an ironic twist, brands pay for product placements in a movie that demonizes product placements.

  tags: brand integrations product placements 2011 movie

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Powerful Insight on Brand Journalism and Chrysler from Bob Garfield

  In this post from Bob Garfield, we see two errors in social media usage: one is from a brand and another from an employee.  Chrysler fired an employee who tweeted  this: "I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive." Despite a stated commitment to social media, Chrysler’s action suggests it isn’t committed to real dialogue or to the spontaneity of social media conversations.  The employee made a mistake too – by not taking the added care to ensure that what he posted was what he wanted associated with his own digital footprint.  As the saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right. 

  tags: Garfield AdAge Chrysler Twitter motorcity Detroit campaign

  • Just as SXSW was getting underway, Chrysler had cut ties to a social-media contractor after one of its employees hit send on the following tweet: "I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive."

  • The junior employee behind the message, 28-year-old Scott Bartosiewicz, explained that he had meant to send it from his personal account, but clicked the wrong box on his Twitter deck. Perhaps that is why Chrysler, instead of stoning him to death, merely fired him.

  • "The company has invested greatly, not only financially, but philosophically … in supporting Detroit and the U.S. auto industry," Chrysler spokesman Ed Garsten told the Associated Press, "and we simply couldn’t tolerate any messaging — whether or not there was an obscenity — that was denigrating to Detroit."

  • Yeah, what an apostate that Bartosiewicz is. In a city wracked with unemployment, crime, poverty, corruption, racism and intractable urban decay, discussion of driving habits is a blasphemy that takes it too far. And an ad campaign that uses rapper Eminem to personify the city’s raw grit could not possibly make room for a witty molecule of road rage.

    That’s why, whether in Austin or Motown, "Brand Journalism" is such an awful misnomer. I find it ironic that marketers are charged with conducting conversations and no one knows how to tell the fucking truth.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The End of an Era: No More CP&B and the King

  In this post, AdFreak presents Crispin’s 15 best campaigns for Burger King. Enjoy the memories as you travel down seven years of Burger King’s best advertising. 

  tags: CP&B BK Burger King advertising video examples campaigns adfreak adweek

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• How to create fascinating SlideShare presentations: Tips from Sally Hogshead

  Sally knows presentations. And you can too once you follow her 6 steps for creating effective presentations. 

  Students who use these tips in preparing their next class presentation will qualify for a gold star award. 

• tags: presentations howto Hogshead slideshare PPT

  • 1. Start with a strong core concept. As with any presentation, it all starts with the idea. (Duh.) To translate into a great SlideShare, your concept must be robust enough to merit 15 or 20 pages of description, yet simple enough to be contained within a succinct, one-minute-ish presentation.

  • 2. Spend extra time to find un-lame visuals. Reject the stock photography clichés. Refuse to give in to the hackneyed metaphors. (Yeah, this means no more stock photos of men holding briefcases running across a finish line). Find images that not only feel fresh and vibrant, but also strategically accentuate your point.

  • 3. Don’t always use images that are “see-say.” Your images shouldn’ literally re-state your point, but rather, add depth and meaning. For instance, when talking about a “fork in the road” …don’t actually show a photo of a fork in the road. To do this, don’t simply search on the stock site for a literal interpretation of your concept, or the site will be more than happy to serve up more lame puns like “fork in the road.” Rather than using search keywords “fork in the road,” get a little more conceptual, and search for words such as “decisions” or “choices” or “complexity.”

  • 4. Take a moment to craft your typography. You don’t have to go crazy with mad design skills, but don’t just cut and paste your unformatted text from a Word doc. Take a moment to check line breaks and basic placement on the page. Since your SlideShare won’t have music or spoken words, your text bears greater responsibility of visually communicating the tone and emotion of your idea.

  • 5. Establish a pattern, then disrupt it. I like to establish a consistent visual pattern in the first few pages of a SlideShare, then add energy and surprise by breaking the pattern.

  • . Almost done! Now wrap it up with a call to action. At the end of your SlideShare, your viewer should want to learn more. (After all, you’ve just fascinated them!) Let them know what action you intend them to take, followed by a page of your contact info. I ended this SlideShare with a tempting, but not in-your-face, call to action:

    Whether you realize it or not, you’re already using these seven triggers. The question is, are you using the right triggers, in the right way, to get your desired result? This book will show you.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

In this TED presentation, Elizabeth Gilbert speaks openly about the creative process and approaches to creativity. She also acknowledges the FEAR of creating – and of not creating. We all face this fear, some more often than others. We can’t let fear stop us from creating.

Listen and watch as Elizabeth Gilbert inspires us to move into our own creative spaces.