Any time that people who work in industries that are widely despised by the public get together for some sort of conference, the real underlying topic of conversation is "Why don't they like us?"

The answer, of course, is that they are all, to varying degrees, con artists, by profession, and quite well paid for it, so STFU. But still, everyone wants to be liked! The topic of the latest ad agency conference? You guessed it, it's about how to get people to like ad people!

THE advertising industry needs to do a better job of advertising itself, speakers and attendees at the 2009 American Association of Advertising Agencies leadership conference here said.

That rebranding began close to home. On Tuesday, the association's president and chief executive, Nancy Hill, announced the group would now go by the name 4A's, since the "American" was too limited (advertisers do business internationally), as was "Advertising Agencies" (firms now offer public relations services as well).

There's a winning strategy: Burnish your image by pointing out that you're now flacks, too. We'll be reading this same story for next year's conference, and on unto infinity, the end.
[NYT]

Confessions of a Shopaholic is out now, starring an imaginary magazine writer who's able to be, you know, a Shopaholic. This is not even remotely workable in reality any longer, no matter how you contort your imagination. Former Radar editor Willa Paskin points out what's become only too obvious to all of us boots on the ground: magazine work is not the path to upper class lifestyle. Make up another dream job for aspiring Queens of New York, Hollywood:

If Shopaholic and its ilk are short on the paltry pay, long on the stilettos, that's partially thanks to the fact that very few people have a clear idea of what an editor actually does all day (or what they get paid to do it). The title has become shorthand for a creative, fun, professional white-collar job that involves very few set tasks. Since the particulars of the profession are so little known, screenwriters are free to present magazine work (inaccurately, it sadly turns out) as the ultimate fantasy, which requires employees to attend fancy fetes and photo shoots, groom and gossip compulsively, date handsome men and spend zero time on e-mail.

In fact, the lifestyle elements most magazine workers currently have in common are layoffs, pay cuts, student loan debt, and overwork. Whee, the Big Apple! But really, it's nothing to feel bad about. The idea that you could come to the big city and live the life of an heiress while working in such a pedestrian field as the print media was mostly a pipe dream from day one; and for those who did manage to do it, it was a passing anomaly.

You know who's happy about all this? The actually rich.

The survey, which polled 108 private jet owners with a mean net worth $116 million, found that 94% of those surveyed defined luxury as "for oneself," rather than for the masses (2.8%). That marks a big change from last year, when 37% agreed that luxury should also be for the masses...

"What you're seeing is a shift to real elitism," says Russ Alan Prince, the president of Prince Assoc. "The rich like it better that everybody can't be part of the luxury boom anymore."

See you guys at Gray's Papaya tonight! Then maybe Netflix? [Daily Beast, WSJ]

Sure, private planes were always an easy target. They're incredibly expensive, they're luxurious to an offensive degree, and they destroy our precious, precious ozone layer warm our planet till everything dies for the comfort of the rich. Plus, as commercial airline travel got more and more terrible and inconvenient, the average person's desire for the rich to share in that pain grew.

But now it's on a whole other level. Private jets are now resented, merely for existing! You could see the issue taking shape when there was the big outcry over the GM executives flying private to Washington to ask for bailout money. And now the new consensus seems to be: if your crappy failure of a company got any bailout funds from taxpayers, riding in a private jet for anything but the strictest business reason is a PR disaster.

The Post slammed Citigroup exec Sandy Weill this weekend for charging the company to fly him and his family to a Mexican resort for Christmas. Today, he's swearing off jets, just like that!

Weill used the jet to fly him and his family to the One & Only Palmilla beachfront resort in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico, where they stayed from Dec. 26 through Jan. 3. The cost of using the plane was estimated at $70,550 to $90,550.

The jaunt came just weeks after Citigroup, which has lost $28.2 billion over the past five quarter, avoided total collapse with a $45 billion federal bailout, courtesy of taxpayers.

What a bastard! But what's coming is not just anger at abuse of private jets; soon it will be taboo for business people to ride a private plane for any reason. With all the layoffs and stupid corporate recession cutbacks, it will just be considered unconscionable. What kind of capitalist monster could blithely go burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel just so they don't have to associate with the unwashed masses?

Cyrus Mehri is the lawyer (who has sued the hell out of plenty of big corporations before), and for months his firm has been investigating the racial situation on MAD AVE. Numbers:

Blacks remain underrepresented on Madison Avenue, according to the report, “Research Perspectives on Race and Employment in the Advertising Industry,” which concluded that only 5.3 percent of managers and professionals at agencies in 2008 were black.

And those blacks who do manage to land jobs on Madison Avenue are significantly underpaid, the report said, earning 80 cents for each dollar earned by their white counterparts.

Not to mention:

Compared with the overall U.S. labor market, the advertising industry fares significantly worse on eight measures of employment for black managers and professionals — by an average of 36.7%.

Mehri wants to get the industry to make changes voluntarily, which he's had success doing elsewhere in the past. If not he will surely sue their asses.

[Ad Age, NYT]

There are a few different strategies. Some, like failed failure WaMu, use humor, along the lines of "We've dragged our dessicated carcass to a safe place now. LOL!"

Others are going for the old "reassure you despite all evidence to the contrary" tactic:

In advertising, many financial institutions are racing to reassure consumers with soothing messages — that focus on important “S” words: strength, safety, stability, security.

“There is a safe and smart place to put your money,” ads for Commerce Bank tell newspaper readers.

Simultaneously, some institutions are continuing to communicate as if the recent upheavals had not happened. Ads for Discover Financial Services, for instance, try to coax consumers to sign up for yet another credit card, offering enticements like free balance transfers.

Ha, well I guess that's appropriate. The truth is advertising is just a buffet of bad options right now for banks. They can laugh it off and look stupid. They can try to reassure you and look like liars. Or they can try the "straight talk" approach and scare you even worse than you already are.

Or they can do what the FDIC did and hire scary blond Suze Orman. Which is the worst option of all. [NYT]

The network’s branding retains the signature colour purple, which was established at its inception, but includes a complete refresh of the agency’s brandmark and visual identity. The new brandmark consists of a bespoke wordmark and Mindshare’s new partner symbol. The symbol has been created to reflect the structure and form of Mindshare’s business. It shows two forms coming together to create a new, strong form reflecting Mindshare’s partnerships with clients, suppliers and other agencies. The flow of colour symbolises the flow of creativity across the business and the segmentation mirrors the bringing together of specialist expertise within Mindshare’s “open source” approach to client business which enhances a platform neutral approach. The bespoke wordmark shows Mindshare in upper case [as shown above]. When written in prose Mindshare no longer has the upper case “S” previously used – hence the company’s name will now be written Mindshare and not MindShare. In visual form on the printed page, this will represent the agency’s new simplified approach, re-engineering its structure from more than a dozen separate specialist departments to four integrated, collaborative groups: Client Leadership, Business Planning, Invention and The Exchange. The bold new brandmark expresses Mindshare’s progressive attitude to new technology and the connected way in which the network views the media landscape.

Idiots. [via AgencySpy]

For the eighth year in a row Coke is the world's best brand, (drug joke). The biggest gainers this year were Google, Apple, and Amazon; the group of biggest losers included financial brands like Merrill Lynch (#1 loser with a bullet!), Morgan Stanley, and Citi. As you would expect.

Also plunging into massive suckdom: Ford and The Gap.

The lesson here is that in order to have a strong band, be massive yet innocuous-to-boring. I am now a brand consultant. Here's the top 20:

• Dellcapturedandrapedmydaughter.com
• Xeroxcorporationslippedmearoofie.com
• Walmarttouchedundermyclothingwithoutconsent.com
• IBMrunsacockfightingring.com
• Gawkermediahasmetieduppleasehelpmeohgod.com

[WSJ]

Now, as Mr. Nadal sets his sights on the U.S. Open, the hunky rebel known for his muscle shirts, capri-length pants and bandanna will morph into more of a traditionalist, starting with his on-court wardrobe.The shift appears part of a larger strategy by Mr. Nadal's tight-knit management team to transform the sublime baseliner from a teenage heartthrob into a grown-up star.

Supposedly Nadal himself has now grown up and spontaneously decided to update his image. But he's "worked closely" with Nike designers to build himself a new wardrobe composed of polo shirts (with mesh side panels!) in "chlorine blue, orange blaze, white and concord [purple]." All at the expense of boring old has-been Roger Federer. Your move, Anna Wintour.

[WSJ]

In 46 hours of programming, NBC contained only one reference to marital sex, but 11 references to nonmarital sex and one reference to adultery. On NBC, there were as many depictions of adults having sex with minors as there were scenes implying or depicting sex between married partners...

References to incest, pedophilia, partner swapping, prostitution, threesomes, transsexuals/transvestites, bestiality and necrophilia combined outnumbered references to sex in marriage on NBC by a ratio of 27 to 1.

[Ad Age]

In papers filed in Manhattan Federal Court, Victoria's Secret said it wants the court to consider a study it conducted.

The survey found only five of 308 people who bought hair care products associated the word "sexy" with a single company and made any reference to Sexy Hair Concepts and its offerings.

Victoria's Secret, which also introduced the Very Sexy bra, said its study proves "that the word 'sexy' has not acquired distinctiveness among purchasers of hair care products."

To be fair, if Sexy Hair Concepts loses their Sexy monopoly, they will have some serious branding problems. Their product line:

Brands that are "Crap": Ford, H&M, Myspace, Mcdonald's, AT&T.

Brands that are "Stupid": Evian, Twitter, YouTube, MTV, Harley-Davidson.

Brands that are "Retarded": Skype, Microsoft, Twitter, MTV, London 2012.

Brands that are "Douchebag": Blackberry, Dodge, BMW, Puma, Corona

Brands that are "Suck": Yahoo, London 2012, Skype, HP, Microsoft

[Brand Tags via WSJ]

The Daily News' Richard Huff points out that ratings for the previous episode, which aired before the photo controversy broke, were also down:

Compared to the first original show of the year, which aired in January, viewership for Sunday's show was down 33%.

That suggests the hubbub over series star Miley Cyrus' questionable photos in Vanity Fair neither helped nor hurt with viewership. Rather, "Hannah" was on a decline before the photo dustup.

Disney CEO Bob Iger has the obligatory quote about how the Miley "franchise" is "incredibly robust." But Huff suggest that she could already be on an inevitable downward slide, at least among young fans. Which would certainly cause her advisers to tell her to grow up, quick.

Experience shows that kid franchises such as "Hannah" that hit the rare white-hot phase are good for roughly 18 months, then start to fade.

"Hannah Montana" had been the top-rated show with young viewers the past two seasons, but because of the slow rollout this year, the heat has moved to the "Wizards of Waverly Place," starring Selena Gomez (who has appeared on "Hannah"), which now holds the slot as Disney's top show.

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At Least It Helped Literacy In Spain

Scary Foreshadowing By Pakistani Airlines

Nature Has 9-11 Too!

MTV Is Concerned About Hunger As Well As 9-11

In France, the scorpion represents the threat of AIDS. Always use condoms when having sex with a scorpion

This scorpion-shaped carrot is Greenpeace's way of scaring you away from genetically engineered vegetables. That is some nasty engineering.

Stella Espresso Coffee should probably fire the ad agency that decided to depict the "bite" of their coffee with an image of a scorpion crawling up some lady's nose.

[via Adrants]

His publicist, Ronn Torossian, said the jiggle-happy entrepreneur planned to return to his home in Los Angeles later tonight.

"He's looking forward to watching Girls Gone Wild movies and is excited about the launch of the magazine," the rep said. "We're going to be doing some things tonight in L.A. with family and friends."

[via E! Online]