Team Roehm!

Big, big, big score for Team Roehm today.

New York's story on her, called "Snakes In The Garden" does just what a lot of people (okay, me) were saying it would: it paints Wal-Mart as the evil Spawn of Satan, and Julie Roehm, Sean Womack and Howard Draft as its undeserving victims.

Featured prominently are Wal-Marts financial missteps, their evil legal machinations, their pathological cheapness. Boo-yah.

Some choice snippets:

People in Bentonville also found plenty of sex in Julie’s personal presentation—the hair, the legs, the big blue eyes—though, for all the talk about what later went wrong, she seemed wholesome by New York standards, Rachael Ray as a midwestern business executive.

Sean looks straight out of a J.Crew catalogue: navy blazer, wrinkled white shirt, plus a handsome angular face and wedge of thick dark hair. He’s 37, though he looks younger, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed.

(T)he designated associate, as employees are called, probably a young, well-scrubbed fellow in short white sleeves. And this fellow would beat him up on prices just as he did every vendor. (“Don’t ever feel sorry for a vendor” is one Wal-Mart pearl.) He’d do that in one of about 40 compact gray meeting rooms on the wall of which was a stern warning: ASSOCIATES … DO NOT ACCEPT FOR THEIR PERSONAL BENEFIT GRATUITIES, TIPS, CASH, SAMPLES, ETC. You couldn’t accept a cup of coffee.

Julie and Sean liked Howard’s agency for another reason. They understood something about him. “He had more at stake than the others,” said Sean. “He’s up from direct marketing, and he’s got to prove himself,” said Julie. “He was not going to let this thing fail.” In October 2006, Howard won nine of ten votes from Wal-Mart’s decision-making committee. He celebrated with the mayor of Chicago, his hometown. And immediately made plans to hire 200 new people. Advertising Age let it be known that DraftFCB would be its agency of the year, which was probably Howard’s last bit of good news.

They landed in Bentonville at about 6:30 in the evening. Fleming and Castro-Wright were waiting. Sean was led down a long corridor to a tiny office. The head of security and a guy from legal were waiting for him. Julie went to a separate room. “The head of security flips his legal pad open and starts a 45-minute interrogation,” said Sean, which, even then, nervous as he was, he thought ridiculous.

Castro-Wright wanted some explanations. The Wal-Mart president made it clear that his concern wasn’t Howard’s ability to do the job. According to people who heard accounts of the meeting, he focused on Howard the person. He mentioned a BusinessWeek article that trotted out Howard’s playboy habits, his showy tastes.

And the real "Wal-Mart Is The AntiChrist" quote:

The legal action seemed to enrage the tight-lipped company. Wal-Mart appeared eager to shut Julie down. An attorney for Wal-Mart spoke to Sean’s wife, Shelley, and tried to enlist her help, according to a person who heard an account of the conversation. The attorney suggested that Wal-Mart hadn’t yet decided whether to pay Sean his bonus. Something under $200,000 was on the line. The Wal-Mart official, seemingly to reassure her of his trustworthiness, mentioned that he attended the same church as Shelley. Did she have any evidence that could be used? They weren’t after Sean but Julie. On Wednesday morning, Shelley—she and Sean are separated—provided company officials with a personal e-mail between Sean and Julie. (A Wal-Mart spokesman confirmed that a conversation took place, but added that “we wouldn’t discuss conversations between a lawyer and a potential witness in a pending lawsuit.”)

False Accusations

So some knucklehead named Sean Kegelman (who apparently works at Digitas) insults Chris Wall on his SuperAdFreak blog and guess who gets blamed for it?

Yours truly.

Guess Wall misread who posted what. Which is a shame, because I'm in agreement with what Wall said.

UPDATE:
Wall has kindly acknowledged his mistake on the SAF blog. The world is once again safe for democracy.

Monday Morning Quarterback

So the USA Today Super Bowl ad polls are in. Sort of like the People's Choice awards. Not a whole lot of surprise there.

Except maybe the fact that "Rock, Paper, Scissors" came in #3-- I saw that coming from a mile away, plus we'd seen it before with Nextel (Sprint?) and on "Wedding Crashers."

Or that the FedEx "Moon" spot came in 8th. Didn't think it was that funny, especially compared to last years Dino-spot. Or even compared to "Mr. TurkeyNeck." (And apparently, Dave Lubars agrees with me).

And of course Consumer Generated Content (CCG) scored big: The Doritos spot was at #4 and the NFL spot at #12.

Fortunately the game itself was pretty exciting, what with the rain and all the turnovers. And what percentage of sports columnists will be writing some variation of "from now on the Super Bowl should only be played in a domed stadium" today?

UPDATE:
Two more surprises: Fallon was responsible for the Garmin spot (at least according to Adcritic) and the Bud Light "English Language Class" spot was done by one of its Hispanic agencies, LatinWorks Marketing. The formers is surprising because the spot wasn't very good; the latter because they didn't get a whole lot of press for what was a very funny spot.

Obligatory Super Bowl Post

Feeling a bit under the weather, so blew off Super Bowl party and only have tadpoles and Mrs. T to gauge reaction to spots. So I'm reading/posting on Adfreaks SuperAdfreak blog(s) where they have a bunch of famous ad guys and Joe Jaffe sharing their thoughts.

Serious props to Ogilvy's Chris Wall for being the only one to take the job seriously and providing a close-to-real-time commercial-by-commercial commentary.

Still very scared by the naked old guy humping the car (and damned if I remember whose car it was, so traumatized was I.)

POST-GAME UPDATE:

So the naked guys were some college student's contest-winning entry. Now I feel bad about slamming her so hard.

Okay, bad-ish.

Without going into details, nothing stood out. Bud Light and Coke did okay- liked the crabs and the chainsaw for BudLite, the CGI send-off for Coke. Snapple Green Tea was funny and FedEd Turkeyneck made me laugh, but I'm a sucker for those sorts of jokes. Ditto Emerald Nuts/Robert Goulet-- that sort of absurd humor cracks me up every time.

Over on SuperAdFreak.com, the TV-Is-Dead crew showed their true colors from Seth Godin's "I'm done, I can't believe I'm a part of this lowbrow crap" rant at around 9 PM-- WTF- did he think he was judging a Shakesperean sonnet competition-- to Joey J's drunken rants.

Again, these guys ignore the way new media enhances old media, how being about to blog about, post about, obsesses about these Super Bowl spots-- and the ability to watch then ad nauseum on YouTube-- and the ability to follow up the experience online-- makes them more relevant and more of an event than ever. Which does nothing to diminish the power of television.

Fortunately for Tim Nudd, the aforementioned Chris Wall actually did what was asked of him: a just-about-real-time, spot-by-spot analysis. Favorite comment of all however, was David Lubars' passive-aggressive swipe at Eric Silver over the FedEx ads.

Night friends.

Viacom's YouTube Mistake

So Viacom's decided to make YouTube take down all their videos.

Dumb fucking move.

Didn't these people learn from the music industry that free downloads and samples on unofficial sites leads to greater sales, not fewer.

With Viacom's properties, the person watching a snippet from one of their shows on YouTube is probably already a fan. Being able to share something he thought was really funny with his friends increases his loyalty to the show. And may even get his friend, who's never watched it, to tune in.

So now all they've succeeded in doing is pissing off the fans who relied on YouTube downloads and made themselves look like the teacher who takes the ball away.

Now the press reports that they were looking to set up their own YouTube-like site, but that's even dumber-- the whole point of YouTube is the authenticity-- the fact that what's up there is random, not corporate. Not to mention the ease of being able to go to one site for all your download needs.

The internet is not going to kill television. It's just going to change the way people interact with it in that it gives them a way to actually interact with it. There are sites with plot summaries, message boards, character histories, video clips to let you interact with any vaguely popular show. I can't tell you how many times I've checked one of these sites out (even the official ones) to get someone else's take on an episode, to catch up on one I missed or to otherwise get on board. It's the pop culture equivalent of reading a book of literary criticism about your favorite author.

And rather than killing television, it just makes people's loyalty to TV that much stronger.

Toad's Friday Faves, #2

This one's here for the effort more than anything.

Given the utter banality of most tissue ads, this spot, part of a campaign from JWT/NY for Kleenex, must have been a bitch to sell through to the client. It's a nice idea, well shot, great music. (Band is called Starrdafu).

Where it falls short though, is that it's hard to believe these are real people. Thought maybe it's just my cynicism coloring things, but if you look at the reviews on AdCritic, they're fairly consistent on this point.

Though, to be fair, Adcritic is an industry site-- I wonder if your average consumer watches it and thinks "actors!"

Still, a great idea for a brand that pretty much owns the category.

Thoughts/comments?

Irrational Men

For the past two months, various commentators, most notably the posters on George Parker's Adscam blog, have exhibited an irrational hatred of former Wal-Mart marketing exec Julie Roehm and have taken a rather sadistic delight in her downfall.

I'm truly at a loss to understand the intensity of their disdain for a women whom none of them have ever met, let alone worked with. I mean really guys (and you're all men): what's up your respective asses?

To begin with, you want to talk sleazy? We're in a business where every single one of you can recite the story of the notorious BDA creative director who fired one of his creatives for defying his orders not to attend her sisters wedding so that she could spend the entire weekend in the office working on a soft drink commercial. (Even though she left the wedding early and came straight back to work.) And how this same CD had an affair with the wife of one of his account guys and then fired the account guy when they got caught. And how his reward for all this was to be made the Executive CD of yet another BDA.

Or how about the ECD of another BDA who'd assign agency producers to go help his girlfriend shoot the (non-ad-related) movie she was making. Or conscript agency art directors to design his book covers.

Not to mention the various coke-heads and adulterers who've sat in the corner office.

And you're upset about Julie Roehm boffing one of her underlings and playing favorites during a pitch? Crucify her for going to dinner with Howard when she only went to Shelly's $100,000 hoe-down? I mean that's pretty small potatoes compared to the sins sleazy agency creatives have committed. Sins for which they rarely get punished and often get rewarded.

Then there's another reality check: I'd much rather have a client like Roehm, someone who desperately wants the creative department to love her and think of her as "the cool client." Have you all only worked at hack shops with wimpy little clients who'll only approve something if it tests well?

I haven't. And the only clients who ever buy the good work, the risky work, are people like Roehm who are out to make a name for themselves and don't want to take the safe route.

Is the "Lingerie Bowl" a good ad? Not at all. But she didn't fucking write it. Some lame-ass agency in Dee-troit did and sold it to her as the greatest, coolest car spot ever. If they'd done something that was actually good, chances are she'd have bought that instead.

Ditto Kerri Martin. Don't like Dr. Mengele for VW? Me either. But she approved all the Mini work that Crispin did. And that stuff rocked. But not that many clients would have taken that risk.

Are people who call themselves "change agents" and paint their offices silly colors people you'd want to hang out with? Probably not.

But I'd much rather have them making decisions on my advertising than some wimp who says "well, I like it, but let's see how it does in qualitative."

UPDATE: 2 Arrested in Boston "Guerrilla-Gone-Awry"

So it seems that Boston officials are "livid" at Turner Broadcasting for the guerrilla advertising stunt-turned-bomb-scare.

So peeved in fact, that they've arrested the two poor suckers who were actually charged with putting the damn things up. Not the president of the company (Interference) that hired them. Not the marketing guy at Turner who hired the company. Just the two poor shlubs who probably got paid a few hundred dollars to climb all over Boston putting these things up.

It does raise an interesting issue though about guerrilla advertising: Why are so many large companies paying to essentially vandalize public (or private) property? I remember a non-ad world friend asking me this years ago when "snipe" postings (aka "wild postings") first came into vogue. Why would the likes of IBM, Nike and McDonald's pay someone to put posters on construction sites under cover of darkness? Who went around and did the actual posting? Who supplied them with the posters-- the ad agency? the client? the media company?

Some pictures for you:

The two poor shlubs who got arrested: Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28

Why Bostonians mistook the devices for bombs

What they look like when working.