This Is Scary: Kmart Starts ‘Black Friday’ Two Days After Halloween

Retailer Says Early Sales Tactic Is Based on Consumers Already Jump-starting Their Holiday Shopping

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — This year, Black Friday comes two days after Halloween. Retailers try and rush the season every year, but Kmart is taking it to a new extreme, introducing “Early Black Friday” sales beginning this weekend.

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L’Oreal Posts Weak Quarter Despite Higher Ad Spending Marketer Says Slowing Salon Visits Contributed to Slippage in North American Growth

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — L’Oreal appears to have hiked ad spending last quarter while rivals Procter & Gamble Co. and Unilever cut back. But it doesn’t look to have helped L’Oreal much, as the company pulled down full-year sales guidance today based on a weak third quarter and a 5.7% decline in organic sales growth in North America.

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Cheap-PC Guru Invites All to Copy His Designs

Leader of One Laptop Per Child Hopes Prices Go Even Lower

Idea Conference

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Like all those low-priced laptops that are coming out on the market lately? Thank One Laptop Per Child and its founder, Nicholas Negroponte. And if history repeats, prices will go much, much lower.

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Hollywood’s Views on Race May Be in for a Change Q&A: Producer Joe Pichirallo on Marketing Black Films to White Audiences, Box-Office Success and the ‘Bradley Effect’

Madison & Vine

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — Is there a “Bradley Effect” when it comes to the box office? The success of two new films with largely black casts — “The Secret Life of Bees” and the thriller “Lakeview Terrace” — suggests that marketers’ conventional wisdom about how race influences purchasing decisions may be in need of re-examination.

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MTV Music Gets It Right, Right Out of the Box

Media Reviews for Media People: MTVMusic.com

Larry Dobrow

I don’t know why MTV didn’t unleash MTVMusic.com sooner. As out of character as it might be for today’s MTV to do something music-related, the brand remains synonymous with music videos to a large percentage of the Loverboy-loving universe. We can find a large percentage of what MTV Music offers elsewhere; somehow it just feels better to watch the clips on an MTV-stamped offshoot. The brand remains embedded in our collective consciousness.

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The Right Way to Tell Your Employer You’re Leaving Timing, In-Person Communication Can Ensure You’ll Be Going on Good Terms

Talentworks

As an executive recruiter, I often speak with executives who receive offers, and nine times out of 10 the first question they ask me is: “How and when do I give notice?” It’s a good question on many levels because how and when someone resigns can have a major impact on a future career path.

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Dell Bows India Campaign

First Big Brand Work From WPP’s Enfatico

Global Idea Network

PC giant Dell is rolling a big campaign aimed at small- and medium-size business in India. The new effort, which runs the media gamut from print and digital to broadcast, represents a shift from the previous strategy of targeting large organizations.

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McDonald’s Gives Packaging a Flashy Update New Look Highlights Food Pictures, Plays Down ‘Lovin’ It’ Slogan

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — McDonald’s is scrapping its package design across 118 countries and 56 languages in what Global Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon called the “biggest packaging initiative in the history of the brand.” The new look puts more emphasis on product and less on the brand’s iconic “I’m lovin’ it” tagline.

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Newsflash: Subway Effort Was Not Racist

We’re Dangerously Close to Stripping the Word of All Meaning

The Big Tent

Bloggers are claiming Subway pulled an online effort because it was “racist.” Such efforts only make it that much harder for real instances of racism and racial insensitivity in this industry to be taken seriously.

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Honda Ads Pioneer New Form of Road Music A 3 Minute Ad Age Video Report

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Inspiration for advertising can come from anywhere but this is probably the first time the lowly highway rumble strip provided any. Honda’s new flock of Civic spots document an effort to turn a portion of California road into a data-storage surface and a new car into a musical instrument. It was a rare sort of undertaking that didn’t just create new ads but made musical and road engineering history in the process.

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Month’s Top 10 Most-Liked, Most-Recalled New TV Spots

Nielsen IAG Research Ad Ratings: Consumers Like Disney Parks’ ‘Birthday’ Ad

Watch the Top Spot

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Disney Parks “Birthday” spot was the commercial most liked by viewers during the last month. See the full Nielsen IAG lists of top-liked and top-recalled spots.

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A Strange Noise Creativity Can Be Shaped by Surprising Sources

Small Agency Diary

The nostalgic mechanical noise of an old typewriter made me think about how the tools we choose define the creative process and how creative work morphs and evolves with new technologies. Sometimes, when the new tools emerge, the people who know how to use them don’t always create the best work. Sometimes, great creative minds just can’t master the new tools.

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PomX Iced Coffee Targets College Crowd

New Energy Drink Counting on Irreverent Humor to Get Noticed

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The company that popularized pomegranate juice, Pom Wonderful, is looking to stake its claim in the energy-drink arena, introducing PomX Iced Coffee with an irreverent marketing campaign targeted to 18- to 24-year-olds with taglines such as “Wake the F Up” and “Yes officer, I’m completely buzzed.”

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Microsoft Enlists Public to Create Latest Ads Crispin Uses Homemade Videos Uploaded to Windows.com for ‘I’m a PC’ Campaign

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — First it was Jerry Seinfeld, then it was Deepak Chopra. Now, Microsoft is introducing another star as part of its new consumer ad campaign: you.

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Creativity’s Pick of the Week’s Best New Ads

American Airlines on the Plight of a Hapless Hoopster, PC Explains His Ad Strategy to Mac, Conservatives Discuss Change and Other Work

Watch the Spots

In this week’s episode of Creativity’s Top 5, courtesy Creativity-Online.com, we see Sarah Palin as president, meet some Conservatives for Change, ride a bus with godless humanists from Britain, follow a hapless hoopster around the world with American Airlines and giggle at Apple’s latest swipe in its computer catfight with Microsoft.

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In Artsy Amsterdam, Time to Think About the Bottom Line Thinker Ewald Engelen Is Showing Creative Types That Economic Health Isn’t All About Creativity

Global Idea Network

Writing from one of Europe’s capitals of creativity, blogger Chidi Onwuka pauses to consider the pro-business philosophy in a city not often known for thinking that way.

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Turning City Buses Into Rolling Video Billboards

A 3 Minute Ad Age Video Report

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — In the latest incursion of ads into big-city life, New York and Chicago are planning to turn hundreds of buses into rolling video billboards. The project is the latest work of Titan Worldwide, the outdoor advertising company that has focused aggressively on new digital formats. The 12-foot-wide bus-mounted video screens are networked to a central computer and can be programmed with a constantly changing schedule of commercials.

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Will Wal-Mart Bring Mobile Internet to the Masses? Links Up With T-Mobile to Hawk Android Phones

DigitalNext

Wal-Mart is teaming up with T-Mobile to sell the G1, the first phone equipped with Google’s Android mobile operating system, for $148.88 — $31.11 off the price I paid to get mine shipped to me the day it launched.

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Proof That Handset Brands Help Sell Wireless Plans

Google Study Finds Many Shoppers Seek a Particular Manufacturer, Not Just a Reliable Network

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — Telecom providers such as AT&T and Verizon may want to take note of a Google study that found more than one in two wireless shoppers said handsets played a major role in their purchase decisions.

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In Tough Times, Is Excess a Laughing Matter? Tricky Marketing Ahead for Touchstone Film ‘Shopaholic’

Madison & Vine

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — Amid weekly stock-market paroxysms, rising bankruptcies, the continuing mortgage crisis and a surge in irrecoverable credit-card debt, Disney’s Touchstone Pictures is readying what’s looking to be an ill-timed release of “Confessions of a Shopaholic.”

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