Nokia Calls Review of $400 Million

…Media Biz After Dispute Over Fees

A dispute over fees is at the heart of Nokia’s decision to review its estimated $400 million global media business, currently handled by WPP’s MediaCom.

The call for a pitch is believed to have resulted from heated discussions between Nokia and MediaCom, in which the Finnish handset maker sought a reduction in fees paid to MediaCom in return for greater compensation paid to the agency based on sales growth. Multiple executives confirmed the dispute.

Several agencies have been invited to take part, including incumbent MediaCom, but the WPP media agency is unlikely to hold on to the business, said executives close to the company.

While Nokia is based in Europe, much of the company’s growth comes from Asia, particularly China, and Nokia’s global head of marketing services, Chris Leong, is based in Beijing.

Google’s Tim Armstrong Departs for AOL

Time Warner cleaned out the executive suite at troubled internet unit AOL, appointing Google President-Americas Operations Tim Armstrong chairman-CEO.

Mr. Armstrong replaces former NBC Universal exec Randy Falco, who was named CEO of AOL in 2006. Also ousted was Mr. Falco’s deputy, Chief Operating Officer Ron Grant, a longtime Time Warner executive who once served as deputy to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes.

In a statement, Mr. Bewkes said Mr. Armstrong is the right executive to “move AOL into the next phase of its evolution.”

“At Google, Armstrong helped build one of the most successful media teams in the history of the internet, helping to make Google the most popular online search-advertising platform in the world for direct and brand marketers,” Mr. Bewkes said.

Wanted to be a CEO
As an early Google employee who opened the company’s Mountain View, Calif., office in 2000, Mr. Armstrong doesn’t need the money, but he was known to want to become a CEO, and his name surfaced for other big internet jobs, such as when Yahoo searched for a replacement for former CEO Jerry Yang.

Skittles.com

What’s Next…?

Quite a bit of buzz has popped up around the new Skittles.com over the weekend and today. If you haven’t seen the site, it’s based on leveraging different social-media sites linked together by a very simple menu navigation that floats on any of the sites. For example, the home page and “chatter” section is the brand’s Twitter page, the video media page is the brand’s YouTube page, the video images page is the brand’s Flickr stream, and the “friends” section is the Facebook fan-page profile.

This is almost certainly inspired by Modernista’s brilliant redesign from about a year ago. Does that matter? Definitely not. Modernista had it right then and now Skittles does too. Skittles has unabashedly made the bold leap into accepting they can’t control the way their brand is defined in today’s social web and can only try their best to participate in the conversation. They’re taking the good with the bad, and I can assure you all that good is going to dramatically outweigh the bad.

Coke, Mercedes Avoid Gritty Film Cameos

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ Director Danny Boyle Says Brands Ask Out of Mumbai Slum Scenes

Madison & Vine

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — Filmmakers often try to incorporate brands into their projects to lend plotlines a sense of authenticity. But in the case of director Danny Boyle’s upcoming release, “Slumdog Millionaire,” the footage might be too real: In an interview with Advertising Age, Mr. Boyle said Coca-Cola and Mercedes-Benz demanded that they be excised from key scenes. Mr. Boyle (“Trainspotting,” “28 Days Later”) went to great lengths to make “Slumdog Millionaire” authentic: He spent a year in India shooting deep in the vast slums of Mumbai, a city where fully half of the 16.6 million denizens live in shantytowns, ghettos or simply on the streets.

In the romantic drama, out in theaters Nov. 12 from Fox Searchlight, a penniless 18-year-old orphan is one question away from winning the jackpot on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” When he is accused of cheating and interrogated by the police, flashbacks from his harrowing youth in the slums show how he actually learned the answers to the show’s seemingly impossible questions.

FULL ARTICLE

iPhone Apps

10 Must-Have iPhone Apps

for the Adman

As I work through the data analysis of my Mardi Gras Twitter experiment, I thought I’d have some fun with this week’s post and share my top 10 iPhone apps that every Adman (and Adwoman) should have to be more successful in today’s high-intensity, gotta-have-it-yesterday ad world.

A special thanks to Mike Rainey, our Chief Creative Officer, for helping me to compile this list.

10. iBeer. For those days when no one remembers to make the Free Beer Friday beer run. Yes, sadly it does happen.

9. Shazam. For when you find the perfect background music for the campaign that is due tomorrow while sitting at the wine bar eating breakfast.

8. Twittelator Pro. If you’re on Twitter, you know why. This one lets you basically do it all from your iPhone. In fact, it powered my entire Mardi Gras Twitter experiment. Troubles here and there, but overall, good stuff.

Twitter

- We Can Do What Google Can’t

Twitter sees lucrative opportunities in search, albeit a different kind of search than what Google offers, and, as co-founder Biz Stone told Ad Age recently, “we’ll certainly be exploring those.”

It’s because of the potential it sees in search that the Twitter co-founders walked away from a $500 million offer from Facebook — not just the terms of the deal, said Todd Chaffee, an Institutional Venture Partners general partner and a new Twitter backer. He said contrary to some reports, Facebook offered not just stock but substantial cash in the deal.

Twitter’s search engine, purchased with the acquisition of Summize last summer, bills itself as a search of “what’s happening — right now,” and in Twitter’s small but growing world, it is.

Facebook Serves

…as Own Example of How Web Bites Back

Facebook inadvertently made the news on President’s Day when Consumerist reported a change in the social networks’s terms of service. In short, Facebook’s new TOS indicates that it owns all the data that users upload to their system. In fact, it goes a step further to suggest that the company may “retain archived copies of your User Content” even if you terminate your Facebook account. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg felt it necessary to personally respond to the concerns, noting that Facebook’s terms are consistent with many web-service providers.