Scouse army holds Denmark to ransom!

The amounts of money paid in the US for sports sponsorship, is pretty crazy. Until you look at the money being splashed around in the UK for the privilege of putting your logo on a football teams strip. The news that Liverpool want Carlsberg to cough up the same amount of money – Eighty million quid – That Aon squeezed Manchester United for in a four year deal, smacks of extortion to me.

Not that I blame the teams for trying it on… If big dumb companies believe that having a three inch tall version of their logo on a players jersey is worth twenty million pounds a year, then they deserve to get ripped off. Still, I suppose it’s no worse than the British taxpayer being stuck with the billions destined to be shoveled down the black hole of the 2012 Olympics.

I did enjoy reading though, that Liverpool fans have forced Carlsberg to abandon ads and promotions in the Wizened of Oz’s Sun rag, ‘cos Liverpool fans refuse to read it. Plus they are currently demanding an advertiser boycott of the Dirty Digger’s Fox Soccer Channel. What with the current implosion of MySpace, he must be wondering where his next billion is coming from.

Holding company executives feel your pain!

In a further sign of how bad things are getting over here, BBDO Detroit is granting its 450 staff a four week furlough… Which is Capitalism Speak for four weeks off, without pay. As one commentator put it… “BBDO staffers might want to ask themselves, is getting a European-style four weeks vacation this year really all that bad? Only the U.S. forces its employees to work like slaves with only two weeks off a year. Perhaps it is time for America to come into line with international standards and give workers a decent level of minimum vacation time.”

What this cretin conveniently forgets is that when all those socialist workers get up to six weeks vacation every year… They actually get paid. And lets not get into all that maternity leave and free health care stuff. Bloody communists. Next thing you know they’ll be stopping European workers from owning assault rifles and bazookas.  

Meanwhile, back at BBDO’s parent company, Omnicom, they’ve lost $685 million in the first quarter of 2009. At least, all the Omnicom heavies, including CEO John Wren, have taken big pay cuts, unlike the charlatans at Interpublic who after particularly pathetic results received big pay raises and multi-million dollar bonuses.

And let’s not get into Sir Martins projected $94 million five year bonus package from WPP. As my old Mum used to say… It’s the rich wot gets the gravy, it’s the poor wot gets the blame.

Exactly who are the “Twitterati” talking to?

Readers of both my blogs will know that I am far from being a fan of Twitter, and I’m not even on Facebook any more because I’ve been hacked twice and had to put up with a lot of very pissed off people who think I’ve been bombarding them with spam. I never was on MySpace, because that seems to be inhabited by a bunch of illiterates, both graphically and verbally.

OK, I admit, I did open up a Twitter account, but closed it after a day, as it seemed like a giant waste of fu***ng time. Maybe Stephen Fry has nothing better to do when stuck in a lift, but I do, like perhaps talking to the people who are stuck in there with me. Anyway, as you probably know, there’s been increasing amounts of publicity recently about how only 10% of the “Twitterati” actually use the bloody thing more than once every August Bank Holiday. It’s even been on “The Beeb.”

What I found most interesting though, was that the study quoted on this says… “The top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production. Which implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.” In other words it’s like a spam email program… But it limits you to 140 characters. As one of the researchers on the study says… “Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends.” Which, funnily enough, is what all the early adopters were claiming.

Apart from the fact that no one has figured out how to make money from it… I’ll lay odds that in a couple of years Twitter will be as popular as “Second Life.” Remember that?

Auto insanity. Will it kill some ad agencies?

Because America has this strange thing called Chapter Eleven, which is a form of bankruptcy that allows companies to stay in business, even after they have reached a stage were they can  no longer pay their creditors, there are quite a few agencies over here looking at a dire situation involving many millions of dollars being owed to them that they may never collect from auto companies, General Motors and Chrysler.

It would seem that Publicis and Interpublic are the two with the most to lose. It is possible they may get paid, but it will very likely only be cents on the dollar. Reminds me of the dot.com implosion in the late nineties, when many BDA’s, who should have known better, were left holding the bag for millions in media buys. Usually for three million dollar Super Bowl spots.

But, in the mysterious way the wheels turn within the advertising industry since the bean counters of the holding companies took over… There is no doubt, after this fiasco, senior management at Publicis and Interpublic will reward themselves with raises and “performance bonuses” for yet another job well done.