Editco.net

You may think you've read enough about advertising (although I hope you haven't) but there's even more to come on More About Advertising to which your correspondent is a contributor.

At some stage this site will flip over to it but you won't just be getting the same stuff (which a gratifying number of you seem to like) but contributions from others too including the excellent media commentator Richard Addis, former editor of the Daily Express among others (the Express was pretty good when Richard was editing it).

Why something new?

We think we can provide some insights into the world of advertising, marketing and media that aren't available anywhere else. And we'll be trying to take a global view too.

Germany’s most famous agency Springer & Jacoby has gone bust after failing to recover from the loss of the giant Mercedes account in July 2006.

For a number of years the agency, credited with being the most creative in Germany, was majority-owned by Interpublic (IPG) but was then acquired by German communications group Avantaxx in October 2006, hardly great timing when you think about it.

Mercedes had left for rival Jung von Matt, set up by former Springer-ites as have been a number of other German agencies. Springer & Jacoby itself was formed by Reinhard Springer and Konstantin Jacoby in 1979 and at one time handled the likes of Coca-Cola, Deutsche Telekom and Lufthansa as well as Mercedes. But, at its demise shortly after its 30th birthday, the biggest account was Osram light bulbs.

There are lots of other contenders of course, Boase Massimi Pollitt in the UK, DDB in New York, maybe there are supporters of Crispin Porter Bogusky in the US and even Campaign Palace in Sydney.

But Collett Dickenson Pearce, now no longer with us alas, created what we now think of as the ‘British’ style of advertising – humorous, self-deprecating, stylish and, to many Americans still, mad.

There was method in CDP’s madness, it reasoned that there was a better chance of selling the client’s product if people liked the ads and didn’t evacuate the room when they came on.

And, as this timely tribute from Campaign shows, it produced some brilliant work: Heineken, Parker Pens, Cockburn’s Port, Fiat and Benson & Hedges. It also toiled for some big unforgiving clients including Nestle and Ford, although inevitably it fell out with both.

Chelsea FC in the UK has just revealed that its highly-paid assets - the players - have dropped in value by about 20 per cent or £40m or so even as the club closes in on a League and Cup double.

The good news is that its wage bill has dropped a bit (to a mere £140m) but that's just because it hasn't sacked a manager recently. Ditching Jose Mourinho (who did rather well), Avram Grant (who'll hook up with his old employers when Portsmouth play Chelsea in the Cup Final) and short-lived Luiz Felipe Scolari cost them £35m over two years.

Well 43 per cent are results pretenders (committed to measuring ad effectiveness but unable to do so) and 22 per cent make it up as they go along and are much more interested in winning awards. 35 per cent are OK.

Who says?

An outfit called the Fournaise Marketing Group that describes itself as the Customer Acquisition Maximiser. So confident is it of its own abilities that it has trademarked this deathless description.

In other words it's an ad effectiveness consultancy and one might well feel that it's in its interests to ask people (1,000 executives across the world) what they think about their agencies' performance in such a way that the results are critical.

Talking of uber fictional creative director Don Draper, which we just were, such a role has been awarded to a rather more low profile Brit, Ewan Paterson, who moves from Clenmow Hornby Inge to be creative director of DDB Chicago.

Paterson has the classic British creative pedigree at BMP DDB (Lego and Volkswagen), Bartle Bogle Hegarty (British Airways and Boddington's) and then his current job executive creative director at WPP-backed CHI where he is credited with Drench's hamster jazz band.

Not in the UK they weren’t, even the big American-owned agencies like McCanns and JWT either had smoothly corporate intellectuals like McCanns’ Barry Day (who used to be paid for his musings by Campaign with vouchers at posh bookshop Hatchard’s) or Jacks the Lad out of the David Bailey songbook.

It didn’t work of course, the really good ones went to British-owned agencies like CDP and BMP.

So when you watch Mad Men you think, who are these guys?

There were plenty of people like account man Phil Geier, who went on to run Interpublic (some would say into the ground) who brought their brash habits as an American CEO to run McCanns in London, to great effect.

I was looking for a decent version of Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me but, while there are loads of brilliant smoochy jazzy ones around, I couldn't find anything with more oomph than Robbie Williams and Phil Collins.

Which, from my point of view, ain't much oomph. So here's Florence:

iAd is a mobile advertising platform that allows ads in Apple apps, so you can click on an ad or watch a video within the app without flipping back to advertiser's website.

To date there are 185,000 Apple apps.

It seems to have been dreamt up by Quattro Wireless, which Apple bought for $300m in January, and Apple says 60 per cent of the revenues gained will go back to the app developer/publisher.

As such it's clearly going to attract numerous developers, publishers and advertisers. And be a direct challenge to Google which, at the moment, is hardly in the app market although it surely will be as it pushes its own Android phone and Chrome browser.

Did you learn anything Tiger? The troubled golfer's late father Earl really wants to know in this bizarre Nike ad, marking Woods' golfing reappearance in the Masters.

Having carefully reviewed the spoofs flooding on to YouTube it seems that some things are beyond parody.