Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25
Success has many fathers, and in the ad industry it has even more.
Anytime there’s a successful campaign, pretty much everyone even tangentially related to it tries to get in on the credits. (There are probably 200 people who claim involvement in Subservient Chicken and Shave Everywhere.) That way the piece can go in their book, helping them land a new job, make more money, etc. There’s little way of actually checking on this, other than talking to those involved in the efforts.
Look no further than the now-famous Oreo Super Bowl blackout tweet. This was, after all, a tweet with seven words and a photo. As we’ve pointed out, it apparently took 13 people to accomplish this feat. Recognition for the full team is a solid move in awards season. But it doesn’t stop there.
Now, Fast Company is out with its 100 Most Creative People list, a grab bag of folks of all sorts that, in the words of Fast Company editor David Lidsky, are “doing cool shit.” It’s a broad criteria. Two agency creatives, Jill Appelbaum and Megan Sheehan, got on the list at No. 7, ranking above Ai Weiwei, in recognition of their work on Oreo at Draft FCB. The blurb gives the duo oblique credit for the Super Bowl tweet, even though they’d stopped working on the business by then. They’d done the creative for Oreo’s yearlong campaign that involved putting photoshopped images up on Facebook. The thinking goes that that effort “transformed” Oreo into a real-time brand, leading to the Super Bowl tweet.
As one agency exec remarked, “At this point, Orly Taitz might take credit.”
More in Marketing
Yahoo pauses IAB membership amid a series of quiet cost-saving measures
Yahoo pulls IAB board memberships, following job cuts as PE-owner reportedly reconsiders ad tech investments.
Target looks to e-commerce, advertising investments to help grow the business
Technology is one of the most important areas in which Target will invest with the hopes of returning to profit growth.
‘The conversation has shifted’: The CFO moved upstream. Now agencies have to as well
One interesting side effect of marketing coming under greater scrutiny in the boardroom: CFOs are working more closely with agencies than ever before.