AdForum Worldwide Summit: What’s on the NYC schedule

by Johanna McDowell (@jomcdowell) NEW YORK CITY: On Saturday, I arrived in the Big Apple for the 2013 AdForum Worldwide Summit New York City, 6-11 October, a “by-invitation-only” programme for agency search and management consultants and global agency CEOs. Our role is to listen, ask questions and keep ourselves informed about what the agencies are doing to identify and embrace new trends, to give feedback and to bring our news back to our home countries to share with our clients and agencies there.

Loeries 2013: Nice show, great work

by Louise Marsland (@louise_marsland) A conversation I had with Draftfcb group CEO John Dixon at the annual Draft media lunch at The Bungalow, Cape Town, on Sunday afternoon got me thinking about The Loerie Awards and how far it’s come.

I’ve been covering the Loeries since the sequined Sun City days 14 years ago, when then M-Net presenter Michelle McLean changed her outfit more times than she got to hand out a Loerie, all through the chaotic excess of the Margate years to the return of the more-formal glamour of the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

Dixon asked what I thought of the awards Saturday night and my response was: “It was nice; the work was great, though.”

Loeries & Pendoring: Not quite a post-mortem

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Flames roared impressively, smoke spilled over the stage and kids screamed. I had just been reading their naively thankful tweets to their educational institutions, such as the AAA School of Advertising, expressing eternal gratitude for securing them seats IN THE FRONT ROW!! of the auditorium at The Loerie Awards, and I had been wondering what fate— and the ad industry — would have in store for them… Welcome to the biz, kiddos.

The ad industry gathered in Cape Town this past weekend, starting on Friday evening, 20 September 2013, with the Pendoring Awards [winners list] and continuing through Saturday and Sunday evenings with The Loerie Awards [Loeries 2013 — all winners], to celebrate and award its creative output of the past year.

Finweek drops adland coverage

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Finweek will no longer be carrying its regular advertising and marketing pages, edited by veteran marketing journalist Tony Koenderman. Finweek editor, Marc Ashton, says the decision was taken in a bid to refine and define the magazine content to ensure that every page plays to its strength in the entrepreneurial/personal finance space and to focus on more “how to” type content in both print and digital formats.

The Ad Contrarian: Fake traffic could cost advertisers $9.5 billion this year

by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian) On 17 June, we published a piece called The $7.5 Billion Ad Swindle. It was about the massive fraud that is being perpetrated on advertisers by criminality within the online advertising industry.

A new report by Solve Media indicates that the fraud is growing at an alarming rate. According to an Adweek piece last week, in just 3 months the size of the fraud has jumped to about $9.5 billion this year (by the way, kudos to Mike Shields of Adweek who won’t let this story go away.)

In the first quarter of 2013, Solve reports that the amount of suspicious web advertising traffic has risen from 43% to 46%. That means that 46% of the viewership reported by websites seems to be fraudulent. It is not people. It is computer programs (bots) pretending to be people to drive up the numbers and screw advertisers out of billions of dollars.

Millennial Ad-Grad: The millennial workplace

by Faheem Chaudhry (@FaheemChaudhry) For creative businesses of all shapes and forms, consistently conceptualizing and executing the most original and unique work is a day-to-day goal as client organisations remain under constant pressure to differentiate and reinvent themselves, simply to stay relevant.

The role of technological progression is without a doubt at the heart of this, as opportunities for creating business value are taking different sizes and forms. While the world may be changing, the primary reason for success will always be rooted in the same dynamic. People. Recruiting and retaining the top talent will always be the core competitive advantage of any creative industry leader.

The Millennial Workplace

We’re all becoming increasingly familiar with the differences between millennials and previous generations. We (millennials) were born in the digital age, have grown up in an era of immediate gratification and are geared towards working under constantly changing expectations, pressures and time constraints.

In creative industries specifically, the world’s leading organisations are adopting new and innovative ways of bringing the best millennials to their boardrooms.

More and more business leaders are realising that the work space and atmosphere determines the ways employees work and the way their imaginations explore. The more inspirational the workplace, the easier creative blocks are overcome and new ideas and territories are explored.

So what are the core characteristics of the creative workplace? And what are millennials most attracted to about them?

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