We Have Located the Monkeys

What a tough break for CK.

It makes you wonder that there must have been something else going on besides the USA Today's poll.

Tom Egly, TGD Communications, Alexandria, VA

Agree with Tom of Virginia....there was something else afoot.. It had to be more because no client could be as shallow and vapid as to drop an agency for a bad reason...that doesn't happen in this day and age.

There truly has to be something else going on besides the Super Bowl Ad - no seasoned manager or at least one that has taken a Statistics course would ever hold any validity to these types of polls. It is truly amazing we have people like this running big business.

--Jamie B, Detroit, MI

C'mon, Bob, there's got to be more to the story. Get off your arse (or have your interns get off their arses) and do some research before you jump to such a conclusion. Or, if you have conclusive evidence that this is the full story, tell us. You preach responsibility - live by your own words.

In deference to C Boak, I think that decisions based on flawed logic (or the complete and total absence of logic) have hardly been hunted to extinction in this day and age. Witness the recent Forrester study, which reported that an overwhelming majority of marketers surveyed were disappointed with the performance of their agencies, despite the fact that an even more overwhelming majority of them admitted that they lacked a credible measure of ROI on which to base this judgment. Agencies have been dismissed under shakier pretexts, and they will likely continue to be.

Tom in VA is spot on.

If there was truly "something else" going on (bad account service, the copywriter picks his nose, the CMOs nephew just started an ad agency) the client ought to have stated what the situation was.

Instead, Career Builders insists it all had to do with 238 people in hotel rooms. Either this is a vicious attempt to silently smear the agency, or the rest of us have no choice but to take the Career Builder folks at their word.

Either way, the monkey are the marketing people at Career Builder. Period.

CareerBuilder and USA Today are both cousins in the same extended corporate family (CB is co-owned by Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy) and the story of the review and resignation was broken by another cousin in the same family, the Chicago Tribune. This certainly gives us the plot points for a Shakespearean tragedy as well as a prima facie case against media conglomeratization - Paul Konstadt, Boston

Agencies will always be the fall guys for marketers that don't know what they are doing, can't lead, can't conceptulize... In this age of change, its sad that change is the only way some of these guys can save their jobs.... What we really need out there are bold marketers that can clearly communicate and lead their brands forward, take the reigns and work with their agencies to make good decisions..

Apes are higher primates, not lower!

This company is simply following advice given on a previous forum question here at AD AGE. They are firing their agency without any question or reason to see if the agency actually made any difference what-so-ever (or ROI as it is known). The first step.....fire your agency for EVERY reason and wait.

All I know is that whoever wins the account next has a tough act to follow. If this was really a blunder, they should fire the guys who made this stupid decision and do something with real guts: admit they made a mistake and come crawling back to the agency. NOW THAT would be something to behold!

I once had a client dump my agency because our first and only campaign for them was so successful they assumed they'd need to go elsewhere for fresh ideas. It never pays to underestimate the tunnel-vision of a client.

It is about time someone wrote this article.

It is almost criminal that the measured "success" in boardrooms around America on post Super Bowl Monday for the most anticipated and expensive adverting day in the US are often based on the USA today admeter. It is a joke that begs scrutiny and discussion for the ad industry.

To understand why this Post Super Bowl madness often happens one must consider that for many of these CEO's or board members the decision to be in the SuperBowl was a tough one based on metrics, product seasonality, brand needs, and revenue goals. The problems however can often come into play once the decision to buy time in the SuperBowl is reached.

The problems encountered are these:
- Often times these decision makers come under fire in the press or the street for the cost of the ad even if it makes business sense. This despite that for some markets the decision to be in the Super Bowl might be the single smartest, most impactful and cost efficient thing they can do, especially in a fragmenting media world.

- For many of these decision makers this is a chance to dust off those old, usually non existent creative muscles and push themselves into the creative process often upsetting smooth relationships between agency and client not to mention tension in the marketing department.

- Given the tensions of the media price, the creative process, press scrutiny, huge audience and pressures from the board, competition, and company staff you can almost smell the coming disaster.

And then it happens. In the anti climactic moments of "Post Super Bowl" advertisers and those decision makers can be left feeling a bit deflated. The rush ends.

Where are the sales? Why are their not people lined up outside? Why has the server not crashed?

So then the frantic search begins to find something, anything that validates all the effort, cost and excitement. In steps the USA Today admeter. A totally ridiculous measure of advertising "effectiveness" or in my opinion a "slapstick" meter but one who has a huge stage, national attention and eager if not desperate eyes of advertisers.

As someone who produced three ads for three Super Bowls i can tell you first hand that the USA Today Admeter is a joke, has zero to do with real effectiveness and has probably led to more fractured agency client relationships if not career destruction of many marketers then you could imagine.

A day like the Super Bowl deserves a real industry business and brand rating that agencies, clients and those decision makers can point to in the days after the Super Bowl before sales and revenue numbers are in.

Marc Karasu





For those of you out there who dont believe that a poll like this can be the arbiter of success for companies and agencies post SuperBowl enjoy your rated G soft and squishy world. I have made SuperBowl ads for my

Measurement, measurement, measurement!!!

Even when measurement is provided, it seems clients can still find flaws. It would appear that measurement without education is useless.

Kris Beldin, SLC, UT

charles youel
the problem with the internet is that no font in the world screams "I was being sarcastic". Clients leave for the darndest reasons...but I have to admit that this seems one of the darndest yet.

PS: I assume other clients will ape CareerBuilder's action.

Just wish the agencies would stop monkeying around.

That scene where all the monkeys aim their laser pointers at the actor's crotch is the funniest thing I've seen in years. Sad to see the monkeys (and their agency) go. It's a jungle out there!