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Stuart Smith
Stuart Smith is one of the most incisive and knowledgeable commentators on global marketing. He was a long-time editor of Marketing Week during the period when it was the UK's leading marketing, media and advertising specialist publication. Visit Stuart Smith Blog.
By Stuart Smith on March 18, 2013
There’s a rather thrilling viral doing the rounds that features top NASCAR (US stock car) racer Jeff Gordon giving a car salesman the ride of his life in a used Chevrolet Camaro. A heavily disguised Jeff (left) is posing as a mousy middle-aged punter, and the stunt is, allegedly, in the service of Pepsi Max, [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative, Media, News
By Stuart Smith on March 14, 2013
Whatever took them so long? Plod has finally pounced on four miscreant Mirror Group journalists in a dawn raid conducted by the Weeting (phone hacking) team. And what a haul it has proved to be. The four include the first serving editor to be arrested: James Scott of the Sunday People. Better known is one [...]
Posted in Media, News | Tagged daily mirror, James Scott, mirror group, operation weeting, phone hacking, sunday mirror, Tina Weaver, trinity mirror
By Stuart Smith on March 14, 2013
The newspaper is dead, and the Telegraph’s decision to merge its daily and Sunday titles into a 7-day-a-week operation is yet another nail in its coffin. Long live the free press. By “free press” I mean not the plutocratic oligarchy (absent the Guardian and Observer-owning Scott Trust) that maintains a diminishing stranglehold over printed national [...]
Posted in Analysis, Finance, Media, News | Tagged 7-day operation, abc figures, Daily Telegraph, internet, journalism, Murdoch McLennan, newspaper circulations, Stuart Smith, sunday telegraph, the guardian
By Stuart Smith on March 11, 2013
So, what was all that about? HSBC’s group marketing director Chris Clark (left) calls a review of the “£400m” (actually rather less these days) global account late last year. Well, not exactly a review. More a series of private meetings that happen to take in the incumbent agency’s rivals at Omnicom, IPG and Publicis – [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative, Finance, News | Tagged ad review, Chris Clark, hsbc, in the future, IPG, JWT, omnicom, publicis groupe, the world's local bank
By Stuart Smith on March 8, 2013
So, Nestlé is to drop George Clooney – Hollywood’s suavest since Cary Grant – as brand ambassador for Nespresso, to replace him with – what? Marketing’s John Reynolds, who got the scoop, does not specify. A Nestlé spokesman cryptically waffled on about “a solid relationship over the years” (seven of them in all) but reminded [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative | Tagged club, crowd-sourcing, George Clooney, nespresso, Nestle, new spokesman, Penelope Cruz, Stuart Smith
By Stuart Smith on March 7, 2013
It’s over a year now since Peralta founder and CEO Alexandre Peralta (pictured) expunged (literally so) the StrawberryFrog images sprayed all over the interior of his Sao Paulo hotshop. How’s he getting on in the wake of his split with mercurial and moody SF panjandrum Scott Goodson? The other day I caught up with him [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative, Finance, News | Tagged Alexander Peralta, bacardi brazil, Jairo Soares, mondelez, Peralta Sao Paulo, Scott Goodson, split, strawberryfrog, Stuart Smith
By Stuart Smith on February 25, 2013
There’s a lot going on under the radar in OOH – or posters, as we anciently called it. And I’m not simply talking of Omnicom’s Eric Newnham-fronted effort to crash the charmed circle of UK specialist buyers – namely WPP-owned Kinetic and Aegis-owned Posterscope. No, what caught my eye recently was something entirely different. It [...]
Posted in Agencies, Finance, Media, News | Tagged Colin Gottlieb, havas media, Jonathan Lewis, Marc Mendoza, Mark Craze, omnicom, out of home, outdoor plus, Phil Georgiadis, shareholders, talon, walker media
By Stuart Smith on February 19, 2013
During the early part of 1990, health officials in North Carolina, USA, made an alarming discovery. Some Perrier bottled mineral water, whose purity was so legendary they had used it to benchmark other water supplies, was found to be contaminated with minute traces of benzene. Benzene is a natural component of crude oil. Ingested in [...]
Posted in Analysis, Clients, Finance, News | Tagged Asda, fda, horse meat, iceland, Malcolm Walker, Perrier, Tesco
By Stuart Smith on February 5, 2013
Richard III, the marketing angle? Incredible as it may seem, there is one – and Mediapost claims to have detected it. The spectacular discovery of the last Plantagenet monarch’s remains under a Leicestershire car park has been derided in some academic quarters as a stunt that offers little new insight into the historical record (unlike, [...]
Posted in Analysis, News, Politics, PR | Tagged Henry V1, Henry V11, leicester car park, princes in the tower, Richard 111, tudors, wars of the roses
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