"It is illegal to advertise on the outside of school buses in Michigan. Any ads must be placed inside," says this article from the self-styled industry bible.

Ah, the inside, that makes perfect (non)sense. The cost of education, whether it’s public or private, is rising. But, in an effort to close the budget gap, do we need to paste advertising on that big yellow school bus. Several school districts in Michigan are in talks to establish a co-op to let national advertisers get access to those impressionable minds.

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We all know Wal-Mart, Disney, Reebok get their products manufactured in a place far, far away. Now it looks like WPP will be tapping into the low-cost labor pool just down the block from the Minnie Mouse doll factory. This move is nothing new; a couple of the big guys have been using these labor pools for awhile. It is interesting that WPP is making a formal announcement out of something that generally is not well received. I guess it was a slow week for new business wins.

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Listen: just because you put a little lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig, or in this case a new Publicis office. I am beginning to think the big guys keep shuffling their respective decks just to get a little free print space in the trades. This iteration is bringing multiple disciplines (media, creative, digital, promotion) literally under one roof. Ah, the smell of increased overhead in the morning.

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From the self-appointed ad industry bible: This 36,000 foot fly-over for the rationale to invest in holding company stocks ("Is It a Good Time to Buy Holding Co. Stock?") was way up in the clouds for my taste and required a slightly lower altitudinal view. Let’s take a look at the numbers over the past year. The S&P Index has declined by nearly 10% and over the same period the big three advertising holding companies have posted a combined average decline of approximately 23%. Given the fundamentals of the advertising business, the deepest cuts, which are still to come, will inflict the most pain on media spending. The big holding cos. have diversified to some degree (some more so than others), but they still rely heavily on media spending and the production dollars used to create the content for those spends. One of the largest advertising spenders, the automotive industry, declined 8.32% in the first quarter of 2008, which was before horrible Q1 earnings calls. These guys will be taking a bigger axe in short order. The real news is those dollars will not come back into the usual channels, especially big-budget media production and spending.

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An article in the trades last week caught my eye with the words "money back" in the title. Apparently, the next experiment of the post-advertising age, word of mouth (WOM), is not getting any respect. Why else would anyone offer up a money-back GUARANTEE to a marketer for not beating its traditional agency partner? It is clear the group called BzzAgent has some impressive "percentage" growth numbers and a client list of almost 300, but why offer a money-back guarantee?

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Circle the wagons: They’re coming in from corporate to help us...again. In the second part of a never-ending series of corporate musical chairs we take a look at IPG’s latest attempt to right the ship. The script is, as always, effectively the same; just the players are different—

WE INTERRUPT THIS ARTICLE FOR BREAKING NEWS:

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A day at Intergalactic Post Advertising HQ is quite an experience. I have to admit I don't work from this outpost, but today I thought it was time to spend a while seeing what was brewing at HQ. The stories—post-advertising triumphs and failures both—were flying in from all directions. I was flying under the radar myself, just trying to stay out of the fray when our editor quipped between sips on his late-afternoon latte, “Hey, double-M, it’s been two weeks. How ‘bout an article?”

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As I read about Publicis Groupe’s latest reorg, I thought, wow these guys are embracing the digital age head on. The tail finally is going to wag the dog, but in a good way. So I read a lot on the story, trying to catch all the quotes and angles and so forth. I got a little suspicious when I came across this gem: "unveiling a new corporate-level unit." It reminded me of those suits that say, "I am from corporate and I am here to help you." They rarely ever do—help, that is. That particular article (from the so-called industry bible) went on to say, "that it will be a central hub." The only thing a client service corporate-level unit is the hub of is unnecessary overhead costs.

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Someone gets an idea to harness the power of new technology/thinking to drive NEW sources of revenue to add to the shrinking pie from traditional means. In this great example of getting it backward, Mindshare Interactive is no more.

From last week's AdWeek: "The reorganization eliminated the shop's digital operation, MindShare Interaction, as a separate unit and dispersed its staff throughout the agency as a whole. It also established four key areas of service: client leadership; business planning; 'invention,' including branded content and other creative disciplines; and 'the exchange,' including buying and activation."

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At the end of my last installment of this ongoing series, I alluded to the acronym ERP or enterprise resource planning tools. These applications are growing in use in many kinds of organizations in many kinds of industries. The typical manufacturing company will have one of these rolling along as widgets get popped off an assembly line. Many folks think these packages do not fit in with professional services companies, where creative people are doing creative things.

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Once upon a time in a land far, far, away, agencies received compensation based on a percentage of all production and media spending.  The most popular percentage (among agencies, at least) was 15%. A lot of (old) folks in the business refer to those times fondly as the golden years. Profits were generated not by the achievement of any measureable metric, but simply by the spending a client’s advertising budget.

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