socialmedian: Fear and Loathing in Adland

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Fear and Loathing in Adland

Submitted by Awolk from blog

Oct 02, 2009

Summary

I don’t know Curt Detweiler. Never even heard of him until this morning when, catching up on my ad trades, I clicked on this article announcing that he’d been named to a senior creative role at McCann in San Francisco.

There were over 50 comments attached to the article. But what was truly odd was that while most of them were both positive and completely innocuous (e.g. “Curt is a great guy! I wish him well! Great hire!”) not a single poster used anything remotely resembling their real name. (Which happens enough on Adweek, but rarely to this degree.)

Now my first thought was that maybe these comments were a PR effort from McCann or from Detweiler himself, a thought echoed by several commenters.

But it seemed like an awful lot of effort for the PR agency. A dozen comments, maybe. But 50?

Which leaves the other option: that people in the ad business are so scared of actually being seen to have an opinion on anything, that even something as banal as publicly congratulating a co-worker is thought to be akin to career suicide.

I’m at a loss to understand why though. ...Read the full article

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