1. Why are people so surprised that the food sucks in China?  It’s CHINA. Now, since I have an office there, I have found actually some GOOD food. The best part is that most of those complaining are either eating in McDonalds or KFC (neither of which taste like it does in the US – but KFC is the favorite of all fast food in China, just so you know, called “Kon Dudge Eee”) or they are frantically searching for beef and broccoli – which isn’t Chinese.  Go where the locals do. Try some bugs. Or, go for the dumplings – all varieties and kinds!
2. I think we should be able to choose the sports we get on TV. It should be like pay-per-view or like the Football package on satellite.  While I love watching Michael Phelps swim and win, over and over and over and over…I personally wanted to see ALL of gymnastics – not just highlights of our team. It’s possible, even with the complexities of broadcast ownership and rights…it will just take consumers requiring it.
3. I feel bad for a local gymnastics training center in Phoenix.  They had a quick 30 second commercial last night that aired locally. I can just see a sales rep from Channel 5 telling the owner, who is about to spend more than his annual budget for ALL of his marketing on ONE spot (silly) that he will get TONS of students and recognition because it will show up right during gymnastics. It didn’t. It was during swimming. And, it was pretty late at night. So, shame on them both. 
4. Commentators – ok, most commentators really, really annoy me.  Too often they are talking just to fill quiet time.  For example last night during swimming one of them was saying, “ah, see as Phelps was coming out of his turn, he looked over down the lanes to see his roommate and find out how far ahead he was.” Yah. I’m sure.  If I were swimming like a million miles an hour for the hundredth time beating records, I too would have time to check out what my pal is doing.  Whatever.  I think he’s a little busy and perhaps, acutely focused on something else…like winning.
5. The US women’s gymnastics team got screwed in scoring. No more to say. You saw it. We all saw it. Love that they have no balance checks, fumbles and stick the landings yet the Chinese gals do the exact opposite and come out with better scores. Ah…to the rest of the world – just stop hating. Thank goodness it turned out right in the end. But we still go screwed.
6. I think it’s funny, and smart that prices are up in China during the Olympics.  I watched Samantha Brown’s Trip to China and noticed that the poor girl paid $35 for a cab. That’s just wrong. And the producers should have told her better. While there I noticed too that prices were up all over anything close to the arenas – WAY up. So, good for the Chinese for adhering to the supply and demand theory. Sad for those that were too afraid to go 10 feet from the area – because even a mile away, prices were normal – great dinner should cost less than $3 in China. And yes, that’s for 2 people.
7. Okay all you tree huggers who complain about pollution – what about the torch being lit 24/7?  (haha, now let’s see how many crazy bloggers out there are spending more energy powering their computers to blog against the torch than the torch is using…I love it!) 
8. During the opening ceremonies, can I just say how proud I am that our basketball players were able to successfully walk in and reinforce all negative imagery of American’s as a brand?  Thank goodness they are famous. But really – do you have to act like a thug when representing the US? How about a smile? How about some graciousness? 
9. Um, does anyone else find it really kinda lame and messed up that Nastia’s mom wasn’t present to see her daughter win gold because she was “too nervous” and was out site seeing?!? Um, were you getting a masagee masagee?  Happy ending maybe? Sorry, I don’t buy it. She can say it over and over, and her daughter can repeat it with that pained face that is painted with anger about 75% of the time, but come on.
10. And of course, how about the 5 year old gymnasts from China?  ”Oh, we put blue eye shadow on you. Now you 14!” LOL!

Specifically, really good agencies come out with GENIUS ad campaigns.  They can craft messages and long streams of advertising snippets that take life in various mediums, and sometimes, the very nature of the campaign is so creative and interesting that you have to commend whoever the idea came from in a cocktail laden planning session.  You see this a lot with Crispin Porter – always fabulous.

See, the beauty of a big agency is that they get paid money to do mostly really lame and easy tasks.  But, the 10% creative genius that happens in a good agency is where the payoff can be for a client.  There’s no art in writing a media plan, or really in doing PR, or even general ad campaigns that follow the standards that have been in place forever.  Where the “magic happens” is when you get a creative team that is allowed the luxury of time (based on crazy retainers and really high billable hours the client is paying) to come up with something that would really capture attention.  See this awesome campaign for LG that was just uncovered!

LG Electronics kicked off a $100 million global marketing push with a long-awaited event that promised to be the red-carpet premiere of a TV series by director David Nutter called “Scarlet.” However, the show, which had been previewed in the press and even listed in online movie database IMDB.com, was a promotional hoax designed to focus attention on LG Electronics’ new line of flat-panel TVs.

I was “victim” to their campaign seeing commercial after commercial thinking – “what an odd show, but maybe I’ll Tivo the first one to check it out…”

Genius. 

So kudos to the brand manager, and the “number of agencies” they say they used (who sadly didn’t get any praise from all the press attention – shame on your press..and shame on you Kwan-Sup Lee if you didn’t tell the writer to include them.)

So, I’ll say it again – use ad agencies (good ones) to craft genius stuff – let them spin their wheels and come up with cool ideas that get attention from multiple streams (goodness knows you won’t pay your interactive team to spend time THINKING or CRAFTING) and then let them work with us to help implement these creative streams to even higher success (like, why isn’t LG blogging about this, or posting it on their site and pushing it out into the relevant blogs with trackbacks, etc. – see, there’s where the agencies go really wrong…)

1. “We meant to do that” – a response when we pointed out that a site a client built (who claims to do web development on the higher end levels) wasn’t visible in Google.

2. “We have too much business” – their continued rebuttal which I found incredibly odd in general, but especially in a down economy. I’ll be sure to check back in with them in 3 months.

3. “We didn’t have any business in January, so we are not going to do any advertising in February” – well, you can see where the flaw is in this one if you know about my rants, but more importantly, the client was on vacation all of January so his phones were not answered. You know how I feel about that.

4. “The internet has only been around for 10 years.” This came from a guy who sells interactive advertising.

5. “There’s not a whole lot of people using the Internet yet.” Self explanatory.

6. “I don’t think we should deal in that social media stuff.” – This from someone who has no ranking in Google for his own name, but there are over 10,000 NEGATIVE posts ABOUT him in Google. 

Got anymore? Share them here!

Shortly after that, you saw a deluge of new sites come up across all industries all with one special moniker…”e” or “i” something or other. For what was really YEARS after the web was already in use, the rest of the world outside us nerds got on board and agencies all over the nation were quick to set up web pages and give them all clever URLs like “eINSERTINDUSTRYHERE.com” or “iINSERTINDUSTRYHERE.com” over and over.  It was maddening.  

Now with the new recognition of what many of us have been doing for years (blogs, community sites, forums, video,) we see the rest of world calling this “Web 2.0″ which is great in so many ways, but also showing the non-creative side of traditional minds getting on board with something us old zealots have been preaching for years. 

So now, you see “Web 2.0″ churning out numerous followers to this tagline.  ”Sales 2.0″ “Real Estate 2.0″ and the “Economy 2.0.”  It makes me wonder though, now that the leaders in our space are forging into “Web 3.0″ to give a name to the NEXT level of integration, will we now see “Dating 3.0″ or “Banking 3.0?” 

And, let me also offer up a pre-response rebuttal to anyone that uses the “do you know how much spam I get in a day” argument because (a) we get over 200 pieces every 4 hours – which is not uncommon for those of us that are heavily involved in social media and interactive advertising for our clients as we are forced to subscribe and leave our email for thousands of sites and advertisers and the like to do our appropriate job of finding AS MANY outlets to reach their clients/customers as possible, and (b) it really takes like less than a second to scan and see what is spam and what isn’t so how much time are you REALLY losing. Let me also add to those that love to banter back the whole “cost” issue (usually people that really don’t know anything about bandwidth or email server space, and 9 times out of 10 are freemail users who miss the point completely – yes, you AOL, HOTMAIL, and GMAILERS, this means you…) because a media outlet should be already invested in a surplus of backup and space due to heavy inquiry from PR as well as customers. But more importantly…

Here’s the crux. There is a symbiotic relationship between writers/producers and the public relations professionals that is often misunderstood and unappreciated from both sides of the fence. For media professionals that fall outside the “news” category, a large amount of your story ideas and delivery depend on the PR companies feeding you information in form of release, inquiry, or even direct access to the top dogs that you need quoted in your story to make it more impressive. That being said, I would think that part of your very job description and daily task would be to sift through thousands of emails and (for those old schoolers) faxes. So, why then if you get something that isn’t a good fit, do you feel the need to flame the sender? Even more to my point, if you are SO limited in your time, then how did you find time to send a mean email?

The bottom line is that you need us as much as we need you. And, many of you probably don’t know this, but we are also at the mercy of the companies that provide the tools to us. While our agency specifically does the best we can to funnel through every contact and look at their beat and also READ their publication, there are ti

So, you ask, why the heck do I live here now? Well, I’ll tell you, for me, the weather is awful, almost 9 months out of the year in some years (certainly 6 consistently.) (And yes, winters are awful in other places, but I don’t mind cold.) And before you flame, I do truly believe that our six months of beautiful weather is the MOST beautiful you can get away from the water…and I love it.

So, the bigges winner is that the business climate in Arizona, for SMALL/MEDIUM sized businesses is wonderful. I have never lived in a town where businesses truly work together to help generate success, even when it’s your competitor. I wish someone like McKinsey would do a case study on this phenomenon, seriously, because it’s in amazing. Any business would be lucky to at least get their start in a great business climate like Phoenix – where the struggle to get in front of customers and people that can help extend your reach are right outside your front door, always willing to answer an email, and usually willing to grab a drink and share thousands of dollars worth of intellectual property to help another.

I cannot tell you how many times I’m at an event speaking with someone that is seemingly my “competitor” only to get a great cross lead within months, or even a direct referral from them. Businesses in Arizona really do work together to help make each other successful. The owners and employees are empathic about networking, and generating leads for each other, and always connecting. You would never see this in my NY office, and certainly not in Southern California.

So, what’s my ache today about this? The fact that the few larger companies, or ones that gain a large amount of funding, finally, and even the universities and government here does NOT hire local agencies or contractors for the “large” jobs – whether that be advertising, or higher end technology development. Do some research on your own. Who did ASU hire to help “reinvent” their brand after Crow preached about how Phoenix will grow? (It wasn’t a local firm.)

Another group of companies, some of which my agency and my great competitors have done work for over the years at a ridiculous rate to help them get up and running, have just landed investment dollars. Great! We want to see them grow. However; now that they’ve “hit the big time” they’ve abandoned the “smaller” agencies (many of which are not small, and in fact have offices and reach on both coasts to help generate national PR/Web, etc.) for agencies out of town. The oddest part: it’s not agencies in the truly competitive cities like NY or LA. It’s other “small” towns.

So, some will say that I’m mad, because there’s one company in particular that we did some pro bono work for when they were about to file for bankruptcy, and it was some press coverage that got them the recognition to gain funding in the millions last month. Some will say I’m mad because WE didn’t get the job. But, I’ll tell you this…I’d rather some of the other agencies in town that do wonderful jobs (SoapBoxPR, Off Madison Avenue, Lavidge, CK, Moses Anshell, Resnick, to name a few) get the jobs. How can Phoenix truly grow, and keep attracting great talent, if they keep outsourcing to other small locales?

For more information on our services, and to look for the clue of who we are speaking about, go to online advertising agency, Amanda Vega Consulting.

BEST TV PRODUCER: Brandy Aguilar, Channel 3, 3TV Health Producer

Why? , Brandy Aguilar is a producer of the highest ethic and calibur. You would think you were dealing with the press in Manhattan when reaching her – she GETS it. She’s quick, responsive, and very, very helpful. If you send her a story idea that may not fit, she is happy to send it on to another producer, and to even give you contact information. She is always open to discuss story ideas and never gives you that TV producer “snot” that many offer up to PR professionals, as if you are BLESSED to be speaking to THEM. Thanks, Brandy, you’re the best!

Best Print Editor: Glen Creno, AZ Republic (He’s still there, right?)

Glen Creno is given an award because of his complete and utter honesty. I worked with a major developer last year and Glen was so candid about exactly why this client has a hard time getting press that is absolutely more than necessary. He gave five questions that he would like answered, and five responses he had recieved from previous agencies attempting to gain coverage for this client. He was more than happy to spend precious time with me on the phone, and make us realize that sometimes, it isn’t the agency, but truly the client that holds us back.

Best Freelance Writer: Kerry Duff

Kerry Duff isn’t afraid to ask questions. She has written about two of my clients and is always a joy to work with, not only because of her personality, but because of her lack of attitude. Rather than act as if she knows everything about the topic, but instead, she freely asks questions, with true interest. She is also very accessible, pleasant, and has quite a fun personality!

Best Ad Rep: Jeff Bowers, Foothills Magazine

When you are working in a full-service agency like www.amandavega.com, you not only deal with outlets in terms of pitching stories about your clients, but you also deal with ad sales reps to help you purchase space for your clients. Jeff Bowers has the KEY elements to being an amazing ad rep that you WANT to buy ads from. (1) He doesn’t call you about clients that clearly don’t fit the publication. (2) He doesn’t BUG you all the time if your clients do not have budgets. (3) He will help direct you to the appropriate editor for story ideas, AND even sometimes calls you to remind you of an upcoming item on the editorial calendar. (4) Jeff always includes you in invitations, even if you haven’t bought an ad in months!