Brand Advertising Campaign of the Year!

It's iPhone. The best brand-driven advertising program of the year. One of the best advertising campaigns in recent history, maybe ever. We're proud to announce it.

No product has been better or more successfully introduced in classic, charming, demonstration commercials that elegantly show us everything we can do with the amazing iPhone.

Including making phone calls.

iApple, to coin a phrase, is one of the biggest, most competent, most capable brands on the planet. It's also one of the sweetest, neatest and most inviting brands we'll ever encounter.

Nobody matches Apple for truth and reality. Genuineness. Honesty. Simplicity and clarity. We feel good watching iPhone advertisements, we are totally seduced and entertained, and we feel the iPhone was made just for us.

Most companies don't understand 'brand' advertising. They think 'brand' is about image. Or just corporate stuff. Or about how good (soft, sappy, emotional) they are.

That's a juvenile perspective.

Yet it's a perspective still shared, believe it or not, by old brains.

Most people know that an authentic brand-driven advertising platform shares what the brand means, what it does, how it connects, how it helps, how it charms, and how it pleases.

You know, all the things that ... sell.

All of us loved iTunes. But there's nothing necessarily youthful about this new product. iPhone is just very real, very ageless, very timeless, very beautiful, certainly made for all of us, and maybe, just maybe, perfect.

Kudos to Apple and their internal teams and outside partners.

Advertising isn't dead, it just belongs to Google

Advertising is thriving.

Unfortunately, advertising agencies don't seem to be.

If advertising agencies and their holding companies had convinced themselves that the status quo somehow still prevailed, they haven't logged in to Google lately.

Those little Ads by Google. Charming, aren't they? Well, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, as of this week, Google will place your real live display advertisement, a real print advertisement, in the newspaper of your choice -- The New York Times, the Des Moines Register, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and hundreds of other major newspapers across the country. All you have to do is click. And if you don't have an advertisement you can place, well, that's not a problem. They have templates you can use. Or you can build your own. They even do "image" ads.

Is that enough to convince you that advertising as we know it is dead? No? Well, consider this.

Google will help you create a radio commercial and place it in a hundred-plus radio stations across the country.

Rupert Murdock, Chairman of News Media, owner of My Space and The Wall Street Journal, recently explained his anxiety about new media, moving fast, and being first.

We have to get there before everything belongs to Google, he said.

WPP, Interpublic and Omnicom probably lost 'agency' status long ago, as their agency brands burrowed deeply into online, public relations and other businesses.

Yet they jealousy guard their 'creative' turf.

But if a group at Unilever's Dove decided they could create nifty radio commercials of their own making and place them with Google. And if a team at Ford did the same thing. And the folks at Pepsi decided an exciting promotional radio campaign could be created, craftsperson style, right in their own offices, and placed on radio stations anywhere their sales people asked for ... aren't we looking at an advertising armageddon in some way, shape or form?

Those Google ads may be unsophisticated.

(Actually, Google Adwords today are very smart, and a lot of very smart writers are creating them.)

It's only a matter of time. Google ads will be as slick and polished as they need to be and no advertising agency fingerprints ever will be found on them.

It's just another way our world has changed.