MarketingInsideOut.com

People are a buzz. After all it was one of the biggest account reviews in recent history. So the smiley gets ditched for upscale chic (sort of)…and then…poof…the instigator of the review is gone. And now speculation is leaking out about possible reasons for Julie Roehm’s quick departure from Wal-Mart. This from today’s MediaPost today:

One source says that during the pitch process for the Wal-Mart account, a lot of “gratuitous gifts” changed hands, raising eyebrows inside the company. Wal-Mart has a very strict policy about gratuities. While many executives in the ad industry wouldn’t flinch at the worth of the things Roehm may have pocketed during the pitch process, Wal-Mart management felt otherwise.

In addition, almost immediately following the awarding of the account to DraftFCB, the agency took out a full-page advertisement in Creativity magazine touting the Cannes Lions Awards that depicted two lions mating, with the smug caption: “It’s good to be on top.”

This did not create a roar of approval at corporate headquarters. The copulating couple caused quite a buzz inside the company as executives questioned Roehm’s judgment, says a source.

I’m sure there’s more to come.

P.S.  I think the way she told the losers of the review they were out should have spoke volumes about questionable judgement.  A terse phone call, a “you lose” email or one-sentence letter would have been a significant step up from this stunt.

I clicked on a link a friend sent me this afternoon and whoa! Check out this site….

NOT at all what I would have expected from Microsoft, this promo site for Vista (at least that’s what I assume it is) is completely out of the ordinary.

The animated character goes from deep-think philosophical musing to near nonsensical rambling — from talking about having one hard nipple to tattooing fish to admitting that he just unleashed “a tiny one, but you can’t smell the screen.”

I spent over an hour on this site just listening to it and playing around, viewing the episodes. My first thought was… there was no way some creative team scripted this thing… it is so random that it is completely compelling, but utterly confusing. I couldn’t fathom the creative brief that would have lead to this.

Yet I was fascinated and just kept getting more and more drawn in. I didn’t see or hear the same thing twice even if I took the same action. I was so intrigued by the site that I started researching to see if I could find anything that helped explain what it was, its objective or who did it.

It turns out the “character” is comedian Demetri Martin, and the ramblings is his shtick. I also discovered an AdFreak post which explained a bit about the piece (apparently they were drawn in too). And that post provided me a link to The Institute for Advanced Personhood, which sucked me in for another 30 minutes.

I would suspect that, for most people, the site is, at best, an iffy-dotted-line-mental connect to Vista –kind of taking the “Your Potential. Our Passion.™” to an entirely different level. There is certainly nothing straightforward about it. The whole thing seems so “un-Microsoft” like …but perhaps that’s good if they are trying to position Vista as something unique and different.

Regardless of the intended business strategy, I enjoyed my visit to the site (and I can’t say that about many). Kudos to McCann and Microsoft for doing something really different.