:: Adgruntie :: Movin' on up

+ Emap buys Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in a £52.5m deal and "plans to integrate it into its Emap Communications media business. The event, first held in 1954, was put up for sale at the beginning of July by the Hatchuel family, who ran the festival as a privately owned company.
The sale of the festival, which had operating profits of £7m this year, is reported to have come about after a disagreement between its owner and chairman, Roger Hatchuel, and his son, Romain.Derek Carter, chief executive of Emap Communications, said: "Working with the international advertising community, it is our intention to ensure the festival continues to reflect the rich diversity of this tremendously exciting market."" We'll see if change in ownership does have any affect on the show, but, it will probably take until next year's show to see how or what that will be. Here's some of the backstory to this news.

+ HipHop Admen - From the article:"Mr. Harrell, co-founder of the ad agency and talent company Nu America, is one of many former and current hip-hop producers and performers who have turned their attention away from the Top 40 and toward Madison Avenue. While hip-hop performers have been running marketing divisions as part of their business, Mr. Harrell and others are building successful full-service agencies with a roster of clients that they run apart from their other businesses. "We're going after leads and contending with the big agencies," Mr. Harrell said. Labeling Mary J. Blige as the "Queen of Hip-Hop Soul" is like labeling a product "cool," he added. "We can do that for products, as well." Some hip-hop admen are following the path to Madison Avenue laid down by entrepreneurs like Russell Simmons and Sean Combs, who was previously called Puff Daddy and is now known to fans as P. Diddy. Mr. Simmons is the founder of Def Jam Records, and Mr. Combs, whose ad company, Blue Flame Marketing and Advertising, part of his Bad Boy Worldwide Entertainment Group, has taken on outside campaigns for, among others, a fragrance for Calvin Klein called Craze...Emil Wilbekin, who spent 12 years at Vibe magazine in various posts, including editorial director, said that there was nothing unusual about music executives promoting corporate brands."This is part of a bigger picture about how urban America is changing, not only in the way advertising looks and feels, and the way the country looks and feels, but also how you reach this new consumer and get a piece of the pie," Mr. Wilbekin said. "That's all it is. They're being very smart business people.""

+ Boo to Adage.com for requiring registration, even if it's free, to access the articles. And boo to the Media Guardian for the same reason. This free registration thing is really very annoying. Unfortunately it seems like a trend that is not slowing down. It's bad enough when older articles require registration, but to make the entire site that way, well, it's just poopy.

+ Another lame attempt at using money as media. "In a promotional stunt using U.S. currency as a vehicle for marketing messages, an online coupon service is sticking circular ads on the reverse side of 16,000 quarters it plans to scatter around Minneapolis. Boodle, owned by San Diego-based Consumer Networks, will distribute the $4,000 worth of quarters in vending machine change dispensers, pay telephone slots, and on the street over the next few weeks to publicize its service. Ken Harris, partner in Cannondale Associates, an Evanston, Ill.-based strategic marketing and sales consulting firm, called the Boodle tactic "very creative" and noted that consumers picking up the quarters already will have gotten "their money's worth." However, he said, Boodle will get its 25 cents worth if the story is picked up by newscasters. "The target audience definitely is watching the news, and if it goes national, they've spent only $4,000 in quarters," he said. He added, "It can't lose even if they get negative publicity." Very creative? Hah. Please. This is nothing new, as mentioned in this January article at Adland.