Tag: Advertising agency

  • Suicide Advertisement By Hyundai Video

    Hyundai released a TV advertisement showing a man attempting to commit Suicide.

    On receiving protests the advertisement was withdrawn.

    The ill-conceived punch-line was that the SUV, an iX35, runs on hydrogen and, therefore, emits only water vapor, so the man can’t kill himself.

    Hyundai Car
    Hyundai.

    The ad was created by Hyundai’s European advertising agency Innocean Europe, according to Hyundai.

    “Hyundai Motor deeply and sincerely apologizes for the offensive viral ad,” Hyundai said in a statement. “The ad was created by an affiliate advertising agency, Innocean Europe, without Hyundai’s request or approval. It runs counter to our values as a company and as members of the community. We are very sorry for any offense or distress the video caused. More to the point, Hyundai apologizes to those who have been personally impacted by tragedy.”

    It was not immediately clear where the ad had originally appeared. “To the best of my knowledge it was never on any Hyundai Web site or Hyundai YouTube outlet,” Hyundai Motor America spokesman Chris Hosford said in an email.
     http://www.wisn.com/news/money/hyundai-pulls-ad-playing-suicide-for-laughs/-/9373130/19896062/-/5ctdy7/-/index.html#ixzz2RaVwHpsO

  • ‘Best Company’ Google ‘Ad Company’ – Ex.Employee

    Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
    Image via CrunchBase

    Google, with all our comments about it, remains the number 1 Search Engine,in terms of internet activity.

    Whatever Google does , people attack it, yours truly included.

    But Google can never be ignored.

    Google has been ranked as the best Employer in terms of Technology, innovation, not withstanding the failure of couple of their products like Google Buzz and the limping Google Circle.

    But they are attempting to penetrate the market with improved e-mail platforms, Timeline search.

    I remember to have read that Google has been rated as the best employer in the world.

    NEW YORK: Internet search giant Google has been ranked as the best company to work for by management and engineering graduates in two separate surveys, which term the company the world’s “most attractive employer” of 2011.

    According to the survey conducted by global employer branding firm Universum, Google has been ranked at the top of its 2011 list of the top 50 global businesses and engineering companies to work for — the third year in a row.

    http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-10-03/job-trends/30238110_1_attractive-employer-search-giant-google

    It is noted to be among the best Companies of the World as well.

    However an Ex employee of Google seems to think otherwise.

    he laments that Google spends more time on generating and displaying advertisements at the cost of innovations.

    It has a fix on Facebook and dissipates energy to counter Facebook.

    Any growing Company has to take note of the Opposition and cut into the Competitor’s market apart from getting additional market share from the growing market.

    Google is trying to innovate but at times a product may not click even when you do all you can.

    Without Advertisement Revenue a Company like Google can not become profitable.

    This is not a charitable Institution, this is business.

    The grumbling is only for the frustrated who can  not understand what business is about.

    Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form. Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3rd paragraph) or read it all. But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software developers. This is simply a more personal telling.

    It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Google. During my time there I became fairly passionate about the company. I keynoted four Google Developer Day events, two Google Test Automation Conferences and was a prolific contributor to the Google testing blog. Recruiters often asked me to help sell high priority candidates on the company. No one had to ask me twice to promote Google and no one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so. In fact, my last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation, trying in vain to get my passion back.

    The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

    Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers.

    Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions. The fact that all this was paid for by a cash machine stuffed full of advertising loot was lost on most of us. Maybe the engineers who actually worked on ads felt it, but the rest of us were convinced that Google was a technology company first and foremost; a company that hired smart people and placed a big bet on their ability to innovate.

    From this innovation machine came strategically important products like Gmail and Chrome, products that were the result of entrepreneurship at the lowest levels of the company. Of course, such runaway innovative spirit creates some duds, and Google has had their share of those, but Google has always known how to fail fast and learn from it.

    In such an environment you don’t have to be part of some executive’s inner circle to succeed. You don’t have to get lucky and land on a sexy project to have a great career. Anyone with ideas or the skills to contribute could get involved. I had any number of opportunities to leave Google during this period, but it was hard to imagine a better place to work.

    But that was then, as the saying goes, and this is now.

    It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook. Informal efforts produced a couple of antisocial dogs in Wave and Buzz. Orkut never caught on outside Brazil. Like the proverbial hare confident enough in its lead to risk a brief nap, Google awoke from its social dreaming to find its front runner status in ads threatened.

    Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. Exhibit A: http://www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s? No company has ever done that for Google and Google took it personally.

    Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.

    Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx

    This is the line an Employee takes after leaving an Organization.