A random assemblage of stuff and things

My favorite meme of all time has become a campus group’s poster:

DuCreux

That, of course, is Joseph Ducreux, who was a French portrait painter at the court of Louis XVI and after the French Revolution. He liked physiognomy, assessing one’s personality by their facial expressions, hence his unorthodox portraiture, like this self-portait and, of course, the very famous Internet joke. You can’t even find the original set anymore, so buried are they amongst everyone’s contribution.

Two students showed this video in class today during a demonstration about advertising. The gasps from the rest of the class were great. See if you can figure out where this is going:

Happy birthday to The Birmingham News, which turned 124 today. This is the June 20, 1900, front page:

BirminghamNews

So the paper was 12 years old at the time. I haven’t seen any of the first volume’s front pages.

Things to read: Ad execs bullish on digital, marketers on social: Data reveals ‘disconnect’ with agencies:

Advertising executives -– both marketers and their agency representatives -– continue to increase their optimism toward digital media options, and are beginning to swing toward it as more of a “branding” than a performance “option,” but there are some significant disconnects between the way they look at various digital media silos. While agency executives tend to be far more bullish on the overall use of digital media, marketers are much more optimistic about budgeting for social media.

The findings, which are part of new, detailed analysis coming out of Advertiser Perceptions’ Fall 2011 survey on ad executive attitudes and optimism about media, show the overall index for digital -– including online display, search and video advertising –- trending upward, but the sentiment appears to be driven primarily by agencies. That insight is interesting, because the bottom line of big agencies appears to be benefitting from their continuing shift toward a greater reliance on digital media, according to a Pivotal Research analysis released Monday (OMD, March 13).

“But there is a discrepancy in the way marketers and agencies are seeing it,” says Randy Cohen, a partner in AP — which produces an ongoing series of ad industry tracking studies under its Advertiser Intelligence Reports banner, including this one. “It’s a disconnect,” he says, adding, “But agencies tend to do what marketers want them to.”

If that’s the case, social media should be the primary beneficiary, according to Cohen, because marketer sentiment is building much more favorably toward social networks versus the rest of the digital mix.

Things to read from my Samford blog:

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