MonKeyArtAwards: It's The Economy, Stupid

Following A Landmark Supreme Court Ruling, In Sync Marries Bemis Balkind And Lives Happily Ever After!

Throwing down the headline “In Sync And Bemis Balkind Merge To Create Formidable Ad Agency” the Finkeless Deadline Hollywood seems hell-bent on striking fear in the hearts of competitors with horrific visions of an out of control juggernaut with Smitty as CEO and Peter Bemins and Aubry Balkind serving as co-presidents.

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Getting A Head Start In The Race To The Bottom

One of our far-flung correspondents sent us this from HuffPo: This Guy Stopped Charging Clients And He Has Zero Regrets about Adrian Hoppel, a Philadelphia web designer who uses the "gift economy” rather than charging clients an agreed upon amount.

Hoppel says, “Most clients gifted me with payment, and the payment is more than I ever received in the traditional model, which was based on negotiation and the lowest bid wins, instead of the gift model which is based on mutual respect and fairness.

Working in the gift [model] does not mean that I work for free, or that I give my work away without care. It means that people trust me to build them a website, and I trust them to support my work as they believe fair.”

Uh huh. Uh huh. We’ve got a pretty good idea why a bloodsucker like Arianna Huffington is promoting this paradigm as the Third Metric: the idea that life should be guided not by the pursuit of money, but by those qualities that make us better people, like wisdom, empathy and personal well-being.

So stop hounding your employer for a raise or whining to your clients about their paltry budgets and embrace your better self as you slide into the abyss. Paid_like_artists

Strictly speaking, if you are an artist, whether you be a fine one or a graphic one, you are not a professional, but a tradesperson.

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Ho Hum. Just One More Vendor Destroyed By Budget Cuts In The Name Of Corporate Profits

From Deadline Hollywood:

Rhythm & Hues is filing for bankruptcy. The companny informed employees around 9 PM Sunday of the upcoming Chapter 11 filing. Many Rhythm & Hues employees were also told by management not to show up to work Monday. On Friday, the company preceded its bankruptcy filing news by announcing to workers that paychecks would be delayed indefinitely.

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Lemonade - The Movie

Lemonade - The Movie from Lorenzo Mendoza on Vimeo.

If you have a problem with the stream, click on to the “LEMONADE – THE MOVIE link to take you directly to vimeo.

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You Lost Us At "Self-Respecting Advertisers"

AdAge had this to say about AOL's Huffpo’s launch of HuffPost High School and its plan to solicit unpaid contributions from teenagers:

"Quite simply, AOL/HuffPo intends to monetize the work of minors earning $0/hour. On Patch and HuffPost High School, it will sell ads against content created by minors -- but it will not share advertising revenue with those minors.

Self-respecting advertisers have to ask if they really want to be a part of something like this."

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What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate Cost-Effectively

Real success in entertainment has always come from word of mouth, so naturally the marketing weenies are chasing this elusive phenomenon by way of social media.

The underlying point in yesterday’s post was that all this “social opportunities” thrumming is in itself a means of diminishing the value of traditional advertising skills. It’s hard to imagine News Corp., Viacom, Time Warner, Comcast et al. wanting to continue picking up the tab for multiple six-figure-a-year-salaried art directors working on campaigns that may or may not be as effective in driving viewership as co-opting 40 or 50 million Facebook potatoes.

Still think the floodwaters aren't going to reach your floor?

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Meanwhile, Back At The Dumpster

Fox has become the fourth studio this week to layoff staff, reassigning 12 in home entertainment and 10 in IT to the dustbin.

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Case Closed

From Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood:

Add Walt Disney Studios and Lionsgate to the companies laying off staff. Disney's will be roughly 5% largely in the distribution area... Lionsgate laid off less than 20 people as part of a reorganization affecting home entertainment and service areas. And, Viacom No. 2 Phillippe Dauman said this about Paramount Pictures signalling what may be layoffs there: "As the home entertainment stream is challenged, fewer DVDs are being sold, so you have to review your home entertainment overhead. That's adjusting to the business model. We’re very focused on that. We continue to work on the overhead there."

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We Have Seen The Future And It Pays In The Low Four-Figures

If you’re like most clients, you’re fed up with greedy graphic artists charging you thousands of dollars for design projects.

Well, good news, America. At Centuple Design all projects are budgeted at a mere $100! And just wait, because in another year or two, it’ll only be $50!

We know many of you creative types out there are asking, “OMG! How can I afford to keep my 12-cylinder Ferrari tuned up and send my gifted children to boarding school with budgets like that?” The short answer is, "Duh." (For those of you billing this time to a client, the long answer is, "Uh, duh.")

Here at MonKeyArtAwards noblesse oblige isn’t just something we say when we’re sending our food back in a French restaurant. It’s part of our Great Effort to lift our fellow wage apes up from the muck enough that - while you're still in the muck - you now have a clearer understanding of who will and will not be rewarded in the New New Economy.

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Fox’s Idea Of Good News

Here’s a gleeful posting we found via LinkedIn on Last Century Fox’s Small Business Center site:

For Robert Gray, the owner of Matters in Motion in Cabot, Ark., finding people to help with graphic art design work, Web design and software development was a frustrating process.

After bad experiences with local hires, he turned to the Internet for help and hired a person in the Philippines.

“He did a fantastic job, he did exactly what I wanted and did it very quickly,” said Gray.

Gray was so happy with the job he ended up paying double the $8 an hour rate the contractor charged and hired him for additional work. Since then, Gray has hired software developers in India.