Adweak Tells It Like It Is

I’ve been laughing along with Adweak on Twitter – @adweak – for awhile. I, and I hope you, need a bit of a humorous reality check about the occasionally pompous ad folk out there. No, not you, those other spophisticated ad folk.

Need an example of a Tweet that hits home? I owned a small agency. We often hyped how nimble we were. Here’s Adweak’s take.

Adweak ‏@adweak Jun 9

BREAKING: Small Agency Just Keeps Reiterating How Nimble They Are Throughout Entire Pitch Meeting

Of course, when I worked for the huge Saatchi, we hyped all about our BIG size and zillions of offices. Small is beautiful. Big is beautiful. Whatever it takes to land that new account.

Now, Adweak has branched out from under cover of Twitter to the world of videos (see below.)

But First, Who Is Adweak?

Well, they won’t tell. But, they now want some of YOUR money. So, I guess if you want some of their great writing + humor, they are willing to let you in. Here are two things they say on ‘their’ website. first what they are selling today and second how they tell their story.

The SELL: Adweak is branching out. While writing snarky tweets about marketing and advertising for nothing is fun, getting paid is even more fun.  To that end, we’ve launched AdweakWorks. We’re a creative team of writers, directors and producers available to work with agencies or directly with brands.   

If you want to work with us, click below. (Here is the link…)

The STORY: Adweak began many years ago in the form of a website very much like The Onion.  In fact we literally said, “We should do an advertising version of The Onion.”  So the Adweak.com domain name was purchased and within 24 hours our first edition was uploaded to the World Wide Web. We never really planned to publish new editions on a regular basis but the site started gaining popularity and we, for some reason, felt compelled to keep it going.  We published new editions on an irregular basis for several years and ultimately let Adweak just sort of fade away.

In October of 2013 we decided to resurrect Adweak in the form of a Twitter account.  But this time there was an objective beyond just providing comic relief to the marketing and advertising masses.

We wanted to see if we could do exactly the opposite of what every self-proclaimed social media guru advises and still be successful.  For instance, we don’t follow anyone.  We don’t retweet anyone and we don’t reply to anyone.   We post updates multiple times a day (we’ve even posted multiple times within an hour).  And we’ve never used a hashtag.  These are all ill-advised according to the social experts. We have over 8,000 organic followers and not a single one of them has been purchased.  In fact we haven’t spent a penny promoting @Adweak.

So is @Adweak a success? Here are the stats.

-Over 470k impressions per month.

-1.5k Retweets per month

-1.7k Favorites per month

In our humble opinion, that’s not bad considering the aforementioned social infractions.  And to us, it proves once again that people have, and always will, consume and engage with great content.

OK, Back To The Videos.

Here are two sweeties. First is what I’ll call social media roulette. The second is the obligatory exit interview — the one that HR makes you do (and, yes, that is a pissed off Portland copywriter). All can be seen right here on YouTube.