DoubleClick Integrates with Donovan

If you've ever run an agency media department, you know that it's tough to set up a system with your finance department to make sure that the invoices that are supposed to be paid are paid. Many media departments handle this by having the person in charge of a campaign approve invoices as they come in. This tends to add a lot of work and can result in the delay of payments to media vendors, as it adds another person into the vendor payment process. However, DoubleClick has recently partnered up with Donovan Data Systems, which many agencies already use for estimating and billing, to integrate their two systems.

This rocks. Media planners who use the system can now offload their vendor payment duties to finance, which is where they belong in the first place.

Donovan already enjoys an installed base of agencies that rely on its somewhat archaic and proprietary systems. To a degree, Donovan resists making any moves that would jeopardize these agency relationships. And since there's very little incentive for Donovan to change anything about how their systems operate, I imagine that cutting this deal must have been a challenge. Hats off to those involved.

Site out of whack? I'm screwing around...

If you happen to be surfing around here and you notice goofy things happening with Hespos.com pages, it's because I'm screwing around with the stylesheets and templates. You see, my site looks too much like Richard Hoy's site, so I'm gonna play with MT a bit to get it to look a bit differently. If I'm happy with a new look and feel and I finish up early, maybe I'll add back some of the static content I've been meaning to put back up. We'll see.

Pass the coffee and the Marlboros. It's gonna be a long night.

Bubba the Love Sponge, RIP

Clear Channel's jack-booted thugs, in its ongoing crusade to dictate morality to us via its virtual monopoly, hunted down and axed Bubba the Love Sponge's radio show yesterday. Of course, Mr. Sponge was responsible for a recent $715,000 proposed fine from the FCC, which didn't help his cause. Here's the article.

More Proof the Music Business is More About Image Than Music

Aging Welsh band The Alarm can't get arrested these days, now that the music industry considers the band a "has been." Rather than live with that, the band decided its music should be judged on its own merits, rather than on the merits of the band's image, and they took action. Sending out unlabeled copies of its new single "45RPM" to radio stations, the band got a terrific reaction to the new song, but people who listened to it thought it came from a new band that The Alarm was managing. This gave the band an idea...

Releasing the single under the pseudonym "The Poppyfields," the band hired a teenage rock band called The Wayriders to lip-synch in a video for the song. Guess what happened? The single charted in the U.K. Last I checked, it was in the Top 30.

"We decided we would do something where it was judged purely on its own musical value," singer Mike Peters told BBC News Online.

Personally, I applaud this move. It just goes to show the sad state of music these days, and that image-conscious industry execs wouldn't know a good song if it walked up and bit them on the ass.

Maybe we should do something similar here in the U.S. Maybe during the week of April Fool's Day, musicians could release their songs without attribution, leaving the talentless entertainment corporations to figure out what constitutes a good song the old-fashioned way - by throwing on a pair of headphones and actually listening to the stuff.