Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

# I came across an good article over on AdAge that discusses why ad gencies are playing a smaller role helping to develop organizational strategy. According to the article, "somewhere along the way, ad agencies and other communications companies started thinking less about the strategy and more about selling execution. Worse yet, they started to fill their staffs with people who were craftsmen and not strategists. The result: They began to be viewed as laborers, not architects."

I was discussing exactly the same thing with a co-worker yesterday, lamenting the fact that most of the outside marketing and writing resources I've encountered over the past few years being little to the table other then their technical skills. Nothing wring with that, except that I have a hard time spending good money for someone to write English or layout a page in Photoshop, especially if the design process ends up being "collaborative" (i.e. I come up with the ideas and they lay them out for me).

This is an opportunity for not only ad agencies, but all kinds of service firms (include web development shops) to add value and differentiate themselves from their competition.

Ed Bilodeau

Thursday, June 09, 2005

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