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Richard Linnett

Member since March 2007Contact Richard

Richard is Chief Proselytizer and Founding Partner at Bombastic.co, the L.A. based communications shop. He was formerly a reporter at Adweek and later at Advertising Age, and co-authored "Branded," a Mediapost Media Magazine column while a director of Havas' pioneering branded entertainment unit MPG Entertainment. Later, while working as Director of Entertainment Marketing at Omnicom's Fathom Communications, he authored the Mediapost column "Plugging Away." His recent book about the New Jersey gangster who inspired the creation of HBO's The Sopranos, "In the Godfather Garden: The Long Life and Times of Richie the Boot Boiardo" is now being developed as a feature film.

Articles by Richard All articles by Richard

  • HOLLYWIRED: Hello, Cash Cow in the Sand in MAD on 02/20/2014

    Venice Beach is rapidly becoming the Silicon Valley of Southern California. And the area is attracting a lot of new-wave ad shops that embrace tech to deliver marketing messages as well as talent agencies and other investors looking to back and profit from the next new tech thing.

  • HOLLYWIRED: Mad Men On The Moon in MAD on 01/07/2014

    Man has conquered the clouds, so it's not surprising that the advertising industry is looking beyond the stratosphere to the final frontier -- where no adman has gone before, or at least not gone in a while. Call the phenomenon "Gravity's rainbow." The popular outer-space flick seems to be stirring marketers' restless imaginations, renewing interest in the cosmos as a media buy, content opportunity, and a marketing pot of gold.

  • HOLLYWIRED -- Don't Buy It, Earn It: A New Year's Resolution in MAD LA on 12/16/2013

    "Hollywired" is all about being wired into Hollywood and vice versa, covering the Hollywood influence on the "wired" or tech and adtech businesses that are blooming all around. "Hollywired" also is all about observing the advertising, marketing and media practices associated with entertainment and branded entertainment. Finally, it's about my favorite subject, the flip side of the entertainment coin -- earned media; which, according to the Forrester definition, is "an old PR term that essentially meant getting your brand into free media rather than having to pay for it through advertising."

  • Step Right Up in Media Magazine on 07/14/2009

    Big surprise. Red Bull really does give you wings, exactly as advertised.

    It doesn't take a genius account planner to know that trace amounts of cocaine recently found in Red Bull's new cola product will not bring down that brand. On the contrary, this special ingredient is already elevating Red Bull's status as an edgy product and energizing its die-hard fan base.

  • Becoming A Cult Brand in Media Magazine on 07/14/2009

    It's a foolproof marketing technique - turning customers into slavish, unthinking, devoted followers of products. In other words, zombies. It's a strategy that can create legions of pod people dedicated to a particular brand, leaving all rivals in the dust. The best customer a brand could have is an actual cult follower.

  • Plugging Away: The Long and Winding Road  in Media Magazine on 07/14/2009

    Has Madison Road finally reached a dead end? The much ballyhooed entertainment marketing independent that was born in the branded content boom year of 2004, when everybody and their mother was hanging a branded-entertainment shingle, is lately rumored to have gone the way of fabled dot-com dodo birds like boo.com.

  • Return of the Age of Anxiety in Media Magazine on 03/02/2009

    Hollywood has made a habit of giving loud shout-outs to madison avenue lately. tnt's dramedy Trust Me about Chicago creative directors - created by former Chicago creative directors - is the latest. Meanwhile, the Emmy Award-winning Mad Men is on amc featuring Don Draper, a creative director during the so-called "creative revolution" in advertising in the '60s. And let's not forget Revolutionary Road, the Sam Mendes film based on the classic Richard Yates novel about Frank Wheeler, who is not an adman per se, but a familiar type of toiler in the marketing department of a business-machine brand during the Age of Anxiety in the '50s.

  • Plugging Away: Heart Attack and Vine in Media Magazine on 11/03/2008

    Wall Street does spill into Main Street - that's been demonstrated. As the stock market slides, mortgages slip into default, loans dry up and people get laid off. What about Madison Ave.? Does it meet up with Main Street somewhere down the road?

  • Plugging Away: The Mothers of Invention in Media Magazine on 06/23/2008

    Is WPP channeling Frank Zappa? Probably not, but they are exorcising the ghost of Madison & Vine. In April, WPP's media agency, MindShare, dropped MindShare Entertainment as a stand-alone practice and squeezed it into a unit called "Invention." The MindShare brass appears to have reached a conclusion shared by many in the industry - that so-called branded entertainment is not a discipline unto itself but simply another paintbrush in the toolbox.

  • Plugging Away: Things Are Getting Ugly in Media Magazine on 04/15/2008

    Remember Ugly George? In the '70s and '80s he was a common unsightly sight around New York, resplendent in a silver space suit with a giant Sony camcorder propped on his shoulder like a bazooka, hounding innocent women on the street, basically trying to get lucky.

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