Does Voice’s Kamer have Something in his Mouth?
You can hear the steam escaping from the Bros Icing Bros engine. The website is gone. Smirnoff has taken action. The dream is dead.
With lines like “Bros Icing Bros? It involves Smirnoff Ice and humiliation, kind of like your third ‘real’ girlfriend,” Foster Kamer over at his new gig at the Village Voice has absolutely owned the Bros Icing Bros beat. Is he a fan? Doesn’t seem like it.
Kamer wrote that Bros Icing Bros was “the province of fratty assholes and the assholes who cynically patronize them.”
Interesting then that Kamer felt it necessary to protect some of those fratty assholes and their cynical patrons.
When the trend piece was just getting going, Kamer posted an inter-office memo from ad agency Wieden-Kennedy in which the game was more or less endorsed. And not only did Kamer not even bother redacting the “creative” responsible for the memo, he linked to the guy’s W+K profile on the agency site.
Then, hours later, the post was removed (from both the Voice site and Kamer’s blog). Cached version exists here.
When asked what happened to the post, W+K PR spokesperson Rebecca Groff told me, “We asked them to pull it down.”
And there you have it. They asked. One supposes “nicely,” but who knows.
After the Voice reportedly suffered a million dollar ad loss over Kamer’s childish Dolan kerfuffle, did Kamer get gun shy about characteristicly mocking corporate interests? Is he now so spooked by the power a huge agency like W+K might have regarding potential advertising at the Voice that an agency PR person’s simple request to de-publish something is observed? Indeed, W+K’s New York client list is an impressive one. And while it does not appear any of those clients are currently advertisers (though the Voice did carry W+K client ESPN’s ESPN Zone ads before the NY location closed), the Voice’s already-put-upon ad sales team would certainly love to land a W+K client such as Nike, Converse, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Delta, Old Spice or EA, just to name a few.
Kamer did not respond to an email asking about the memo. Maybe he was preoccupied with an advertiser’s cock in his mouth.