apt
APT Shut Down,The Limelight Up for $60 Million
cityfile · 10/21/08 12:50PM
♦ The Limelight can be yours for a mere $60 million if you happen to be looking to buy a club and/or a church. [GS]
♦ APT has been shut down for "criminal sale or possession of controlled substances or marijuana." [Eater]
♦ Top Chef runner-up Dave Martin has bid goodbye to Crave on 42nd. [Feedbag]
♦ Lovely Day on Elizabeth Street was shuttered following a fire. [Eater]
♦ You missed it: Ivanka Trump was handing out microwavable meals on the street today. [MidtownLunch]
Yahoo launches APT ad-buying tool, confuses agency friends
Nicholas Carlson · 09/25/08 10:20AMYahoo's marketing department didn't like "Apex," and their choice, AMP, was already taken, so when Yahoo finally announced its new display advertising dashboard for sales representatives yesterday, the company decided to call it APT. The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News have already signed up, reports the Wall Street Journal. Yahoo's friends at ad agencies Publicis, WPP and Havas plan to hold off on using it, though.Mostly because each has already announced plans to develop dashboards of their own — in partnership with Yahoo — and they're confused about the new tool. "For us, we've already got something going with Yahoo, and I'm not sure this changes that strategy," one agency exec told the WSJ. "The news is more a continued statement along the line that digital media is really hard to buy. We need to make it easier."
Mad Men's Don Draper lends dated persuasion to Yahoo's ad platform pitch
Melissa Gira Grant · 09/24/08 02:20PMAdding some actual potency to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and president Sue Decker's pitch to Madison Avenue this morning: Jon Hamm, star of AMC's weekly ode to the world of 1960's ad guys, Mad Men. Yang and Decker were likely hoping Hamm's shine would rub off on them, just by having him in the room this morning to deliver lines like "what my friend Jerry Yang is about to share with you will rock the advertising world in the same way that radio and television did way back when."Likening APT (née AMP, née Project Apex, before its name was "awesomeized"), Yahoo's too-little-too-late ad platform, to the scotch-soaked, cigarette hazy halcyon days that Hamm's presence would evoke can only remind those potential ad buyers of how the business really isn't anymore. Like Yahoo's golden era, it, too, has passed, no matter how many smoke rings management attempts to wreath their current missteps in. As Don Draper said in his most famous pitch, clipped above: "Nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound."