Here’s the press release.

“Hollywood’s oldest talent shop, the 110-year-old William Morris Agency, is partnering with a triumvirate of digital media, wireless and advertising executives to create a joint venture called Agency 3.0, a digital-marketing-services company seeking to marry digital technology to strategically developed content….

“In an interview with Ad Age, Mr. Johnson said TV advertising ‘is becoming less effective,’ in part because ‘it’s highly disconnected from the creative process.

“His partners’ new venture aims to ‘bring the ad dollars that much closer to the creative process,’ Mr. Johnson said.

Smart idea and an impressive team. I bet, though, they will come to regret that name.

Congrats, Torrence and congrats, Dell!

“‘If [an idea] fails,” says [Starbucks CTO] Bruzzo, “our customers who are on MyStarbucksIdea ought to participate in being accountable for it.’ Whether an idea is accepted or not, customers get only the satisfaction of participating; there are no payments or other tangible rewards.”

What an excellent example of a brand-as-conversation, or what we at FM call (and Jeff often criticizes!) conversational marketing.

“I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to ‘be social.’ Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that social context in our connected lives, we won’t really feel like we are truly living and alive, just as without sufficient air, we won’t really be able to breathe deeply.”

That’s right, the fall shopping guide. It’s still part of the conversation, nine months later.

“‘The industry is not that old,’ says Chas Edwards, publisher and CRO of Federated Media. ‘As an industry, we’ve only taken a couple of runs at what online advertising can look like. We’ve been focused on the click. But now you have significant budgets and marketing experts who think differently than just the direct response metric. We’re still in the early stages of imagining what brand advertising on the internet looks like and how we can measure success against that. So I don’t think we’ve yet seen a lot of interesting brand executions online, but we’re beginning to.’”

“The slowing economy and the struggle by social networks to develop successful ad models have led to lowered ad spending projections for the next few years, according to eMarketer.”

A little creativity around sponsorship ideas and the industry might get itself back on track!