Gawker: valleywag, american express

Yahoo Canada cancels employee Amex cards

Paul Boutin — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:44:21 EST

Beyoncé gets to keep her Amex card. Yahoo Canada employees have been ordered to turn theirs in. And for transpo, they won't get taxi chits anymore. See you on the bus! Here's the full internal email:

From: Sachi Kittur [mailto:xxxxxx@yahoo-inc.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 9:22 AM
To: all-canada@yahoo-inc.com
Subject: AMEX corporate cards and Taxi Chits

Use of Taxi Chits:

In addition to our recent halt of pre-paid transportation services, please note that effective immediately, we will no longer be using taxi chits. These changes will allow us to institute better controls as we try to streamline our approvals and tracking of corporate expenditures. We ask that all employees simply expense any business related transportation expenses as per our expense policy guidelines. Taxi chits will now reside with HR so if you have any extra-ordinary circumstances that justify their use (ie. client visit etc), please come and see HR.

Corporate AMEX cards:

Keeping in line with our goal of ensuring better cost controls across our business, we have decided to significantly reduce the use of our AMEX corporate cards. Effective immediately, ALL employees (with the exception of senior management team or newcomers that don't have any credit history ) that currently have a corporate card will no longer be eligible to use these and will be asked to return these cards into HR over the next 2 week period. For those of you that are impacted, a reminder that you will be responsible for clearing up any outstanding balances so please ensure that any expenses owing are submitted into AP immediately. If there are any extra-ordinary circumstances that warrant access to a corporate card for frequent business expenditures, please speak to HR/Finance and we will work out an alternate arrangement.

Thanks in advance for your support and cooperation.

Best regards,

Sachi

Sachi Kittur I Senior HR Manager I Yahoo Canada I 207 Queens Quay West Suite 801 Toronto M5J 1A7 416.687.xxxx M: 416.500.xxxx IM: xxxx

Interactive agency's favorite new model: free

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:40:00 EDT

Here's a new problem for the people running popular online properties like YouTube and Facebook to complain about: Ad agencies love using those sites to market their clients, but advertisers are beginning to realize they don't have to spend a dime to do so.Even when they do, the platform companies aren't the ones who see the profits. Lonelygirl15's creators, for example, make most of their money selling product placements in their videos. YouTube doesn't get any cut of that revenue. A top exec for a major interactive agency told me yesterday: "I keep telling my guys I"m going to do a contest next year to see who can come up with a media plan that costs $0, outside of our fees, of course." It shouldn't be too hard. Marketers create free Facebook pages for all kinds of brands. It's just as free to upload a YouTube video. And if an agency uploads one as clever as the above American Express ad, and its sequel, below, the agency won't need to pay anybody to promote it.

The 5 goofiest computer ads

Paul Boutin — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Microsoft's new Seinfeld ad campaign proves you can't predict success. Here are five goofy ads that worked — plus the clip that probably sold Microsoft on Seinfeld. Above: A parody of Jacques Cousteau's undersea documentaries for Sun Microsystems.

Playing on an early meme about home computers, Alan Alda shows how an Atari will make your kid a better typist than you. Oh, and it plays games too.

Apple flaunts its Y2K-proof products with a sad monologue from 2001's HAL 9000.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion teaches you how to get the color you want from your I-can't-decide girlfriend. Sexist? Not as much as the talk about Sarah Palin at Whole Foods this morning.

A clever Web page ad for Apple that ties two ad spots on the page together. John Hodgman's PC guy undermines the ads a bit by making me feel sympathetic for him.

Seinfeld's pointless but funny Superman ad for American Express's product warranty feature was probably what convinced Microsoft he could do the same for Windows. If the writers of the Microsoft/Seinfeld ad had created a similarly out-of-character character for Bill Gates, it might've worked.

Jimmy Wales isn't American Express's pitchman, he's its steely-eyed visionary

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:20:00 EDT

For MarketWatch readers, American Express wants to brand itself as company that understands how to "drive growth through technology." And so the the credit card company presents the Open forum, featuring Internet visionary Jimbo Wales and his faroff gaze. Who better to explain the "nature of direct marketing" or demonstrate the value of "reaching customers?" Besides, Wales has shown he's very comfortable using his card.

AmEx only issues partial iPhone refund

Owen Thomas — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:00:32 EDT

Sorry to get your hopes up, folks. After early reports that American Express was giving cardholders $200 refunds on their iPhones — after Apple slashed the price earlier this month — it now seems the company has reconsidered its generosity. Early adopter Muhammad Saleem blogs that he only got a $100 refund, not the $200 he requested. An AmEx rep told him that he had to apply to Apple, which now offers a $100 credit to premature iPhone buyers, to get the other half. Saleem and other cardholders should consider themselves lucky to get anything at all, though. American Express discontinued its price-protection benefit last fall, and the company is only offering iPhone refunds at its discretion — likely because it's a high-profile case of a price drop, and it hopes to win positive publicity and customer goodwill.

Future of journalism now shilling American Express on a fake trolley

Nick Douglas — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:27:21 EDT

[UPDATE BELOW]What's up with the bubbly former host of Rocketboom, which was supposed to be the Internet's first huge news show before it leveled off? According to the London Times, Amanda Congdon's show for ABC News is "currently in the world's top 40,000 blogs," which puts it somewhere below great-soups-ive-eaten.blogspot.com. But Congdon has always been proud of her second career as a host for corporate stunt videos, and she recently starred in an American Express ad (shown below) shot in San Francisco. It's for a good cause, in a way: AmEx is giving away up to $5 million for a world-improving project to be selected by its customers. Metaphor-makers rejoice: The "cable car" carrying journotainer Amanda through the city in this video is a fake. Okay, okay, a "replica."

Bring on the endorsements indeed.

UPDATE: Consumerist.com says that AmEx's project is getting hijacked by Proctor and Gamble, who entered a project of their own for this $5 million contest. The "Children's Safe Drinking Water" project would be enacted by UNICEF, and guess what corporation sells water purification systems.