Agency

Advertising spending for the first half of 2006 rose by 5.1% over the same period last year, due to gains across major media, according to preliminary figures released by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of Nielsen Media Research.

Nielsen Media Research released updated television household estimates — called universe estimates — for Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American TV households in its 210 local television markets, also called Designated Market Areas (DMAs).

In America’s Anglo society, people living in Spanish-speaking households are sometimes regarded as second-class citizens. In October, if they happen to live in a Nielsen household, they’ll begin getting some first-class treatment. In a plan unveiled to clients on Tuesday, Nielsen Media Research said it would begin paying Spanish-speaking households more money to be part of its TV ratings service than Hispanic households where English is the dominant language. The goal, the company said, is to boost the number of Spanish-speaking households in its sample in order to make it more representative of the U.S. population.

Dallas based Dieste Harmel and Partners has named Aldo Quevedo as the new President and Chief Creative Officer of the agency. Tony Dieste become the Chairman and Chief Idea Officer at the same time, Warren Harmel becomes the CEO and Chief Insight Officer.

As a leader, you have a clear vision for your company and are 100 percent committed to pursuing it. But something is going wrong between the creation of that vision and your company’s ability to make it happen. What that something might be is all too often a murky mystery. If you can relate to this scenario, your company is suffering from what Rick Lepsinger, president of OnPoint Consulting, calls “the strategy-execution gap.” In an effort to quantify this pervasive, frustrating problem, he conducted a survey . . . and the results were stunning.

Th**************@********Ad.com wishes you a safe Labor Day weekend.

On Friday of this week, all mainstream agencies in the final phase of the agency review process have been requested to appear for a briefing of the last round of the agency review. Along with the invitation to all mainstream agencies, all multicultural agencies in the last round have also been invited to observe the process.

Sitting in the bushes overlooking the Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas we have place our HispanicAd.com cyber camera. We expect to see incumbent Houston-based Lopez Negrete Communications, Austin-based LatinWorks and Miami-based Accentmarketing joining the briefings.

Could there be a wildcard?

We will have to wait and see if our cyber-camera tells all.

Brown-Forman Corporation announced today that it has reached agreement with Pablo Romo de la Peña and Jose Guillermo Romo de la Peña, owners of Grupo Industrial Herradura, S.A. de C.V. (Casa Herradura), to purchase substantially all of their 136-year-old company’s related assets for $876 million dollars.

United States Gypsum Company (USG), the manufacturer of top-selling Sheetrock Brand drywall, is launching the ‘El Mero Mero Drywalero’ (The Best of the Best Drywaller) contest to honor and reward the best drywaller in Southern California.