Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a story for Brandweek about Kimberly-Clark, the company that makes Kleenex and a bunch of other brands. I got a nice little scoop on how they were hiring three top people in their marketing department. Not exactly Pulitzer but I was proud of it. In this week’s issue AdAge a similar story is there lead on the front page. Nothing wrong with that. Someone breaks a story and others follow up, hopefully adding more to it. And they do add to it. Including some important info which I didn’t have: K-C will be ramping up marketing spending $200 million by 2009 and readying a massive shift to nontraditional media. Good on them. Good solid facts and a good solid article.

But here’s a little complaint: In the print version there’s this tagline on the subhead that says EXCLUSIVE. So what’s exclusive? That they got different information than I did? By that standard everything in the magazine should get an exclusive tag. Let’s not oversell the goods here gang.

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Sparklers, snakes & salutes*

• Fun story over at PingMagazine about an artist who is mixing Chinese socialist realist style with Western brands.
• The company I keep. Echelon Marketing Group’s blog has links to six other business sites: McKinsey & Co., Booz Allen Hamilton, the WSJ, Ad Age, Harvard Business Review and … CollateralDamage? Talk about one of these things is not like the others. I sense a medical exam for someone on the webside at Echelon.
• Toothless Invective and Rhapsodic Blather. Great name, fun blog & I have no idea who is behind it but hey they linked to me.
• The US National Hurricane Center continues to scare me by predicting there will be no tropical storm activity through tomorrow. I have a bad case of the lady doth protest too much about this. Why no word on asteroids colliding with the earth, tsunami knocking over cruise ships, towering inferni or giant radioactive bugs? Be afraid, be very afraid.
• Bet they stiffed him on the tip. Australian movie director Paul Fenech has set a world record by travelling 12,500 miles to deliver a pizza. He claimes that his three-day journey from Australia to New Zealand via Spain was aimed to raise awareness of the youth cancer charity CanTeen but I think he just got lost and this was the only excuse he could come up with.
• Meryl Streep, babe. I am a long time Meryl fan, OK. She’s a great actress, we all know that. But then I started to see the pix from The Devil Wears Prada and WOW. She’s my new pinup girl, er, woman.

*Salutes was what we in RI called the basic small firecracker that you would light up and it would go bang without damaging your hand if you were dumb enough to have it explode on you (refuses to disclose how he knows this but OWWW). What are these called elsewhere in the US?