Naked tells truth about corporate advertising

By Louise Story

NEW YORK: It takes a bit of courage, and perhaps a lot of ego, to tell large companies that their ad campaigns have been failing miserably.

But that's exactly what the advertising firm Naked claims to do regularly.

"We get up in front of a group of agencies and tell them, very nicely, that they have wasted tens of millions of dollars," said Ben Richards, senior strategist at Naked New York.

For that advice, of course, Naked hopes to earn a chunk of the supposedly wasted money. The company specializes in helping clients select the right balance of media for its message - shifting, perhaps, away from television and toward the Internet, or maybe in other directions.

Naked is one of the specialists in an emerging area in marketing called "communications planning," which tries to look beyond the 30-second spot to new ways to reach potential customers. The company, which got its start in 2000 in London and opened an office in New York two years ago, has in the last year signed up clients like Kimberly-Clark, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson.

more: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/09/technology/naked.php