After two decades as an ad critic at Adweek, Barbara Lippert, 55, joins Goodby Silverstein & Partners as its curator of popular culture.
“We’d always thought it would be interesting to have someone on staff whose job it would be to stay in touch with popular culture,” Mr. Goodby said, because of the interplay between advertising and pop culture, as well as “be our emissary and talk about the agency” at conferences, meetings and other forums.
According to Stuart Elliott, one of the last old media men standing on the ad beat, Lippert and Bob Garfield (who is now a consultant) laughed when they first became the ad critics for Adweek and Advertising Age. “Everybody laughed,” Ms. Lippert said, because the job was so unusual.
“Now, everybody’s an ad critic,” she added, “and neither publication has a formal critic.”
Another reality now is that “everyone’s an aggregator and a curator,” Ms. Lippert said. That may be, but few ads are worthy of curation or aggregation, that’s why we select just one or two a day for you to poke, envy, love, etc.