The end is near."If you could only keep one thing out of a list that included your phone, your TV or your computer and Internet connection, what would it be?"Five years ago, in a study of digitally savvy youth, the answer was "computer + Internet." Now, in a recent study of "digital divas," those "16% of women who are most wired (and) highly viral," according to AdAge, the response is the same.The end is going mainstream. We can live without our land lines.We can live without TV.We can even live without our mobile phones.But we can't live without an Internet-enabled computer.I...
I was catching up on Supernatural (Guilty as charged, I don't care. Jensen Ackles will be a big star someday, but I digress.) And something happened that I have been expecting for a long time. I witnessed the first online video commercial pod. Two :15's back-to-back. In a bad-for-the-viewer, good-for-the-industry kind of way this is good news long-term for online video.
Brand used to be a purchasing short cut. I like my Chevy car, I bet I'll like a truck with a Chevy logo on it too. Pre-search engine, getting information about product quality was hard. So trust, trust in the brand, was pretty much all you had to start with. Search has changed that.
Never before has a willingness to comprehend technology--to understand its implications--been so important for everyone working inside advertising. As Advertising Week 2008 parades 1960s ad man character Don Draper onstage, look back: No one other than, perhaps, a producer had to hold technical experience in order to make an ad "happen." All that writers, art directors or account managers were required to have were ideas, and iron stomachs. No more. Today, as Adweek's Brian Morrissey notes, "technology companies and agencies will need to get on the same page." The current problem facing Silicon Valley, as Morrissey puts it, is in creating...
Apparently a group of concerned digital biggies like Digitas, Enfatico, Edelman Digital and the like have formed the Social Media Council.
Ad Age which devoted an unprecedented amount of space to Bob Garfield's piece on monetizing social media. http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=130969 It had all of Bob's usual rhetorical flourishes and with a little editing could probably have be half the length but he did reinforce a point we try to make to clients: behavioral data is valuable. What people tell you or what their behavior on your site tells you, that's valuable, sellable (is that a word?) stuff. Garfield basically tells Facebook that the way to monetize the site is to deploy a kick-ass predictive engine that scrapes the site and presents non-adlike...
Here is a purely defensive innovation to protect revenue streams. Google understands that innovation is not always about growth, and is applying one of the lessons of the PC age -- if don't continue to innovate, you get left behind by the times. Isn't that right Control Data, Cray, and IBM?
Brian Stelter wrote about the "three screen" reports coming out of Nielsen in The New York Times last week. Nielsen's goal is measurement parity across the three screens: TV, computer, mobile. But something seems missing from the data. "The average American spent 127 hours of time with TV in May, up from 121 hours in May 2007; and 26 hours on the Internet, up from 24 hours last year." "Two-thirds of Internet users in the United States, 119 million people, watched video in May." I think what we're watching, in other words, content, isn't properly accounted for. "The amount of online...
I gave a presentation this past Monday to students at the Miami Ad School (Minneapolis outpost). The subject was, "What's the future of advertising?" I rephrased that to "What is advertising?" because honestly, can it be neatly defined any more? I think not.Advertising could just as easily be defined as triggering relevant information and functionality under an appropriate context, as pushing images and copy out willy-nilly. We're back in the wild west, we're mutating. And as I told the students, that's a good thing, since this evolution carries with it expanded opportunities and inventive risk. I'm bullish about the ad industry's...
Just got off the phone with an advertising headhunter who told me the advice I gave her two years ago, (start repping interactive people,) is a wave now hitting her beach. Agencies are furiously ramping up only to discover they don't have the management vision in place to deploy the talent they are so rapidly hiring. The top echelon managers made their bones in traditional advertising which focuses on building messages, and have no idea how to re-organize themselves around the creation of consumer solutions. It's so much more painful then they realize. It's not something you can bolt on...
RECENT COMMENTS