This is something to get really excited about: http://www.ad-tech.com/ 

ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition. They host different conferences throughout the world and provide resources and connections for different companies within the industry. This will be the first time I’m attending one thanks to the encouragement of Marissa, CEO of AD-Village (@ http://www.marissalouie.com)  and I feel privileged to have the chance to meet my contemporaries in the field.

Also, Advertising 2.0:

Launch 2.0, the previous party, was a success! Advertising 2.0 looks like it’s going to be just as fun, with over 300+ confirmed guests to fill up the W Hotel for the night. And did we mention that free skittles will be available on request?

Sounds exciting? You know it is.

Related posts:

http://tinyurl.com/advertising20

www.tinyurl.com/adtechblog20

www.tinyurl.com/adtech20

http://tinyurl.com/sfgate20
http://www.mbablogs.businessweek.com/YoungFemaleEntrepreneur/archive/2009/04/21/yz4xqrb12arq
http://bub.blicio.us/skittles-web-20-adtech-sf-the-advertising-20-party/
http://marissalouie.com/2009/04/15/skittles-web-20-advertising-the-advertising-20-party-at-adtech-sf/
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2410111/?ps=7
http://www.yelp.com/events/san-francisco-the-advertising-2-0-party-at-ad-tech-sf
http://www.gabbr.com/news/2009/4/16097/Skittles-+-Web-2.0-+-ad:tech-SF-=-The-Advertising-2.0-Party/
http://www.socialmedian.com/story/4069298/weve-got-web-20-why-not-advertising
http://webmarketingblips.dailyradar.com/story/ad_tech_san_francisco_the_event_for_digital_marketing_1/

As a side note, AD-Village is opening up positions for interns in different departments.  For inquiries, contact Juan  at juan@ad-village.com.

The internet has revolutionized society and has brought us all closer together. Well this effect can be seen in a marketing and advertising perspective and has shown to produce high revenue. Advertising online has gained so much popularity because the internet itself has become more popular. In the 21st century we have seen the web blow up, companies, individuals it doesn’t matter who everyone is online. So the best way to reach these people is online advertising. Just as important as commercials for television, marketing banners on the side of a web-page have the same effect. Viral marketing is most effective online because of the numerous amounts of people and consumers to contact. It uses social networking to help increase the awareness of a product. Advertising via internet, radio, television, or even just old fashion word of mouth. Many times viral marketing is the best option because it is a form of free advertising. There are six different types of viral marketing:

1) “Send it Forward”- Companies send out mass e-mails and encourages friends and family to continue forwarding it in a big chain. It allows for SMS and it makes it an easier way to reach a lot of people

2) Viral- One receives incentives or rewards for forwarding messages or e-mails.

3) Masked Marketing- An advertisement that confuses the consumer and hides the fact that it is in fact an actual advertisement. Makes the consumer think about what they just saw and hopefully gets them talking to their peers & family about it, because they are curious to find out more.

4) Rumor Marketing- Is a way to create talk and gossip about a person or product that will help promote the item. This is why we see movie stars appearing on the talk shows right before their new movie comes out.

5) Social Database- An online service such as Facebook or Myspace that offers a database so it’s users can add contacts when needed.

6) Invitations- E-mails or Gmail sent directly to a user.

Besides from using these different types of viral advertising companies can use the internet to their advantage in another important way, corporate blogging. This allows the big business and corporations get in contact with their consumers on a more personal level. Customers can ask questions and receive answers right from their computers and the best part is that other customers can look and see the question and answer in case they have the same. It allows instant feedback, for example a customer buys a product goes home and is unsatisfied with it and can go right to their computers and complain about it. Then the corporations can answer and or respond to the complaint and everyone sees what is going on. Of course trust is what makes all this possible. Consumers trust that they are blogging with business men of the companies and companies trust that people won’t bring complaints and misuse the blog just for the hell of it. But corporations can use blogging in a different way if they feel direct contact with consumers is not the best idea. They can use private blogs just for the company. Every employee can have access to the URL and would be allowed to post and comment as they please. Instead of sending out a mass e-mail, you can blog add charts, videos, photo’s without attachments and reach the same people even faster. Everyone just logs in and can read the new update. Both approaches benefit the corporation.

If you think Chicken Little is just letting off some steam, think again. This sh*t is bananas, people. And not in a sassy, Gwen Stefani kind of way.

What am I talking about? The massive, apocalyptic upheaval taking place across the media industry right now… the realization of the Chaos Scenario.

[insert melodramatic sound effect here]

Before I inundate you with data points certain to cause heart palpitations, let me pause for a moment to say this: Chicken Little was a total spazz. From his perspective, the sky WAS falling. From mine, it was just a storm passing through. If only he had stopped panicking long enough to find shelter and maybe some galloshes, CL might still be here today pecking away at corn meal, instead of gracing my dinner table all crispy and warm.

Now—back to the Apocalypse!

After posting yesterday’s “The end of advertising as we know it” piece, I sat down to read the March 23 edition of Ad Age, which just arrived on my doorstep that afternoon. What, pray tell, is on the cover? This headline:

Future May Be Brighter, but It’s Apocalypse Now

Sure, it’s an article penned by the same guy who presented the Chaos Scenario in the first place [Bob, if you're reading this, I think you totally ROCK]. But “I was right!” bias aside, he’s got a real point.

As evidence, I submit Exhibit A: Bloodshed across every corner of the media industry!!!!

NEWSPAPERS:

• Amid 23% population growth in the past two decades, US newspaper circulation has dropped 20%

MAGAZINES:

• Newsstand sales—the “profit engine of the ad industry”—fell 12% in 2008.
• Gross ad pages have dropped 22% so far in 2009 (and 2008 wasn’t exactly rosy!).

Lest you dismiss these data points as ‘just another victim of the recession,’ consider for a moment the remote possibility that it’s not; that the core issue behind these numbers isn’t circumstantial—it’s structural. To quote Wendy Harris Millard, co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, “Advertising simply cannot support all the media that’s out there.”

UH OH. That’s bad, right?

BROADCAST:

• Clear Channel, the fearsome behemoth that some predicted would consume the entire nation like a cancer if not stopped, recently laid off 9% of its workforce, dumped 56 of its TV stations and is now struggling under the weight of $20 Billion in debt—with little prospect of salvation.
• Bernstein Research predicts a 20-30% drop in 2009 TV station ad revenue.
• CBS’s prime-time audience was down 2.9% in the last reporting period.
  ABC: -9.7%.
  NBC: -14.3%
  Fox: -17.5%

Meanwhile, the COST of advertising on television has continued to climb:

“The average price of reaching 1000 households with a a 30-second spot in prime time was $22.65 in 2008… but effectively more like $32, because between 150 and 200 of those 1000 households use DVRs to skip past the ads.”

So basically you get to pay more than ever to reach fewer people than ever. Awesome!

Of course, this might explain why “by mid-February, 71% reported having slashed their budgets, and 6% more said the cuts were on their way.”

OUCH.

ONLINE:
The inevitable “disequilibrium between supply and demand” has taken its toll on online publishers as well.

• Usage is soaring, but value is in the toilet.
• Average click-through rates online are near zero.
• Consumers have gotten pretty good at ignoring and/or avoiding even the most clever ads online.
• Yahoo, the most trafficked website on the planet (3.5 Billion daily page views), has lost nearly 2/3 of its market cap since last spring.
• Doom. Gloom. And more doom.

So now what? Panic? Take a cyanide pill? Go back and get your MBA?

photo credit: "Oh My God the Sky is Falling" by Liam Cooke

No doubt, most industry observers (and participants) will find themselves frozen—with that deer-in-headlights look—for some time. Some will indeed panic, drink heavily, and/or send me hate mail.

Which is why I’m here to remind you that everytime a door closes, another one opens.

To some, the glass looks half empty. To me, it’s undoubtedly half full.

Insert 3rd illustrative cliche here.

Here’s the deal, people:
The universe operates in an unstoppable cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. At the moment, we are—COLLECTIVELY (as a species, and perhaps even beyond)—in the throes of a profound and utterly incredible death/rebirth cycle, magnified by the increasing interconnectedness that technology now affords.

The question is, are you going to be the guy whining about how sour the lemons are? Or the one who makes a lot of people happy—and gets rich in the process—making the most delicious, refreshing lemonade?

I guess this is “old news,” as the data I’m about to share comes from a 2007 IBM Global Business Services study (aptly titled “The end of advertising as we know it”)—but perhaps that makes it even more compelling. Here goes:

71% of the 2400 consumers surveyed across five countries said they spend >2 hours/day on the Internet—not including work-related activities. In other words, almost 3/4 of this global sample spends several hours DAILY of their precious leisure-time online. [side note: do any of these people have children? Because if they do, what business do they have with 2 whole hours of daily leisure time?! I don't get it.]

Meanwhile, 48% of the folks surveyed said they spend >2 hours/day watching TV.

In 2009, I’d bet my britches that the gap between those numbers has only grown larger with web use (fueled by time-intensive destinations like Facebook, YouTube, MMOs, virtual worlds, etc.), iPhone apps, on-demand TV, TiVo, DVR… and more(!) encroaching at a relentless pace on the Grandaddy of all advertising mediums.

The question is, as a brand, agency, or marketing professional… what are you doing about it?

The “pretend it’s not happening” approach, while popular, is ill-advised. The music industry tried it a few years back when digital music first appeared on the scene. Now they’re hemorrhaging money and market share and being outsmarted by downstream vendors who responded to the shift toward digital.

[sigh]

Please don’t follow in doomed footsteps.

Even if I’m totally wrong about the increased gap (and we all know, the Genius is rarely—if ever—wrong), you can’t hide from the fact that you’ve still got a few disruptive forces that aint going nowhere, notime soon. Namely:

1. Consumers want control.
And not just of what they watch but how they watch it—and interact with it—as well as how they filter what they view, including ads.

And young people? They’re not having any of the “I WILL YELL LOUDLY AT YOU TILL YOU BUY SOMETHING” strategy of old. By next year, young Americans will outnumber Baby Boomers and make the shift toward digital (which they were BORN using, wanting, understanding, and expecting) a fait accompli.

I do hope you’re ready.

2. “Impact” is the new “Reach”.
Admit it. You’ve grown used to a world where “Reach” was the Holy Grail of marketing. For years, it’s been all about “impressions”, the idea being that the more eyeballs you snared, the more sales would result.

Now that the drugs have worn off, many marketers are dealing with a nasty hangover called “REALITY”. Just because you show up at a party looking wicked hot and flirt with EVERY guy, doesn’t mean you’ll go home with a ring on your finger. Get my drift? Same logic applies to the “spray and pray” philosophy of Old Marketing.

The party is over, folks. And the rulers (those funny things you measure stuff with) have come out.

Well… maybe not rulers per se. We’re all still trying to wrestle that nasty Metrics Monster to the ground. Oddly, I think he likes the wrestling and is growing fond of a good Full Nelson. [Dear God, it's the drugs talking again...!]

Ahem.

Fact: Virtually all of us are enduring the joys of recession-mandated “rectal exams” in the form of account reviews, lowered credit limits, tighter budgets, and greater demand for true ROI. Impressions, clicks, even those new-fangled “engagement” metrics aren’t cutting it. The question is how did those impressions, clicks, and “engaged” consumers translate into increased brand awareness, positive word-of-mouth/mouse, and purchases downstream? If you haven’t figured out how to measure that yet, you’d better hop to it. Quick.

2/3 of the advertising executives IBM polled expect 20% of advertising revenue to shift from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.

Yep. P.S. that research was published 2 years ago.

And last but not least,
3. The Consumer is also the Creator.
Thanks to technology, consumers have been empowered not just to choose their own destiny—but to create it. In the same way that we’ve seen the rise of “Reality TV” over the past several years, so User Generated Content is becoming The Dominant Force online. IBM’s previously referenced survey, for example, already showed in 2007 that UGC sites are the top destination for viewing online video content.

Look out, Mad Ave!

Which leads me back to my earlier question: Time’s are changin’. The masses are moving from one screen to another… to many. As a brand, agency, or marketing professional… what are you doing about it?

In class last week we discussed marketing , advertising  and business 2.0. Inevitably the concept of corporate blogs came up, and with it, the debate over whether a corporate blog is ultimately a positive or a negative tool. I do believe that they are almost always beneficial to corporations. The argument that it gives the consumer the opportunity to post negative comments doesn´t hold much water, since the advent of Web 2.0allows them to do so anyway, even if it´s on a personal rather than corporate blog. Creating a corporate blog centralizes consumer comments, allowing the company to see both the positive and negative posts, both of which would be posted on-line regardless of whether or not a corporate blog was in place. Thus, the company can respond to the comments of the consumer, either by writing an explanation back or by modifying their product. However, regardless of the benefits to the corporation, I believe corporate blogs could negatively affect the consumer. As depicted in the cartoon, the blogs are written with an agenda. Honest assessment of the company and its products may not be present in a corporate blog. Therefore, consumers may be led to believe that a product is more valuable or of better quality than it actually is, or that a company is more trustworthy than it actually is. Essentially, corporate blogging is not the most honest, unbiased  source of information on the Internet. Depending on how the company conducts its blog, it may be more of an advertisement than a work of journalism, so consumers must simply be cautious and treat corporate blogs as such.

OK, so I am riding the coattails of so many others on the “What Motrin Did Wrong” train.  Check out the ad in question… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmykFKjNpdY

I think this ad and Motrin’s subsequent response is a classic example of corporate think not working in the new dynamic of marketing and messaging.  Mostly, from all the blogs and tweets out there on the subject, I think Seth Godin really makes the best point… http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/we-feel-your-pa.html.

Truly, Motrin presented what to some was a horrible ad.  So, what did they do?  They got corporate and posted a corporate apology.  What they missed is an opportunity to engage.  This was the prefect chance for Motrin to start a real conversation with real people about real pain.

So many corporations play it safe and react as opposed to interact.  Bad PR will occur no matter what.  Its all about how you use it.  Motrin could have invited the angry customers to a discussion on their website about how better to market their product.  They could have blogged about the mistake they made, apologized for offending some and invite open discussion about what they could have done differently.

AND, they could have encouraged all of this interaction on their website, on Twiter, YouTube (another missed opportunity for them was to make fun of their own ad).  It’s a shame that heads are still so thick in the corporate world.  Someday these people will all retire to an island somewhere and the real conversation can truly begin!

Attention brands, business owners, advertising agencies, and media peeps!!!!

I have some bad news. And it’s not about the financial markets, the election, or your expanding waistline. Nope—it’s far, far worse.

Are you sitting down? Good. Here it comes…

TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING IS IN A DEATH SPIRAL.

That’s right. DEATH SPIRAL.

Now before you freak and jump out a window (or worse—post nasty anonymous comments in reply to this statement), allow me to explain. And yes, to propose a solution… I am a Genius, after all.

Traditional Advertising’s “Death Spiral” can be attributed to 3 recent phenomena:
1.    Clutter
2.    Trust
3.    Social media

Let’s talk.

Clutter
I don’t know about you, but I hate clutter.

A little bit of nice, clean white space feels so much better.

If traditional ads were spaced like these last few paragraphs, they might actually WORK.

We might actually even ENJOY them.

But instead… most ads are more like this:
piledandsquishedrightontopofoneanothersothatwehardlyhaveachancetotakeabreath
letaloneprocessanyinformationordecodeanyoftheproductmysteriesorevaluatewhat
makesthembetterfastermoreeasiernewerDIFFERENTERorinanywaynecessarytoour
existenceonthisincreasinglyoverpopulatedplanet
GASPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!

Clear as mud? ☺

The worst part is that the Clutter Problem is escalating at a DEATH-SPIRAL-INDUCING rate.

Consider this:
In 1998 Google had an index of 25M pages. As of this summer, its index had hit the mind-blowing milestone of 1 TRILLION UNIQUE URLs.

A F**KING TRILLION!!!!!

Still more to consider:

There are >100,000,000 videos on YouTube.com—with >65k new ones being added DAILY.

In 2005 (most recent data I could find), there were roughly 40 BILLION product catalogs published. That’s equal to 134 catalogs for every man, woman & child in the US.

Yes, folks, the average person is exposed to some 3000 marketing messages per day… but the American Association of Advertising Agencies says we’re only able to absorb (at most!) 100.

And let’s face it, that’s probably an inflated number.

PS. 90% of people who can skip ads, do.

Yes, but most of those messages are crap. What matters is good creative. Killer copy. Pretty women with big boobs wiggling around to a HAWT soundtrack.

Ok… NO. Neither creative nor copy nor boobs—nor any combination of the three—are likely to solve the clutter problem. Besides… you’ve got 2 more hefty problems to solve.

Trust
“Lets talk about trust baby, let’s talk about you & me…”

People don’t trust advertisers. Period.

You know it. I know it. Let’s call a spade a spade and move on. But in case you’re still skeptical (or just plain crazy), here’s proof:

“In a 1998 Gallup poll rating honesty and ethical standards across a range of professions, advertising people ended up near the bottom, sandwiched between lawyers and car salesmen.”

SANDWICHED BETWEEN LAWYERS AND CAR SALESMEN, people!!!!! And perhaps, if we were to redo this poll today, they might change those to “Politicians and Pimps” (both of whom are better-dressed, frankly-speaking).

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the trust that most consumers have in the opinions of other consumers.

“‘Word-of-mouth’ the most powerful selling tool…78% of consumers say they trust the recommendation of other consumers.” - Nielsen, Trust in Advertising, 2007 Global Consumer Survey Report.

And the trend is particularly true among younger consumers—namely, the ¼ of the US population (ONE F**KING FOURTH!) who are 14-24yo and were born wired.

Raised in a time where “SPAM” and “COOKIE” don’t automatically conjure images of food, today’s youth LIVES and BREATHES online:

• They spend >16 hours online/week (online > TV)
• 56% spend >1 hour daily sending instant messages
• ¼ prefer social networks to F2F time with friends
• Have an average of 53 online friends (vs. 11 “close” friends)
• 96% use a social network DAILY

And they don’t care about your ad, people. They care what their friends think.

Trust me.

Social media
Ah… every traditional advertiser’s favorite topic! YAY! Let’s hug.

Seriously, now—it’s common knowledge that people don’t like intrusive, one-way conversations. What is traditional advertising but an intrusive, one-way conversation?

The paradigm is shifting. Fast. Hard.

Ahh… The Solution!

Should we make the logo bigger?

Craft a catchy new tag line?

More girls? Bigger boobs?

No, no, no, no, NO!

Traditional Advertising’s Terminal Illness (aka Death Spiral) shall not be cured by a larger helping of the Same Old Shi*t. You’re going to have think different. Act different. BE DIFFERENT.

REALLY DIFFERENT.

Start by shifting your focus more on branding and less on advertising. Yes, branding. That magical je ne sais quoi that ultimately results in the feelings/thoughts/attitudes that people have about your product/service/company.

You mean our tagline?
No.
Our logo?
No.
The killer copy on our website?
No.
…..Our tagline?
No.
Are you sure?
Yes.

Your brand isn’t what you say your company/product/service is. It’s what THEY say it is.

Branding isn’t advertising.

In fact, it’s more like… your child. You can’t control it (though it’s natural to want to try)… but you can [and should] certainly influence it, enable it, embrace it, and inspire it.

Start by listening. Really listening. No, REALLY listening.

There. Doesn’t that feel better already?

Eyeblaster has now officially released its Channel Connect for Search. See Press Release.

For me personally, this is one of the most key developments in online advertising, notably because rather than fighting a declining click-rate, it addresses real consumer behaviour as opposed to assumed behaviour. It gives agencies and advertisers confidence in measuring the effects of online advertising by breaking down the silos of display and search and getting to the heart of the matter – if people are not clicking on display adverts, then what the heck are they doing?!

Very few people click on adverts – about one in a thousand. As a consumer, you would have to be very far down the purchase funnel as a result of supporting media in order for you to click and convert immediately as a result of a display banner. Clicking away from content to a website to me is the equivalent of asking me to get off a bus on the way to work just because I notice a sign through the window saying “discount here today.” Reality being is even if I was interested, I would make a mental note and go back later at my convenience. No matter how keen you were, most of us would still go to work first – we have our own agenda – it is a huge call to action to expect me to get off that bus unless I was already on my way there. But, I still ‘noticed’ the sign…

We are therefore forcing and measuring unnatural human behaviour. No other media channel is expecting users to respond “now”, rather they work together to build up a story where results are seen within a period of time. The lack of immediacy has no reflection upon effectiveness.

Online advertising has created a rod for its own back. Its accountability is also its downfall. This is all about to change.

Often what is missed by mass-media however, even if successful in gaining results, is the consumer journey and process in between exposure and conversion – measuring the true behavioural effects over time. In my analogy, did people research the company and/or product prior to going back there to make a purchase? After all, few of us buy without qualifying first.

We are about to find out…

What is the strategy behind Eyeblaster’s launch of Channel Connect for Search?

The link between awareness and interest has always been a key aspect in a purchase funnel. Traditionally, mass-media advertising has driven foot-traffic to brick and mortar shops where sales staff have been able to answer inquiries live. With web 2.0, much of this conversation now happens online, as consumers look for product reviews and ratings to help qualify their research methods from trusted peers, beyond mere information.

Being able to measure the effects of display advertising beyond an immediate click-through has always been at the heart of rich media. Much of the missing data regarding brand effectiveness beyond the impression is seen by consumers seeking further information – in a way they feel more in control – and that is via search. Linking search and display is in essence being able to measure the conversation between a brand and the consumer more completely. It is now possible to follow the conversation across multiple impressions and channels to the final conversion, giving marketers full visibility of their sales funnel.

What challenges does Channel Connect for Search help agencies and advertisers address?

For any advertiser, it is a mistake to disregard the 99.5% of people who do not click on an advert. No other media are measured on an immediate response, rather a piqued interest that moves a consumer along a conversion cycle. The linking of the data sets of both display and search give insights into actual user behaviors and helps justify investment in display advertising beyond the click. Pulling the results from both areas brings a more unified analysis on behalf of an advertiser as well as revealing the bearing each discipline has upon the other. From an agency perspective, it reveals crucial insights as well as a huge time saving in concatenating or de-duping information. It also helps agencies develop a more natural strategy for advertiser-consumer dialogue, with less forced emphasis on immediate clicks as a way to measure campaign effectiveness. In other words, unified reporting provides clear evidence that the credit for conversions must be distributed beyond the final impression, whether it be search or display.

What brands have used/will use Channel Connect for Search?

Channel Connect for Search was a response to Eyeblaster customers across the globe. They asked for an easy way to integrate their digital advertising channels that provided unified apples to apples reporting. We are currently running major campaigns for many verticals, including pharma, cosmetics, broadcast entertainment, automotive, financial, and consumer packaged goods.

How will Eyeblaster get the word out about the service (i.e. marketing tactics)?

Eyeblaster has a heritage of innovation for helping the advertising community develop against a sea-tide of change in consumer behavior. Eyeblaster has this year gone through a rebrand, representing our evolution from a pure rich media vendor to delivering cross-channel digital consumer experiences. Our staff from around the world are already geared up to discuss this turning point with their agency contacts. With a fresh look and message, a new challenging advertising campaign focused on an industry coming of age, as well as multiple industry speaking opportunities discussing advertising 2.0 – building brand-consumer relationships in a digital age – it is indeed a powerful and exciting and timely message for the digital industry.

Press comments on Channel Connect for Search:

• DM News: Eyeblaster releases cross-channel analytics tool
• ClickZ: Eyeblaster Tries to Bridge Gap Between Display and Search
• Wired: Eyeblaster Announces Search and Display Tracking Tool
• Mobile Marketer: Eyeblaster helps brands, agencies track consumer behavior
• Marketing Vox: Banner Ads Influence Search Conversions; Eyeblaster Tries to Prove It
• Biz Report: Eyeblaster takes marketers beyond the last click
• Business Wire: Life’s Good for LG Electronics as Mindshare Connects Search & Display

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The Obama presidential campaign will be remembered for its many first. The first bi-racial presidential candidate, the first presidential candidate to acknowledge his black children, the first presidential candidate with an African first name and the first presidential candidate to release a digital CD.

The compilation was put together by the good folks at Hidden Beach Recordings, best known for removing the arsine ramblings of ignorant buffoons from popular rap songs and making them palatable to anyone with a 5th grade education, in the UnRapped Jazz series. The CD is only available from the Obama campaign store, and will set you back $25 bucks for the digital download or $30 bucks for the physical CD. All proceeds from the the CD will go to the Obama/Biden ticket. After the election the CD will be released to retail stores around the country.

The vision of communication in the digital age is one of two way conversations, sometimes lead by brands and sometimes lead by users but always distributed across services, niches and purposes. Brian Solis of PR 2.0 has an excellent update to the classic social media Starfish visualization. He calls it the Conversation Prism and in true which attempts to capture the conversation flow across services and sites. Both visualizations highlight the plethora of tools and services that continue to disperse audiences and the stories they carry about your brand, product or service, across the Interwebs.

Use the Conversation Prism to help discover new services and sites, where conversations about your client’s brands are happening. Begin by observing the conversations you find and as you discover ways to add value and truly contribute to the conversation, jump-in participate in them. Identifying and understanding these services, how to leverage them and build strategies around them is the real challenge facing communications companies

We create as many contact points with the consumer nowadays because we want to sell stuff. Contact points have one objective: lead the consumer into a buy while using the different channels in a smart way.

Channels are convergenced when they offer the next keywords to the consumer:

• Relevance
• Context/Situation
• Creativity
• Dialogue
• Affinity

It is important to take context into account. Context can be defined as time and place. It’s not because you are using much channels that these channels are properly used. In advertising, most concepts are translated linear to the different channels while it should be done vertically per context. What you should do is maximize the advantage of each channel independently using the typical characteristics of this channel. We all know that ATL is about impact and visibility (awareness) while Mobile is at the opposite side of the marketing landscape because is personal, contextual and offers interactivity to the individual.

There are 4 kinds of convergence:

• Convergence in time (personal, work & family time amalgamates – there is no clear difference anymore)
• Convergence in place (ubiquitous connectivity – we are connected everywhere)
• Social convergence (we are social beings and always available)
• Commercial convergence (client relations and commercial transactions are part of our lives)

In the WebNu, we don’t push communication but try to start a conversation. We communicate whenever it’s opportune for the individual. The consumer needs to have the feeling that he’s in control and he chooses whether he wants to interact or not.
As the mobile phone is the ultimate medium because we are naturally addicted to this medium, context is becoming more and more relevant in advertising. Context defines your content.

It is vital to understand that brand communications should be coherent. The different channels reinforce each other. The content should be adapted to each specific channel. It is crucial! This seems logical and easy but in fact, in a convergence world, it isn’t. The boundaries of channel, media and content are insecure. How would you describe someone who is watching TV via the internet on this cell phone?
The only way success can be achieved is when the brand works efficient and organized and proper objectives are set.

This is part of the presentation I gave in Chicago, it started off the sessions and was intended to give people an understanding of the terms, phrases and language of Web 2.0 pundits and users. In a strange twist, all the audio from this session was lost and so the presentation is sans audio.

The story on the first two slides is that those words were literally something I heard during the Start-up Riot here in atlanta. I use that as an example of both the extreme nerdiness of which I am sometimes a part as well as how every much the language of Web 2.0 has moved beyond MBA speak. The point I try and drive home with these slides is that you need to know the lingo to be a part of the game and you need to understand the lingo to play it. I no longer include The Long Tail in presentations because it is so hard to convey the idea, the controversies and rebuttals without either spending 10 minutes on it or getting uber geeky and referring to power laws.

I read an article today in a paper where the tasks of a marketeer are explained. These were the five tasks:

• Lead generation
• Increase client loyalty
• Client happiness
• Marketing accountability
• Product & services innovation

Perhaps I am a bit ambitious but there is a solution to it. Here are some steps that respond to the tasks of a marketeer.

In the WebNu, you always have to take 5 steps:

1. Establish your brand (be findable)
2. Demonstrate your brand (be exiting)
3. Challenge with your brand (create connections)
4. Offer relevance to the customer (turn connections into relationships)
5. Offer products & services in a relevant context (sales)

You can not expect from a customer that he stays his lifetime exclusively with your brand but your brand can have the best offer (product or service) at a certain time. If you are not connected to this customer and you don’t have a meaningful relationship with him, you can’t make that offer. Marketing’s responsibility is larger than just advertising. It should be lifecycle information management of your customer base. This insight, well used, creates opportunities for business innovation and transformation.

While saying this in the WebNu, a company needs to prepare itself and make the shift using enterprise 2.0 tools and an advertising 2.0 spirit to gain a competitive advantage. Integration of your business is crucial and should be built from a customer obsessed perspective; the empowered customer.

While the term “Web 2.0″ has become rather cliche, it’s ugly step-children, Marketing 2.0, PR 2.0, Branding 2.0, Advertising 2.0, and (Dear God) Business 2.0 are just beginning to see their days in the sun.

Unfortunately, there’s a gigantic gap between coining a term and embodying it—and thus we hear a lot of talk and see very few results on any of the above fronts (though the Genius does her best to chronicle those rare gems that do).

Today’s Bonafide Genius Awards go—for better or worse—to two shining examples in the “talk” category. (It seems my search for examples of “results” this week has been fruitless.) Clever, pointed, entertaining, and spot-on in their articulation of the industry cross-roads that smart marketing pros are responding to, they’re shining examples of how dull, cliche terms get a new shine when someone puts a little Genius into their message.

Congrats to Openhere for The Break Up and Paul Isakson of space150 for What’s Next in Marketing & Advertising.

Advertising 2.0 Genius (a.k.a. “The Break-Up”)

Marketing 2.0 Strategy (a.k.a. “What’s Next in Marketing & Advertising”)

P.S. A good number of you (the smarter ones, that is) have already seen these, but for the rest of you… watch and learn.

Social Media Test: Find the Holy Grail. It’s hidden in this video.

For all the social media marketers out there you need watch this video. Why because of all the noise out there in social media this video panel discussion is the most relevevant information for you.

The future of marketing will be impacted by widgets – this is what the Slide CEO Max Levchin didn’t want to say in front of all the people at Web 2.0 conference. This is where the holy grail is.. Sparing me of writing what the holy grail is ..I’ll just post the video and see if you can fish it out..

It’s a kind of social media test…

Key Players:

Hooman Radfar, CEO & Co-founder, Clearspring Technologies
Kevin Freedman, Vice President, Finance & Operations, Slide
Eric Alterman, Chairman, KickApps
Dan Riess, Vice President, Marketing and Ad Solutions, Turner Broadcasting System
Sun Jen Yung, Managing Director, Investment Banking, Oppenheimer & Co., Moderator

This week Ad Age published an interesting article on the growth of Internet ad spending in the UK. Despite shrinking ad budgets across other sectors, the article reports that online ad budgets grew 38% to $5.6 billion in 2007. They are expected to add another 30% this year for total ad budgets around $7.28 billion. UK advertisers spend some $8 billion on TV ads and at the current pace online ad spending will exceed this number in early in ‘09. The other noteworthy item in the article was how very short-sighted some people in the ad industry remain. Despite the witting on the wall, Bob Wootton, pr flack for the ad industry in the UK, uttered the following quotable:

“Internet is thriving because it’s the refuge of small and medium-sized enterprises in hard times. It empowers and enables a new kind of advertiser to come to market… There is no surge of big brand advertisers towards the internet.”

In other words, real advertisers with real budgets arent moving their money online so we dont need to be concerned with small businesses spending their meager pennies on keywords. Classic luddite mistake #518, thinking scale is the only measure of importance.

This is an edited version of my first review, now with fact correction courtesy of the author. Thanks Seth.

A friend of mine has a chart he likes to use when he presents on marketing in the age of Web 2.0. The X-axis represents ‘the amount of times I hear about the Long Tail’ while the Y-axis shows ‘the amount I give a shit’. This chart – a parody of the ‘power law’ distribution curve typically used to demonstrate the concept of the Long Tail itself – is used to make a powerful point. The key tenets of the new marketing are being devalued in their use as empty evangelical buzzwords by businesses that lack the vision and commitment to ever put them into meaningful practice.

It’s a point that’s hammered home repeatedly in this latest piece of impassioned and compulsively readable polemic from ‘Permission Marketing’ guru Godin, though in truth there’s little new in Meatball Sundae we haven’t heard from him before. Indeed, the ultimate message hasn’t progressed much beyond the key ‘markets are conversations’ insight that powered the ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’, which followed the rails laid by Godin’s earlier ‘Permission Marketing’. What Godin brings, however, to this latest discussion of 14 trends impacting business in the 21st century is an all-new, hard-line attitude: this time it’s do or die.

Marketers and their agencies, says Godin, are treating the techniques of the new marketing as simply so much whipped cream and cherries to be liberally dolloped over the top of old-fashioned ‘meatball’ organisations. The result – a focus on the cosmetic with no thought for bottom-up realignment with market trends – is predictably indigestible to consumers. ‘Ask not what the new marketing can do for you’, declaims Godin, ‘ask what you can do to thrive because of the new marketing’. It’s as a wake-up call to these meatball organisations that Godin takes such a strong position. This is an ‘all or nothing’ turning point in the way that companies organise themselves, and ‘sooner or later you’re going to play by the rules of this new game or watch the game get won by someone else’.

It’s also made clear early on that the winners in this new game are often start-ups free from the encumbrance of earlier structural and organisational models. This, says Godin, is why American Express never acquired PayPal, and why Barnes & Noble never became Amazon. They were unable to conceive of an environment where ideas are spread by groups of people and where consumer-to-consumer conversation is the new mass media. Success in this environment ‘doesn’t demand better marketing, it demands better products, better services and better organisations’. In short, you shouldn’t be looking at applying the lessons of Web 2.0 to your brand website, you should be looking at applying them to what your business actually does all day.

Elsewhere, the book – one of its author’s longest – delivers some trademark Godin touches. The familiar name-checking of small but successful inspirational companies you’ll never have heard of remains, (try Etsy.com, Sendaball and Threadless.com), as does the ever changing nature of the conceptual frames used to get the ideas across. With its dizzying talk of 2 ages of marketing, 3 eras of advertising and 4 separate industrial revolutions, it’s as if the book’s unusual length is intended to ensure that everyone – finally – gets the point.

Godin even finds the time to paint a bravura picture of 18th century craftsman Josiah Wedgwood as a game-changing pioneer of new marketing techniques. The pay-off, a comparison to Josiah’s older, set in his ways, and ultimately unsuccessful brother Thomas is as effective as an instructional tale as that of any of the new dot-coms Godin holds up for praise.

Another new riff for Godin’s axe this time around is his demolition of the concept of the advertising-led ‘Big Idea’ as still being at the heart of effective marketing. Big ideas in advertising worked well when advertising was in charge, but with mass media now neither as effective or desirable as they once were, the ‘Big Ideas’ that count now are those which are embedded into the experience of the product itself – like that of the BlackBerry, for example.

Meanwhile, God knows what Disney CEO Bob Iger has ever done to Godin, but the book ends with an example of how each of the 14 trends discussed can be pointedly applied to this company that appears to be conspicuously failing to recognise some very simple truths: the customer doesn’t care about you and doesn’t want to become a citizen of your branded world; you’re not in charge; customers are narcissistic; and they’ve already got worlds they’re happy in. You need to work out what to do in order to be invited into these worlds, rather than deluding yourself you’re somehow still running the game.

Find the time to take the long road through Meatball Sundae – even if you’re familiar with the territory (and really, you should be by now) you’ll still be inspired by Godin’s enduring passion and diversity of reference points. Better still, you’ll be armed with any number of examples to either help you make the case for reinventing your own organisation’s meatballs or to inspire you to resign and go work for a company that’s been paying proper attention to the changes of the last few years.

Do you ever have trouble deciding where to spend your money? Do you have trouble finding the best business in town? Do you want to hear testimonials of businesses you want to patronize with unfiltered views from real customers? Wait and pull your hair out no longer.

I ran across Grayboxx today. While it doesn’t have the community features of Yelp, which makes Yelp so fun to return to again and again, it has a plethora of reviews and shows up high in search results. I tend to trust this review of Kristen Nicole from Mashable:

“I tried [grayboxx] out for cities as large as New York and Chicago, and even my birthplace of Kalamazoo. For towns large and small, the search results were consistently better than Google, Yahoo and even Yelp.”

For instance, here are the top 10 recommended photographers within 10 miles of Nashville. And I’m not alone. The statistics from Compete indicate that Grayboxx is experiencing amazing product growth in users, especially given that it only launched nationally on December 3rd.

Yep, when it comes to local search, I believe its just possible that Grayboxx has a strategic advantage of the wisdom of crowds on its side. This is business is a more democratized and transparent. Its Consumer Reports and the Better Business Bureau at your digital fingertips.

I, for one, hope Grayboxx gets all the publicity and use it deserves….and ultimately makes our lives easier. So if you’ve got a great review, a bad review, want to get testimonials from customers for yourself or your business, Grayboxx may very well have the answer for you.

Check it out and tell me what you think.

If you’re into hyperlocal blogging, wordpress seo tips and techniques may be just what you need. This is quick and effective list of WordPress blogging tips to enhance your search engine ranking.

This morning while listening to my Feist radio station on Pandora something unusual caught my eye. Like everyone else, I’m fairly ad-blind and tend to ignore everything on the right edge of the screen but for some reason this ad caught my attention. It could have been the sultry looking brunette, but I like to think I’m a bit more evolved then that.

For months Pandora has been changing the look and feel of the station page that surrounds its player to match the look of the ads it runs. Some advertisers have even been sophisticated enough to embed controls directly in their ads that allow users to pick the theme of the page. However outside of a fleeting cool factor, the value seems limited. No one I know that uses Pandora spends time on the site looking at anything, especially not the ads.

However the ad that caught my eye, didnt change the theme of the station page it did something completely different. It presented a list of alternate stations tied to the advertisers product (this ones an OK new show on NBC). The show, a modern day version of Mrs. Columbo, is about a reporter that jumps back and fourth in time solving mysteries. On Pandora however the ads for the show included, stations like “Hits from 1987 – 1992″ (the time period the main character jumps to) and “Hits Time Travel”. The stations attempted to tie your activity on Pandora with the show while providing you another way to explore music. Brilliant! Advertising as a service! Imagine the coordination and conversations between Pandora and the Ad agency that this required.

The sheer brilliance of this form of advertising, call it advertising as service, struck me. Sure folks have been talking about advertising 2.0 for years but this particular execution really brings it home. Connecting your users activity with advertisers message in a seamless, and more importantly, useful manner is the future of advertising.