Could it be?

 It is rumored that we are about to run out of IP addresses. Apparently on March 12, 2011 there will no longer be any 4-byte IP address. 

There is a new repalcement coming soon called an IPv6. However, the new system has yet to be impemented. 

The risk of all of this? No new sites. That's right zipo. 


How could that be? The internet has always baffled me in a sense that I don't understand how big and how small it is at the same time. The fact that we can run out of something that seems to be plentiful. 

I took a digital media class this year and learned more that my brain could have possibly known about publishing, HTML and the internet in general. What a complex world.

We'll see what happens in 2011.

Strange Thinking...

This past summer I worked at an advertising that handled Broadway accounts. It was so different from anything I had ever learned. The strategy and thinking behind it didn't click to me. You had to have experience and understand the though process behind it before it made sense.

With an audience made of up almost 70% tourists you would think ABSOLUTELY advertise to the tourists. However, these people come and leave and a new group will come. What makes theater tick is those hard core theater lovers. It is such a small amount of people. The richest of the rich. Literally you are advertising to maybe 1% of the world to come see this show on Broadway that could last 13 years like Lion King or could just close the next night.

This brings up another point that adverting venues must be so flexible with shows. What if I had already bought New York Times for 6 months in advance for my show I'm working on. But, the show closes 2 days later. The NYT needs to understand that I no longer have any show to advertise. It goes against everything I have learned. It bends the rules and that makes me want to figure out how and why.

The link to Groupon

I learned an interesting tidbit regarding how Groupon works. They work in direct contact with advertising agencies. The amount of time it takes to get deals in place is extremely quick- only a week or two before they run and no advanced lock in date can be booked for advertisers.


Groupon wanna-bes are popping up everywhere even though they have been in place for ages. It appeals to the money saving times.

It is stated that Groupon promotions were only profitable for 66% of businesses, 40% said they wouldn't run the promotion again. Very interesting. You would never guess them unsuccessful.

Target on the Map

Brands have now taken over with their logos on Google Maps. I stumbled upon this innovative new way to integrate a brand into a users experience (as talked about in the post below). Instead of a generic map pinpoint the user can now see Target's target location. The user can easily find the brand just by scanning the map. 

I see a huge drawback being when users are overwhelemed by the amount of logos found on the maps.

But for now, keep on driving towards the logos Target.

Just Get Engaged

More and more media planners are seeing the necessity of not only creating a media plan, but also an engagement plan. A plan that will see actually what the user will DO and how you are going to measure that doing. Basically the need is how to better engage with the user. The engagement aspect will create a lasting relationship and memory between the brand and the user.

Below are a list from a ClickZ article of the most promising ways to get this engagement plan:


Offers and calls to actions: What are the high-value actions and interactions we are trying to encourage?


Rich media functionality: What rich media technologies can we take advantage of to encourage high levels of engagement right in the banner? Consider lead capture, video, social enablement games, etc.


Site specific technical enablement: LinkedIn polls, Facebook Engagement Ads, InfoWorld's White Paper Library lead capture, etc.


Landing page actions: Lead capture, video plays, coupon and materials/white paper downloads, free trials, free demos, send to friend, call us, talk to an expert, etc.

Thank you page secondary calls to action: Don't just say "thank you" and end the experience. Keep visitors on your site! Say thank you and offer more highly engaging activities. How about: "Thank you and here is a great 2-minute video" or "Thank you, explore this new product" or "Thank you, would you like to speak with a rep."

E-mail auto replies: If people fill out a form to get a coupon or white paper, don't just say, "Thank you. Here is your white paper." Offer secondary calls to action to continue the dialogue. Like the thank you page opportunity, say "Thank you and here is a great 2-minute video" or "Thank you. Explore this new product." or "Thank you, would you like to get a quote."

Viral/social/advocacy calls to action: Turn one impression, click or action into many by weaving viral calls to action and chiclets into the process. That includes things like forward to a friend, post this to my blog, tweet this, post to Facebook.


Lead triaging: If you are doing lead generation, what happens to the leads you generate? Are they being rapidly followed up on, categorized and escalated? What customer-relationship management systems are they being ported into? Salesforce.com Siebel, Microsoft Dynamics?

Marketing automation: What are the marketing automation programs and applications being applied to the leads you generate based on their source, demographics or behavior? Are they being ported into Unica, Salesforce, Eloqua or Capterra? Are you triggering specific campaign or offer calls to action and emails when they return to your clients site?


Retargeting: Are you using retargeting technologies via your ad server, the networks, and large portals/sites to reinforce offers and brand impact once a consumer or prospect has visited your client's site? What is the secondary message you are serving exclusively to people you retarget?

When I Grow Up

I was showed this video a few months ago. It's a hilarious spoof of Monster's "When I Grow Up" campaign.



Maybe I should show this video to my parents?

'Tis the Season

Social media to fight for clean drinking water? It seems like social media has come a long way from gossip about Lindsay Lohan in rehab again.

OneRiot, a Twitter advertising network and oneforty, a Twitter app directory and getting ready to make the fight for social media to work in helping charitable causes for the new season. This new use of social media will help in raising money for a good cause. Twitter apps will begin to show ads (shown below) when Twitter users write certain holiday keywords in their tweets.

 The idea is simple- raise $20,000 to give fresh and clean water to charity. The CEO of OneRiot plans to target charity to an audience "Santa, mince pies and general excess" during the holiday season.

Let's see if the terms clean water and frosting cookies ring in the season with charity.

A new level

These shoes take social media to a whole new level.

I wonder who came up with the idea?

http://gizmodo.com/5700683/social-network-sneakers-wont-make-you-any-real-friends-either

The benfits of mind maps

Tonight I sat in front of over 40 mind maps created by students at UT. I felt extremely overwhelmed. My task was to take all of these mind maps and create one supra mind map.

What I learned is that consumers have so many different insights, experiences, memories and feelings about a brand that it is extremely difficult and almost impossible to chunk all of those minds into one mind. It if I took the entire US population and mashed them all into one blanket of thoughts.

Each map possessed qualities that are beyond how I relate to the brand or how I thought people could even connect to a brand itself.

An insightful night to say the least.

A promotion or bomb scare?

In an Ad Age article Procter and Gamble may have gotten themselves into a little more than expected. The company attempted to blow away the public in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with a new sweepstakes promotion, but instead called in the bomb squad.

Crates were placed all around the city in attempt to be a teaser promotion for P&G's sweepstakes called "P&G Faustao's Airplane," which would include drawings and winners with $100,000 worth of prizes.

The public responded to the crates as a bomb scare, which tarnished the whole promotion (although P&G has decided to continue with the promotion).

This goes to show that maybe that situation analysis is necessary. We need to have a full understanding of the situation and culture before placing media.

Read the full article here:

The Digital Planning Process

I am beginning to learn more and more about digital. Here is a little list of what I have soaked up about the process of digital media planning:

Process of Digital Media Planning
1. Define Client goals and budget
• Entire team (not just digital) works with client
• How will you define success
2. Develop the campaign’s objectives and strategy
3. Develop target audience
• Use syndicated research: media consumption
4. Media mix
5. Research behavior and decide sites
• Site Choice:
• How well and effectively and efficiently reach target audience
• Cost efficiency (eCPM)
• Targeting capabilities
• Added Value offerings
• Contextual Relevance
• Ad Size
o 300X250 performs the best in terms of Click Through Rate (CTR)
o Awareness Campaigns: High-impact placements: homepage, roadblocks, video, sponsorship, advertorials, rich media opportunities
 reach and frequency most important
o Direct Response Campaign
 Most efficient way to reach users (CPC, CPA) who are already aware of product
6. Send Request for Proposal (RFP) to sites
7. Begin media plan through evaluation and negotiations
8. Buy media and begin the execution process
• Renegotiations of rates occur
9. Analysis and analytics
• Awareness Campaign: achieved reach and frequency goals, brand lift study
• Direct Response: engagement metrics, end actions and efficiencies

A Digital Movement

It is a little scary to think how digital our world has become. Every platform that was simply traditional is now moved to a digital platform.

Take for example radio. It has now been replaced with websites like Pandora and Groove Shark. Even scarier for our field is that now consumers have the ability to just pay a few dollars to opt out of our millions of ad dollar spending.

TV has also traveled down that road with Netflix, online streaming on Hulu and network sites.

Moving in an even more digitally way is mobile. Taking all of this and cramming it into one little hand held device.

How quickly digital moves is a scary thought. I wonder what will be next?

Strategy with Social Media

I recently read the article "What Advertising Strategies Work with Social Apps?" that was featured on ClickZ. The article focuses on four different social media platforms: foursquare, mobile applications, Facebook applications and social interview.

The trend here is activity based advertising. The advertiser wants to integrate the user into the experience and provide them with something of value. We have seen that, yes of course people are on all of these sites, but we need to look deeper to see their level of involvement with the social networking platforms. Dig deep to see and make the connection and interaction with the user instead of being to the side. In a nut shell- we need full on integration and interaction. In my opinion, the interaction is a much better result that a traditional CTR approach.

The article highlights that an advertiser must engage with, not at a customer. You want to be integrated with the customer's actions. Damon Burrell, VP marketing at MTV Network states that"engagement isn't about users clicking on a banner and coming to our site, but rather integrating them into the experience and providing something of value."

Cross Platform Model

I read an article a few months ago from MediaWeek, "Nielsen Launches Online Campaign Ratings." It wasn't until this month that this idea was once again strongly reinforced in my mind. Nielsen will roll out an Online Campaign rating in 2011 that will be bale to track the effectiveness of cross platform campaigns. The ratings will be more like TV ratings with TRP, GRP, reach and frequency.

This truly has the ability to change how we see a whole campaign. The Richards Group presented to us a few weeks ago about a "cross-training model" of someone who needs to know both the traditional and non-traditional world. This is the future of advertising.

Although the ratings system is not designed for measuring specific digital features such as traffic, the ratings will be designed for measuring a specific ad campaign. We will be able to see how digital and traditional are melting together to make a fully integrated campaign.

Look out digital world 2011.

The Future

My research and thoughts into the future of advertising industry:

The job market industry for college graduates has increased 13.5 % for the graduating class of 2011. More specific to my career path is advertising and within advertising I will focus strongly on media planning. Employment rates for advertising increased 108% this year. Jobs for media planners increased 57%. These rates peaked in May 2010 and have since leveled off to what employment rates were in February 2009. Along with these rates AdAge reported that marketing services and media have gone up 3.7% to $33.7 billion in 2008. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these rates are predicted to continue to rise through 2018 for employment in advertising, marketing, promotions, and public relations. These rates will rise due an increase in the number of goods and services and the need for brands to differentiate.

The Bureau also states that the advertising agencies are looking for students with “related experience, a high level of creativity, strong communication and computer skills” in finding the best jobs. Even more so the trend of moving to digital media is being incredibly important. The industry currently is currently moving into a very “cross-trained model” says The Richards Group. This means that many media planners now have to be trained in traditional, but also the digital world. Employers are seeking graduates that have experience in new age media including social media, and using traditional media in a non-traditional way especially with the internet. Additionally, traditional media such as newspaper, TV, and radio have all moved into a digital space. Once again this shows the impact of how important digital skills are currently in the advertising industry.

A huge challenge for advertising is that it is so dependable on consumer interaction and the economy. One reason for the change to the digital world is that is has much easier measurability than traditional media. As seen in the past history of advertising when the recession, many companies cut back on advertising. This is bound to happen again in the future.

The competition for these media and advertising jobs are very high. The number of applicants applying for a position outnumbers the spots available. The average salary currently for media planning is $47,900. The Bureau believes that there will be high earnings, travel, and longer hours associated with these positions.

In 2009 MediaBistro.com released a “Media Job Report” which analyzed this job sector. The most desirable jobs were marketing director, senior advertising sales executive, account manager for digital media, and online publishing.

The leading advertising agencies ranked by revenue of 2009 are BBDO Worldwide, McCann Erickson, BBD, TBWA, and JWT. The top media agencies are Zenith Media, MediaVest, Carat, Sarcom, MediaCom, Initative, OMD, Universal McCann, PHD, Mediaedge:CIA, Horizon Media, Optimedia, MindShare MPG and Maxus.

A Target to Remember

As I work on more and more projects I realize the importance of defining ones target market. It is one of the most tedious tasks, but once that one shining piece of research is found the media world seems to set well.

The target research is your true foundation. A foundation that everything else in your campaign will be built off of. My way of thinking of the process is like so:

1. Set your target audience (this will be through hours of research and countless pages of articles)
2. Define your strategy (what is the one word that can be used to encompass how you are going to reach them)
3. Make everything else fall into place (start your media mix & placement)

Somewhere deep inside I enjoy the little glimmer of joy when I find that key piece of research. That hidden piece that will set your whole campaign into motion. I hope that every media student somehow feels that little tinge of joy.

Making the Cut in Times Square

Trying to cut the clutter of Times Square has been a task for many. It is a constant one upping effect.

However, this past Thursday many might have to one up a little harder. Clear Channel Spectacolor placed Times Square's first-ever 3D digital sign, promoting Honda's new CR-Z Sport Hybrid coupe.

The audience received special 3-D glasses to watch as the ditigal billboard on 47th Street and Broadway played Honda's video.

Let's see who's next in Times Square.

See the full article here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=136395