Unicast

As you know, we recently welcomed MediaMind Technologies, Inc., a leading global provider of integrated digital advertising solutions and the EyeWonder video and rich media advertising unit to the DG family. We share DG’s excitement in broadening our team and scope. Unicast has been a pioneer of innovation in the interactive space, working with the world’s largest publishers on a global scale. Together with MediaMind and EyeWonder, we will further expand our interactive capabilities and the strong service-orientation DG has already established over the years.

The combination of MediaMind, Unicast, and EyeWonder brings together a highly qualified roster of professionals, a complementary footprint of offices worldwide, along with innovative technologies to connect advertisers and agencies with the most desirable audiences on a global basis.

While we integrate with MediaMind and EyeWonder under the MediaMind brand, we encourage you to continue follow our news updates at http://creativezone.mediamind.com/Blog/ or click here to subscribe.

Hate to be cliché, but it really is true: when it comes to an agency, you're only as good as your weakest department. It's not just your creative department you need to worry about. Sure, a bad art director or a bad producer can make life intolerable, but every department is crucial to your success as a whole.

There are several distinct disciplines within advertising. As a consequence, there are several distinct "cliques" inside agencies. Creative people tend to hang out with other creative people, campaign managers tend to have lunch with other campaign managers, and so on. Each department lives and works within its own separate capsule. The only interaction people from different departments have is in hallways, bathrooms, and company meetings. Creatives perceive account executives as having their own agendas, while media planners think the creatives just want to win awards. They have little understanding of each other, and thus, they have trouble synchronizing their talents.

When the different disciplines work together in harmony, great work tends to come to life. Some agencies are trying to break down the walls between departments. Digital agencies such as AKQA and RG/A have been known to team a writer and developer together. Often times the art director and developer are one in the same. Amalgamated is a relatively new agency that is also designed to break down the hierarchy and department "polarization" that often cripples traditional agencies. Everyone has contact with clients, and all key staff become intricately involved and educated in the client's business. You’ll see more and more that agencies are inviting all the players to the table for project kick-offs.

There is no denying that different people within an agency have their strengths. Creatives don't pretend for a moment that they could do a better job on campaign management than the people who do it every day. But when all departments work together, ideas flow back and forth, and perhaps someone else, maybe even the guy in the mailroom, comes up with something brilliant. Judging by the Mini campaign's success, in which this very thing happened, it's a good idea to always be listening.

HTML5 has been a major theme and point of discussion at this year’s SXSWi. So I knew I wanted to see as many panels about this subject as possible. On Saturday I attended the “Flash is Dead. Long live Flash” panel. In this panel Elliot Chong and Toby Miller debated which was better Flash or HTML5. Although both presented good arguments for each format, the overarching theme of the debate was that both are great formats and designers/developers need to choose the right tool for the right job.

This theme would continue in Sunday’s panel “HTML5? The Webs Dead Baby”. This panel was structured much differently than the previous “Flash is Dead! Long Live Flash” panel. Where those speakers had debated the good and bad aspects of HTML5, this panel tried to define what the best uses are for HTML5. The forum began with the panelist discussing the best times to uses HTML5 and most agreed that the decision should be made based on what the designer or clients are trying to accomplish. Similar to the previous panel presentation, many of the panelist agreed that you may in fact need to use multiple types of formats in order to execute a suitable campaign.

So to recap the consensus at SXSWi is that HTML5 has become a bigger player, but it shouldn’t be looked at as a definitive solution. Instead it is better to let the job dictate which format or tool a designer/developer should use.

Remember David Ogilvy’s quote that if your ad does not speak to the consumer it will pass like a ship in the night? What are we doing if not speaking to consumers? When you're creating ads, you must speak to consumers’ hopes and dreams, wants and needs. You must talk person-to-person with them and engage them in conversation. Nobody ever felt special being talked to through a bullhorn. You must talk TO them, not AT them.

Successful ad campaigns hit a personal chord with the people to whom they are targeted. They often hit upon a core insight that aligns itself to the targets’ beliefs, feelings and values. Every single ad campaign you create should be an example of the kind of thinker and problem solver you are. Ultimately it should be at the creative and executional level of the how you want yourself and your agency to be perceived. Each ad campaign is also a demonstration to your client, that you can do what advertising is intended to do: sell products in a smart, tactical way. The creative elements of a campaign not only make your ads look better, but they also work to convey your message to your specific target in effective, directed ways. The elements of your campaign make your ads look smart, as well as yourself.

It’s no longer about sticking your headline above the image and logo in bottom right. Your overall idea should be grown organically from the message to the type to the layout. It should have a look and feel that is in line with the tone of your message while being on target with your clients brand. The point is that it's important to remain conscious of what you're doing and what you're using in every ad you produce. In an agency we are in it together, and we sell or else.

Here's a sample list of the elements of a campaign:
* Type
* Colors
* Word Choice
* Ammount of Words
* Body Copy
* Voice and Attitude
* Model Choice
* Clothes or Lack Therof
* Photography Style
* Photography Location
* Illustration Style
* Style or Lack Therof
* Ad Size
* White Space (or lack of white space)
* Logo Size and Placement
* Where the ad appears
* When the ad appears
http://www.ogilvy.com

One of my favorite authors, Jonah Lehrer, wrote an article in WIRED science a few months back about “Social Closeness” and the differences in how we use Twitter and Facebook as our social tools. The article offers some conclusions about what we, as marketing professionals, might already or subconsciously know about the two social media giants: Facebook is for people you know personally while Twitter is for people you either find interesting or somehow share values with.

How then, can we leverage the differences in how society uses these tools and what is the value that each offers us, from the media and marketing perspective?

The Frontal Cortex article concludes that we, despite having a belief system more common to our Twitter associates, are humanly evoked to empathize, trust and listen to our Facebook friends due to the unique personal connection we share.

I highly recommend Jonah Lehrer’s research. His books and blogs are well crafted; he is able to provide compelling scientific evidence and an educated perspective on the subject of popular neuroscience.

A big story in the tech world of 2010 now into 2011 has been the battle between Flash and HTML5 over who will reign supreme as the standard-bearer for video and rich media content on the web and beyond.It is hard to believe something as ‘techy’ as HTML5 would find itself as a headline in major consumer publications, but thanks to a little open letter from Steve Jobs to world, HTML5 soon became a word everyone was talking about. When Jobs speaks people listen, and as a result HTML5 saw a huge boost in adoption rates in 2010.

The new possibilities of HTML5 being an alternative to the rich and often complex interactive experience of Flash, took it from ‘techy’ status now into creative territory, and is the current execution supported by the more than 160 million Apple’s iOs devices sold. HTML5 however does have quite a long way to go before it can truly claim to be any sort of complex flash alternative and should not be considered a replacement technology for Flash, just a competitive one.

Although each standard offers unique features and functionality that make both of them appropriate, depending on the technology goals your company wants to accomplish and what platform you need to do it on, right now, we online rich media advertisers use Flash. And minding a few bumps here and there it is quite amazing for what we are accomplishing. I imagine surely however at some point in the future rich media advertising will find its market in the web pages being viewed from your mobile device, that will have all of the dynamics and interactivity of one of our Flash rich media experiences. Of course if Jobs has anything to do with it they wont be Flash.

But hold on, before anyone is tempted to jump on the “Flash is dying” bandwagon, let’s look at the Flash facts as they stand today:
• 1.2 billion mobile phones are Flash capable
• 70% of online gaming sites run Flash
• 85% of top 100 websites use Flash
• Major websites use Flash, including Hulu, Disney and YouTube
• 2-3 million people belong to the Flash developer community
• 90% of creative professionals have Adobe software on their desktops
• Supports a wide variety of browsers, including older models like IE6
• Powerful video streaming and video playback capabilities, like with live events
• Integration with webcams and microphones support new interactive features like two way video chat

AND although the technology is not yet perfected by any means, we will soon be able to utilize the soon to be released tool currently called “Wallaby” by Adobe, which automatically converts Flash animations and video directly to HTML5 without hours and hours of hand coding. Making the possibility for us to offer rich media advertising to all mobile devices realistic, easy and fast.

Apple’s not going to knock out Adobe. Adobe’s not going to eradicate HTML5. All of these technologies and vendors will continue to evolve and, ultimately, consumers will reap the rewards from the innovative solutions that emerge from this competition. As the viewer demands change, so do the tools to meet those demands. It wasn’t too long ago Flash was being exported to Java, as that was the relevant runtime of the day. Bob Dylan said it well when he said, “the times, they are a changing.” Luckily for us, it wont be overnight.

Want to see some more Flash to HTML5 examples?

Curious about Flash vs. HTML5 performance comparisons?

Recently in the world of the web, one company caused quite a stir when the editor of the free weekly magazine, Cooks Source, took an article written off Monica Gaudio’s food blog and printed it in their magazine without her knowledge or permission. Monica confronted the editor with an email asking for a formal apology and a small donation to the Columbia School of Journalism. Instead she received a return letter where the editor proceeded to claim the Internet to be public domain. That she (Monica) should be grateful for the exposure, and they deserved a "thanks" for editing it for her.

Rather than seek any legal action Gaudio, a self-proclaimed nerd, decided to utilize the Internet masses to seek literary justice. With a little help from her other writing friends, the story spread like a virus through the Internet world appearing on blogs and news sites. And then the Internet world was officially pissed off.

Gaudio and friends sent out a call to action to internet users to help expose the magazine and find more examples of stolen articles Digital retribution by the masses also included creating false twitter accounts under the guise of both the magazine and the editors names, slamming the magazine’s facebook page with comment after comment of threats as well as some less terrifying, more clever comment threads such as “Cooks Source kicked my dog” and “hide your kids, hide your wives, cuz Cooks Source is stealing everything out here”. People even went so far as to create viral videos around the scandal see: “Hitler reacts to copyright violation” as well as a series of haiku’s depicting the magazine and the editor in a not so flattering light.

Ok, so now what? We know that people like justice, or at least feeling like they somehow contribute to the greater good. Or maybe they are all just bored and want to see their clever posts up on someone’s website. But thousands of people are right now enjoying being a part of something bigger, as the story seems to continue to be shared and spread throughout the interweb.

This mass coming together via the Internet for one collective goal, however sinister, is in a way a very free form example of the ugly side of crowdsourcing. You can’t even Google “copyright infringement” without one of the top articles being about Cooks Source Magazine. A once insignificant free weekly publication is now the most popular bad guy on the web.

How can we then turn mad into happy, and collective hatred to collective super stokedness? As rich media advertisers we already skate a fine line between entertaining and annoying the masses. We cover up page content, auto expand units, and takeover entire webpages for the sake of high tech entertainment advertising. Nothing that will get death threats sent to your home address or anything, but could be seen as annoying to some nonetheless. So first lets look at crowdsourcing itself.

Crowdsourcing, by definition, is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call. So are you saying put our audience to work? Why not! People like to feel involved, like they are a part of a bigger community sharing a common idea or goal. Especially if the end result is seeing their “work” posted online in a positive group environment (even if it is uniting against a common enemy). Take wiki’s for example, or the company Threadless. With the online format and the anonymity it offers, people tend to be more involved and are comforted with a certain security of not being physically present.

In June 2009, The UK Guardian Newspaper lacked the time and funding to sift through thousands of documents in a fact-finding mission to uncover information on one of the biggest political scandals in decades. In one week their developers used Django to code a web framework for anonymous and non-anonymous users to go online, review documents and submit finds. In the first 80 hours the site was live, over 20,000 users had reviewed over 170,000 documents, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56% - that’s a lot.

Can you imagine that type of traffic for an advertiser? That may be, and I hate this word, “unrealistic” for our industry. But even half that would be great. And keep in mind “work” doesn’t necessarily mean labor. Putting our audience to work can also be something like a group art project, an online scavenger hunt, or a viral video contest. Here are some tips for creating a successful crowdsourcing campaign:
- These people are unpaid and don’t have to care, so it has to be fun, entertaining, or evoke enough emotion for them to get involved and stay involved, then get their friends involved
- If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around.
- Public attention is fickle, if your ad has ties to current events or trends get it out fast, and get it out now (see “No, seriously: What the Old Spice ads can teach us about news’ future”). There’s nothing more boring than old news
- Successful participation will come in big bursts, so have your framework and servers ready. If your ad is slow, clunky, or doesn’t function correctly forget it.

People hate ads. Especially bad ones. So the more creative and innovative we can be to “sell without selling” the better it is for all of us. It is our job to get the attention of the Internet masses, steer them into a certain direction, and drive new and more sales to our advertisers. And so now I say to you, go forth and crowdsource.

I’ve read several pieces lately about the advertising industry’s attempts to decode what women want, the latest being this review of a book called What Women Want (which happened to be written by a man). The buying power of women is rapidly expanding, and everyone is trying to figure out how to cash in on that trend. As a person who has been female since, oh, before I was born, I’d like to offer some tips straight from the horse’s mouth:

1. KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE PINK. I am so sick of having the “female version” of every product looking like it’s been dipped in Pepto-Bismol. We are capable of viewing and appreciating more than one color. We are complex, dynamic grown women, so please consider using a complex, dynamic color palette when speaking to us instead of the color of the booties they put on us in the hospital when we were born. Also, pastels are not always necessary.

2. Instead of “women,” could we just be treated as “people?” There is so much advertising aimed at women (especially moms) that makes me think, “Gosh, my husband’s the one who does that.” And when I see an ad for something marketed to women that men could use too, I think, “Why am I being singled out here?” Gender inequality is shrinking, and advertisers have some catching up to do with this new emerging reality.

3. Make our lives easier. I am never going to remember to fill out the survey on the two-foot long receipt when I get home. I have consistently failed to remember to take the coupon with me when I go to buy something. I don’t want to get an email to take a survey every single time I have my car serviced. I want fewer pieces of paper to carry around. I want the coupon to be on the box and ready to use at checkout. I don’t mind sharing my feedback with you, but you have to make it easy and non-intrusive for me. I want to subscribe to your email updates instead of being magically enrolled and having to figure out how to unsubscribe, and if I do subscribe, I want to hear from you when it’s actually relevant, not every day. I want you to keep your message short and sweet and then give me the option to find out more quickly and easily.

Women are busy these days, so if you can keep that in mind when crafting and delivering your message, you’ll reap the rewards, and so will we.

4. Respect our age (This is the part where I’m supposed to say “Even if we lie about it.”). Grown women don’t need to be talked down to in the “hey girlfriend!” vernacular in order to be interested in what you have to say. If you’re marketing to grownups, feel free to leave out the OMGs and BFFs and gossipy tones and give it to us straight. It doesn’t need to be juvenile to be fun. Also feel free to retire some of those old “women are like this and men are like that” clichés—yes, women like shoes. Ha ha. Let’s move it along now.

That’s my list—ladies out there, do you have any others to add?

Social media offers businesses a host of ways to connect to their customer base. It’s more than just a buzzword; it shows consumers that you want to be connected to them by more than just a purchase. It shows that you’re technologically savvy, and maybe by extension, smarter and easier to do business with. It reminds people your business exists when they forget. The benefits can be huge if you do it right, but what if you’re too small to have a marketing department and you wind up doing it on your own? How much effort do you wind up having to expend, and what’s the return on your investment?

Let’s start with why it’s worth the effort. I recently was in need of a spare bed for my guest bedroom. I started doing my research online, and quickly wound up at Amazon, which I think is a great site for user-friendliness. I easily found what I was looking for, but the shipping charges were more than I was willing to spend, and I had to have it by the weekend because I had guests coming to town. I shopped around on several other major furniture sites that I knew had locations in my city. If I couldn’t find what I was looking for with a simple keyword search, I abandoned the website pretty quickly and moved on to the next one. I finally wound up on websites for some strictly local companies that had no catalog or search functionality or anything remotely resembling that on their website and wound up having to make phone calls (so old-fashioned!). Their websites were basically a glorified version of their entries in the phone book. I did eventually end up buying from one of them. Well, they got my business, so how exactly did they fail with their $2.00 website and lack of a social media platform?

      1. There were literally DOZENS of other opportunities for someone else to snag my business before I ever found out about this place. If those previous websites hadn’t been so disappointing as well, there’s an excellent chance I’d have purchased somewhere else first. I wound up at my ultimate destination against pretty steep odds.

      2. When making a major purchase or trying new restaurants, I often head first to Facebook and ask for recommendations from my virtual community. Or go to Yelp and look up reviews for places (which I actually did do with a couple of those sites). Those are the easiest places to start the hunt because I’m already on them, so if the mountain comes to my virtual Mohammed, they’ll get all the attention first. When there’s no info there, I start browsing websites.

With that in mind, I think we can safely say that your odds of making a sale are definitely improved if you have a better plan of attack that involves social media. The plan might look something like this:

      A. A robust website that is easily searchable and has the information your customers are looking for (like your prices/rates). This will be the core for everything else you do; all the rest of your social media efforts will lead back to this. Bonus points if you have an email subscription option (and for heaven’s sake, don’t send anyone an email unless they request it through that first). A caution here though: use the email sparingly—this does not need to be a daily thing! Extra bonus points if you have a blog on your site that shows the human side of your business, and mega-bonus points if it’s actually entertaining and informative.

This piece will take the most time to maintain, and you may be tempted just to stick with that and skip the rest since this will be a fair amount of work. But you’d be missing out on some opportunities.

      B. The Facebook page. This should be a complement to your website, but it also accesses people that your website can’t. The great thing about a Facebook page is that it’s easy to set up, but don’t make the mistake of letting it languish after that; get in there, spend some time on making “friends”, and make regular updates (though not so many that people hide you from their news feed). If you change something on your website, let people know about it on Facebook. Got a coupon or special deal or contest? Put it up there with a link to your site. Add a new photo every once in a while, update it a couple of times a week to keep things relevant, and you’re on your way to creating an actual community with your customer base.

      C. The Twitter feed. The ubiquitous companion to the Facebook page. Since so many people are on both, if you don’t catch them on one, you’ll have the other to help cover your bases. It’s a good idea to put things like coupons and special deals on here too because they can be easily passed around.

      D. For the truly advanced, check out how you can incorporate location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. I recently read a great article about how to do this here. Since this functions as a sort of game, offer some reward for people who check in frequently and become “mayors,” etc.

So you’ve set up all of these things, and now it’s a question of keeping them maintained. Focus first on your website. When something new happens on the website, announce it on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else you can think of. If something important happens at your business, think about how you’re going to let everyone else know. Since you’re reaching a much larger audience than you normally would, you’ll be reaping the benefits of all this increased exposure. And hopefully, you’ll be able to maintain these things without undue burden as you’re trying to keep your smaller business running.

OK, got my morning beverage, time to get to work. Oh wait, first I’m going to throw on some Pandora. Hmm, says something about Facebook…eh, I’ve got a ton of email to read, figure that out later. Oh good, the Killers. Love this song.

Whoa.

Apparently Greg likes this song too. How does Pandora know that Greg and I are connected? Hmm, and what information about what me is going to show up when Greg goes to Pandora?

OK, starting to get a little creeped out, internet.

***

This was my actual reaction upon my first foray into Facebook’s Open Graph. Working where I do, I like to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on out there on the internet, so I had heard a bit about Open Graph. But even after hearing about it, I was not prepared for how unnerving it would be to simply open up Pandora. I love Pandora, but that morning made me wonder if I should even be using it. And if I decide later not to have Pandora connected to Facebook, where do I go about undoing that? And why didn’t anyone ask me if I wanted this to happen in the first place?

Not being asked what I do and don’t want has been a common theme lately. Recently, I ordered some Mother’s Day flowers from a typical website. I SCOURED every page during the process looking for the automatically checked checkbox that says “please bombard me with email every two days about special offers until I am so sick of you I can hardly stand it” (OK, it doesn’t say that, but that is what I see). There was no checkbox. There was no option for it at all. OK cool, maybe I’m lucky and these guys get it and aren’t going to automatically opt me into a bunch of email that I don’t want.

Cue the emails.

Great, now I have to scroll to the very bottom of the page. Click Unsubscribe. Yes, attachments and links are OK, blah blah blah… Click Unsubscribe again on the landing page.

I’ll have to keep this in mind for next Mother’s Day.

Now on the one hand, if I had opted in to the email list and got one at, say Thanksgiving, I might think, “Ooh, since I’m not going to see my grandmother for Thanksgiving, I should maybe send her a bouquet to let her know I’m thinking about her,” then boom, very effective use of email. But sending me stuff two days later? With no new holidays in sight? I smell a lack of restraint, so I better unsubscribe now.

Finally, I went to buy a Camelbak this weekend at a retail store. The store had one of those sign up to get a discount card deals where you get to carry around a plastic card with all of the other discount cards that all of the OTHER stores make you carry around, not to mention the little plastic keychain thingies, and now you can’t even close your wallet or get it back into your purse and at every single store you go to you have to remember if you have the card or not and then try to figure out where in the heck you put it and WHY CAN’T YOU JUST GIVE ME THE $1.62 DISCOUNT???? And sure, you can say no, I don’t want the card. But they never just drop it on the first try. And the next time you walk in here, they’re going to do the hard sell on the card AGAIN so don’t think for a minute that this matter is settled by you already having decided that you don’t want one!

OK, sorry, that was a bit of a rant. But my point is this: I am much more likely to come back to your store if I don’t get asked about the card every time. I’ll even tell my friends about it if I just automatically get the savings without having to submit to junk mail and email and little plastic cards.

And I’d be more likely to sign up for floral updates if I know you’re reminding me about something useful instead of burying me in spam. Do you think I purchase flowers weekly? Then why would I need to hear from you that often?

And I’m a lot more inclined to remember the time you creeped me out on Pandora and completely rewrote my profile without asking me if I was OK with either, Facebook. And no, most people aren’t quitting yet. But we remember all the times you screwed up. We remember every time someone passes along a message urging you to go to your Privacy Settings and turn something off that you never turned on in the first place. We remember every instance of it, we store that away, and one day we’re going to be spending more time figuring out how to turn off things in your application that we don’t like than enjoying the things we do like, and that’s when we leave; is that what you want?

Consider your audience. Put yourself in their shoes. You know how busy you are and how much you wish everything could just be easier and less cluttered? Keep that in mind next time you come up with the next bright idea, and make sure your users have the OPTION to decide what they want from you, and then follow it up by respecting that.