Yahoo has unveiled an updated version of its Yahoo Mail service for the Web, as well as Windows 8 and the iPhone and Android. Introduced in a blog post by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, the new Yahoo Mail is more streamlined and user-friendly. “We’ve redesigned the new version of Yahoo! Mail with speed in mind -- getting through your emails is faster than ever before,” wrote Mayer. “We’ve also made your inbox more intuitive and easier to navigate, allowing you to focus on what matters most: your messages.” She added that Yahoo Mail would also have a more consistent look and feel across devices. The new apps are available for download now and most Yahoo Mail users will begin to see the changes over the next few days. Mayer noted that the redesign was based on input from users asking for fewer distractions in their email and the ability to log in quickly. The facelift for Yahoo Mail, long one of the company’s most popular offerings, reflects her stated commitment to maintaining the strength of Yahoo’s core properties that also include areas like the home page, Yahoo Sports, and News as well as search. Yahoo Mail underwent its last major revamp in May 2011, when it introduced an upgrade designed to make the service twice as fast, safer from spam and more compatible with social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.
In a surprising development for the burgeoning real-time media marketplace, advertisers and agencies now have the ability to programmatically target and place ads online based on content that users tag as being most relevant to themselves and others. As part of its Programmatic Advertising Platform, ad tech developer RadiumOne is enabling “hashtag targeting.” “Basically, we’re just intelligently going out and targeting what people are already having a conversation about,” says Gurbaksh Chahal, CEO of RadiumOne. “If McDonald’s wants they can target people who hashtag #McDonald’s, or anyone who tags #burgers or #fries. They can even target #hungry.” Initially, Chahal says the hashtag targeting will be available via RadiumOne’s own social media platform Via.Me -- which currently reaches about 11 million users per month -- but over time, he says RadiumOne hopes to integrate with other networks that enable users to hashtag, including Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Chahal says the concept makes sense for real-time media-buying, because users are hashtagging what’s relevant to them and sharing it with others in real-time. By enabling marketers to target based on hashtags, RadiumOne is effectively borrowing a page from search marketing, and RadiumOne Vice President-Marketing Doug Chavez says the advertisers and agencies will likely develop similar approaches to keyword and key term targeting, albeit via social media. “Take a brand like Meow Mix. If users are updating pictures of their cat and hashtagging it ‘purrrr,’ they can target cat owners by targeting the hashtag ‘purrrr.” Chahal says that based on RadiumOne’s initial user testing, “clickthrough rates go up” when brands target ads based on user hashtags, which he says makes sense, because consumers are effectively tagging what’s relevant to them by using hashtags. He says it will likely take some time before the ad industry figures out how to apply the concept in targeting, but he believes it will ultimately expand the number of segments a brand can target, because hashtags can be both explicitly and implicitly related to brands. “Part of our job on social is that there is a lot of noise out there, and we have to do a better job of creating better signals for targeting people. We think hashtags are one of them,” Chahal says.
PARK CITY, Utah -- Big Data opens huge opportunities for email marketers to better target consumers. Do consumers mind? In some businesses at least, customers may even be enthusiastic if the personalized information collected gives them some value in return.At CheapAir.com, Greg Samson, the vice president of marketing, says: “We've found that the most data-driven, potentially scary messages that result from following people are the messages our customers and our subscribers react the most positively to.”Speaking at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit on Tuesday, Samson added that travel is a very personal activity, and that messages are “driven by data … but they seem to be coming from a person who has just reached out to this customer to help them.” (CheapAir competes in the online travel booking space.)Erin Levzow, director of e-commerce and interactive marketing at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, said customers appreciate staff knowing their preferences and making them a spa appointment or directing them to a favored slot machine.While she said it is important not to get “too weird and creepy for people, they really like that -- they feel welcome.” Levzow joined Samson on a Big Data panel and mentioned that the casino industry has mounds of data from online hotel bookings to loyalty cards, which offers opportunities if it can be harnessed. “If we don’t connect all that data and all those touchpoints, I’m not doing the best job I can [in] targeting that customer,” she said. Big Data has gotten ample media play recently, noting the opportunities it offers. According to Rapleaf CEO Phil Davis, the potential is there to find the “the holy grail of one-to-one marketing, getting the right message to the right person at the right time in the right way … at a cost that doesn’t cost more than the actual conversion.” Davis believes Big Data will yield more automated analytic engines to help process the data coming with volume, velocity and variety as never seen before. Effective engines need to isolate “the data fields that moves the needle the most,” he said. He added that third-party data can be immensely effective. Rapleaf clients tend to spend between $3 and $20 to acquire an email address. Though they generally don’t know how to take advantage swiftly, Davis said data “will allow you to create much better first impressions.”
What do media buyers make of “native advertising” -- that controversial form of customized online ad integration? Some 49% plan to incorporate it into their buys next year, according to new data from the native ad specialists at Solve Media. Although spending levels vary, two our of five media buyers surveyed by Solve say they have allocated more than 10% of their 2013 budget to native advertising. Making those transactions possible, nearly 20% of online publishers said they are likely to add a native advertising option to their sites next year, according to Solve. Solve’s flagship product Type-In lets advertisers survey consumers' interactions with ads by measuring how effectively they remember the brand's messages to complete a transaction. This past summer, the start-up debuted a new product that replaced CAPTCHAs with select brand logos, which then asks site visitors to type in a word or phrase that they most closely associate with the featured brand. The combination of the two products put Solve Media “in a position to be one of the most important branding vehicles on the Web,” stated Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray at the time. According to critics, however, native advertising is difficult to scale, and can conflict with publishers’ ethical standards. "Native monetization" -- as investor Fred Wilson described the model at OMMA Global last September -- refers to ads that are "unique and native to the experience" of a particular publisher. In its defense, Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media, said: “The industry talks about 'serving' ads and in a very real sense, I feel they should 'serve' the consumer.” After surveying 800 media buyers, agency creatives, online publishers, venture capitalists, private equity firms and angel investors, Solve found that nearly 60% of agency media buyers consider native advertising to be “very important” or “extremely important” going into 2013. Buyers based in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco will spend the most on native advertising, Solve found. More than half of the venture capitalists, private equity firms and angel investors that invest in media and ad technology said they are likely to very likely to invest in companies that sell native advertising in 2013.
Havas Digital is mapping out a strategy to support content attribution in which data provides information on the type of message in an ad that prompts consumers to make a purchase or complete an action. Messaging, creative ads and content have not caught up with technology and targeting, according to Michael Kaushansky, SVP of analytics and insights at Havas Digital. While technology can identify a consumer on a Web site visited milliseconds ago, and serve an ad, the ad will not add anything personal to the experience. "The industry needs to rethink ways to use data, from retroactive to proactive analytics," he said. The industry has solved the issues of serving the ad at the correct time to the perfect customer, but not serving the right message. Proactive analytics focuses on defining actionable insights to provide a better experience for consumers. Kaushansky said the model will roll out in pieces. It means analyzing the data to understand how to invest in media that prompts consumers to take action, not just bring awareness to the brand, then measuring the activity. Rather than using channels like display and search marketing, the strategy relies on content and the same data stored in data management platforms. Kaushansky points to email marketing and how a brand might tie recurring purchases into making ads more personal. Someone buys fish oil from a vitamin store, which lasts about 30 days, and typically gets a personalized replenishment reminder about 21 days into the cycle. Less than a handful of clients have moved to this model. One unnamed client experienced a 93% reduction in CPM by reducing the frequency and improving the targeting of the communication across the campaign. Performance improved by 15% over three months. "With clients more heavily leveraged in the real-time bidding space, such as a trading desk, you can probably get results in less than 15 days," Kaushansky said. The thinking aims to address specific customer issues that improve the experience and not just provide data dashboards or attribution modeling. For the most part, attribution models are useless, Kaushansky said, because the data will tell marketers the lift, but won't make findings actionable. Havas Digital will build out technology to automate parts of the process. The group has already automated content and search attribution and media planning daily insights, as well as constructing a real-time dashboard.
Facebook’s much-publicized effort to ramp up mobile advertising showed results in the third quarter, when it reported 14% of its $1.26 billion in revenue came from ads run on mobile devices. But that doesn’t mean campaigns always extend seamlessly to handheld devices. The transition can be challenging when marketers run branded apps on their Facebook pages to help spur viral sharing, comments and other social actions. around a promotion or broader ad effort. Without optimizing for mobile screens, users may need to pinch and zoom the page to make it viewable or get stuck with a dead link. In a blog post last month, Facebook ad partner and developer Friend2Friend highlighted glitches some of the largest brands have encountered translating Facebook apps to the mobile side. It pointed to the “What Can Your Coke Become” app on Coca-Cola’s Facebook page. Fans who clicked on contest videos were taken to a blank error page, according to friend2friend. Similarly, Converse’s Rubber Tracks and “Warrior Remix Context” apps on its Facebook page generated updates in fans’ mobile news feeds that linked to sites requiring “significant pinching and zooming. Following a link from its own Timeline for the shoe brand’s “Rock Your School” app led to an error message. Friend2Friend CEO Roger Katz suggests many brands have a lot of catching up to do to make their Facebook presence more mobile-friendly. “A third of [Facebook] users are trying to engage on these brand pages and in these branded apps on smartphones,” he said. “If a third of those experiences are failing, that’s a sorry state of mobile engagement.” To help bridge the gap between the desktop and mobile, the company has released an upgraded version of its social marketing platform that includes tools for running campaigns across platforms. They include a self-serve system allowing brands to create mobile-optimized Web content and apps once on run simultaneously on PCs and mobile devices. It also lets marketers combine social campaigns in a single, standalone app that can be promoted through various channels, including the Facebook news feed, email, Twitter and QR codes. The platform automatically builds a mobile-friendly “SmartLink” and accompanying printable QR code for driving traffic to brand executions built by Friend2Friend. As a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, the company offers publishing, analytics and management tools. For clients Outside magazine, Build-Bear-Workshop, SmartWool and New Belgium Brewing, it has developed a mobile-optimized presence on Facebook. About 60% of the social network’s 1 billion users are accessing it via mobile. Friend2Friend says its social apps on Facebook mobile have increased 450% since the spring, while mobile “Likes” have increased 500% to client brand pages from mobile fans. But overall, “brands haven’t made the leap to taking the experiences they have in environments like Facebook and bringing them so they’re effectively presented in mobile,” said Katz.
PARK CITY, Utah -- A hallmark of the Obama campaign’s email program was its non-stop emphasis on testing. On Oct. 17, it sent out messages to 166 segments that day and 84 were A/B tests, whether with subject lines, time of day, messaging, etc. Toby Fallsgraff, the email director for Obama’s 2012 reelection effort, said the pursuit of innovation continued to avoid stale tactics. “Novelty can be highly effective, it can also be highly fleeting and so our mantra was test and re-test,” he said. The efforts worked. More than $500 million was raised online via 4.5 million donors averaging $53 a donation. “We let our supporters design the program we were running,” Fallsgraff said in a keynote address at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit. “So, when anybody complained about how much email they got or why are you asking us for this money, you guys said this was fine with you. That was our whole approach. We optimized everything. The program was designed around what people told us they wanted.” Fallsgraf added that the subject lines, which may have felt out of place in a presidential campaign, were enormously important. One from President Obama saying “I will be outspent” performed well enough that an email with the same message, but different subject line, raised half as much money. But one subject line remained a star performer. “Our go-to champion subject line was ‘hey’ -- especially from the president,” Fallsgraff said. “It was a very casual approach. We figured that I send emails with the subject line ‘hey’ three or four times a week, why can’t the president?” Fallsgraff said “light swearing” also worked well such as “Hell yea, I like Obamacare,” which came from David Axelrod, a campaign strategist. The campaign sent emails out from a range of people, stretching from the president to campaign manager Jim Messina to finance director Rufus Gifford. “The one guiding light was being different and standing out. And that’s why we didn’t want our emails to sound like any other political campaigns out there,” he said. “We wanted emails to be plausible.” Fallsgraff said the reelection campaign used the 2008 email list of Obama supporters. It sent them messages with talking points to lobby friends and others to help reelect the president. The goal was to make them feel part of the team That concept was ramped up as Election Day neared. Messages to list members were focused on getting friends and family to the polls. A particularly effective fund-raising tactic was building a segment tabbed “quick donors,” where the campaign stored payment information for people, who could give more with a simple email click. Fallsgraff calls this technique a fund-raising “game-changer.” (Another memorable tactic was the chance to enter "Dinner with Barack" contests.) Email segmentation testing confirmed that donors did not mind that the campaign acted on past contribution information. “People liked that we knew their past activity. Thanking folks for a recent donation or for signing the president’s birthday card, that made people more likely to give again,” Fallsgraf noted. The email team was housed within the campaign’s digital department, of 200 staffers. The email group was responsible for all digital copy that emerged from the Chicago office, whether distributed via email, online platforms, SMS, social media, blogs or the official Obama campaign site. About 18 to 22 people were dedicated to email eventually. Four worked fully on social media. The campaign’s digital analytics team played a key role in what Fallsgraff calls “ the most data-driven program in political history.”
The popular virtual-pet app Mobbles routinely gathers email addresses and other data from children without first attempting to obtain their parents' consent, the privacy group Center for Digital Democracy alleges in a complaint filed on Tuesday with the Federal Trade Commission. The group is asking the FTC to investigate whether the app -- available through iTunes and Google Play -- violates the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. That law prohibits operators of Web sites aimed at children from knowingly collecting personally identifiable information from users younger than 13 without their parent's permission. The Mobbles app, designed for children ages 4 and up, features a variety of virtual pets that players collect and care for. Mobbles, which only became available to the public in May, is monetized through in-app purchases of virtual currency. The complaint alleges that Mobbles unlawfully collects a host of personal data from children. For instance, Mobbles allegedly provides virtual currency and in-game coupons to children who disclose their email addresses in order to subscribe to a newsletter. Children also are asked to share their GPS data with Mobble for one of the game's features, according to the complaint. "Mobbles makes no attempt to provide direct notice to parents and offers no opportunity for parents to opt out of further use of their children’s information," the complaint alleges. "The newsletter sign-up page does not even ask for a parent’s contact information." Mobbles co-founder Alex Curtelin tells Online Media Daily that the company doesn't sell any data to third parties and retains as little data as possible. "We don't store any location-related data," he says. "We don't need to store it for our game to work." He also says that the company uses players' emails for two purposes: to resend their passwords if they forget them, and to reach players who opt in a weekly newsletter. The complaint comes one day after the FTC criticized developers for failing to inform parents about the data collection practices of apps. The FTC said it planned to investigate whether app developers are violating COPPA.
Ads featuring video and rich media as well as location-based units are helping drive demand and increased value for mobile advertising. That’s according to a new report from mobile exchange Nexage analyzing trends and activity on its network in the second half of 2012. The company reports a 24% monthly increase in ad spending from May to October in its real-time bidding (RTB) marketplace, which handles 20 billion impressions a month and boasts more than 200 buyers. Lifting spending are holiday season campaigns driving in-store sales as well as m-commerce. Nexage points out that the increased buying activity comes from a broad base of sources, including DSPs, ad networks, app advertisers, online media companies and agencies. Higher-value ad formats in particular are drawing buyers. Nexage noted a 30% per month increase in demand for location-enabled ads as marketers focus on local and hyper-local campaigns. Likewise, publishers using the exchange are seeing a 33% monthly rise in location-based impressions. Separately, publishers are offering more rich media and video ad placements, capitalizing on growing adoption of smartphones and tablets, with the latter providing a more conducive platform for video ads. That push has helped to increase rich media and video ad impressions 19% per month, with those ad types now accounting for 26% of exchange traffic. Growing use of both location-related and rich media units is also helping to boost ad pricing, with average eCPMs up 44% from the second quarter to the third quarter. Location-focused ads command premiums of two to five times average CPMs, while those for rich media/video ads are five to ten times higher, according to Nexage. Mobile RTB made up 26% of all mobile ad spending, with that proportion doubling over the last six month on 37% monthly growth. RTB auctions increased 33%, while bids per auction were up 96% in the same period. Nexage expect more aggressive strategies from brands and publishers will lead to accelerating mobile ad growth next year.
New NBCUniversal ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino has made some additional staff changes to those made some weeks ago.Scott Schiller, executive vice president of digital ad sales for NBCUniversal, will take on an expanded role, including overseeing digital ad sales for nbc.com, usa.com, bravotv.com, oxygen.com, syfy.com, accesshollywood.com, E! Online, g4tv.com, stylenetwork.com as well as Fandango, Daily Candy, Television Without Pity and Comcast’s xfinity.com.Previously, Schiller was executive vice president of digital advertising sales for NBCUniversal entertainment & digital networks and integrated media.Krishan Bhatia, executive vice president of digital strategy and operations, will also gain more responsibilities -- overseeing ad sales strategy, operations and account management for the company’s digital platforms. He had been executive vice president of digital strategy and operations for the entertainment and digital networks and integrated media of NBCUniversal.Now Barry Fischer will become executive vice president of sales analytics for NBCUniversal. He had been executive vice president of market strategy since January 2011.Earl Marshall is now executive vice president and CFO of ad sales. He had been senior vice president of sales solutions, overseeing NBCUniversal’s ad sales systems and operations. Former Turner Broadcasting executive Mike Mayer has been appointed senior vice president of sales solutions.John Shea, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of integrated media for NBCUniversal, will join the advertising sales division to overseeing strategy and creative for cross-portfolio ad deals.Schiller, Bhatia, Fischer, Marshall, and Mayer will report to Linda Yaccarino, president of advertising sales, NBCUniversal. Shea will report to Yaccarino and Lauren Zalaznick, NBCUniversal’s Chairman, Entertainment & Digital Networks and Integrated Media.Last month, Yaccarino made senior executives changes to cable, news and digital areas. This follows her promotion to head up all TV and digital related advertising sales activity in September.
By tuning out East Coast chatter and conventional thinking, Digitaria creates digital designs that are as useful as they are beautiful. Daiga Atvara talks fast, and from her cadence, you just know she is saying something important, so you press the phone hard to your ear, try to block out the Madison Avenue noise outside your window (and in a way, that's just what Madison Avenue is to Atvara -- noise) and listen. She’s excited, and passionately tells you about design, art, clients and culture, speaking about them in her Latvian accent as if they were one and the same, because to her they are. Although you can see Madison Avenue covered in snow and grime outside your window, if you listen closely enough, you’ll soon find yourself transported to the San Diego headquarters of Digitaria, the agency Atvara cofounded some 15 years ago, at which she serves as chief creative director.In 1997, San Diego wasn’t the first place to come to mind when scouting locations in which to establish a world-class digital agency. In fact, it wouldn’t even make the list of usual suspects where New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston reign supreme and whose markets have traditionally been flooded with fresh raw talent ready to claw its way to the top. But Atvara didn’t need claws — she is a towering talent — and it was only natural that when she cofounded Digitaria with current CEO Dan Khabie, the agency would ascend rapidly.From its inception, Digitaria has always been design-minded. Of course many digital agencies have good design on the brain, but what makes Digitaria stand out is that their approach to design is nearly indistinguishable from their approach to any other facet of a campaign. Design is just as integral a part of a campaign as, say, storytelling or media placement. Until late 2010, Digitaria operated as an independent agency with an impressive client roster including GE, Sony and Under Armour. It was acquired by WPP's JWT that September, with the intention of keeping Digitaria independent, while allowing it to solidify its much-deserved reputation as a major force in the digital space. Digitaria’s client roster reads like a who’s who of the business world, with clients from the NFL to Experian to Subway, working within a wide range of verticals ranging from sports to luxury to non-profits.The agency’s blockbuster work this year, though, came from two clients that seem to stand in stark opposition to each other — at least where target audience is concerned — Petco and Rolex. The success of these two campaigns is further proof that the agency understands how to captivate any demographic, whether it’s tens of millions of pet owners, or the elite who can afford to drop five figures on a watch. For both, the agency’s carefully crafted efforts convey the same message: you need me.“The definition of great design is making people care and teaching them something. Whatever makes sense to the people is what should matter,” says Atvara. And Digitaria did just that with the campaigns, creating beautiful experiences with which consumers could both identify and interact. Of course no good design work, or any good work for that matter, gets done without a like-minded set of players all working towards a common goal. And that common goal is what unites Digitaria’s tight-knit community of employees. It may be a cliche, but it’s a cliche for good reason: At this company, your coworkers are really family — that is, family without the bickering and power plays. “The employees do a lot together outside work — sports teams, outdoor days, movie screenings, Padres games, holiday parties, bike trips, poker night,” explains Sarah Kotlova, group account director, “some of them officially sanctioned and put together by the agency, some just organized by employees who like each other.”But don’t let the fact that employees forge personal relationships and spend time with one another outside of work make you think the work doesn’t always come first. “Digitaria is collaborative and people work very hard here when we’re under the gun, but they also know how to let go when things aren’t as tight,” Kotlova assures.Nurturing its California vibeMaybe the Southern California sun is responsible for softening the edges of Digitaria’s work style, or perhaps more laid-back creatives are drawn to the area. No matter the reason, it’s clear that Digitaria’s San Diego location has shaped the company’s culture.“What does it mean that we are from here?” Atvara ponders, “We have the West Coast mentality. We have this pioneering spirit of doing things in an exploratory way. San Diego forced us to be pioneers. The tech drive — there is something unknown here that hasn’t been discovered, yet that shapes us. It makes us think unconventionally — to survive and make us who we are.” It’s that mentality that also shapes Digitaria on a more tangible level with regards to day-to-day operations. “Digitaria is a very entrepreneurial company. Once you prove you know what you’re doing,” Kotlova says, “you get a lot of leeway and freedom. It’s a very SoCal place, people are laid back but coolly confident, and egomaniacs don’t last long here.”Digitaria’s approach to storytelling also reflects their unconventional culture. For Atvara and team, campaigns should be about the consumer’s needs. And when you think about it, it seems logical that an agency would rather tell a story that consumers want to hear rather than forcing a narrative.“We need to figure out what people want,” Atvara explains, “Making things people want is bigger than making people want things. We go from there and make relevance around it. Experience design will become more and more relevant.”It’s not surprising that a different approach to campaigns arises from creating things people want. But, what people want the most, Digitaria has found, is great storytelling, even if that means thinking about the media and strategy later. “We have a hard time working in the traditional sense: ‘here is our media strategy, banners, then storytelling,’” says Atvara, “For us, the media comes after the storytelling.”The power of doing it all in-houseThis approach to storytelling first isn’t hard to accomplish at Digitaria, given that all work is done in-house at this full service agency. “We produce almost everything in-house,” says Kotlova. “When that happens, inspiration can become a product itself — the idea is overseen to fruition by the very people who designed it. That’s very rare in the business. And it’s the biggest selling point for Digitaria. Our tech department can make the ideas our creative department comes up with a reality.”Armed with one of the strongest in-house production teams in the industry, Digitaria is able to take on a wide range of clients, and even bring some back into the fold, as was the case when Petco recently approached the agency.“Petco was one of Digitaria’s earliest clients, but we had parted several years ago,” says Kotlova, “The agency’s recent run of good creative, however, brought them back into our orbit, and our creative for Petco has earned all sorts of kudos for ‘bringing the fun back’ in their digital communications, via gameification and more playful digital work.” “You can’t learn anything if you don’t ask why we are doing this and what does it mean,” Atvara says. “Petco made us think differently.”It wasn’t just Petco that noticed Digitaria’s solid creative design work. Luxury watchmaker Rolex took note and, in turn, came knocking. For Rolex, Digitaria brought the luxury brand into the digital age. “Rolex has been a blockbuster for us, and we’ve made great strides invigorating their digital creative, to the point that some of our digital has now crossed over into print advertising as well,” says Kotlova.“Before it started working with Digitaria, Rolex thought digital marketing seemed too transitory for the luxury brand, but we’ve managed to bring the luxury of creative craft to the brand’s digital work — even in a simple thing like a banner ad, we have added working watches, which tell time,” says Kotlova. Atvara’s thoughts on digital design come from a very practical standpoint, as always, and rely on people — the consumers — as the focus: “It’s almost product development thinking when you do design in digital. How do you want people to use it in the end? Even on the campaign level, it’s important to think that way.” The automatic watches’ iconic sweeping second hands dovetail nicely into Atvara’s views. Spark some creativity and nostalgia, an experience, if you will, but make it useful. Always make it useful. Atvara puts it more simply: “What is the point of design? To make the usable product beautiful.”“Our goal has been to create immersive experiences, like the banner ad and the Rolex YouTube channel, which is designed to be a brand experience, not just a collection of videos,” notes Kotlova. With Digitaria’s triumphant foray into the luxury space, the agency proved that it could successfully tackle, and make profitable, any vertical it delved into. One of Digitaria’s most widely celebrated campaigns this year was for Invisible Children. Remember Kony 2012? Digitaria made a huge splash with the initiative, and the award-winning lra Crisis Tracker was applauded throughout the industry. After the world saw this campaign change lives, Digitaria realized it needed to hone in on its central branding, tightening and strengthening the message. Though the media uproar may have softened, Digitaria is still as invested as ever in the message.“We continue working with Invisible Children and defining their work and narrowing who they are,” says Atvara. She notes that non-profit work also serves to empower the agency’s employees: “[Non-profit work is] more creative and also anchors [our staff] mentally to give a perspective of how incredibly powerful knowledge is — that our knowledge on how to sell shoes can make a real difference in the world. That’s empowering to our employees. They allow us to be more innovative. We pledge to have two non-profits a year. We are forced to be creative with very limited budgets.”As for Digitaria’s future, Atvara has big plans. “This year has been about really innovative marketing work and entering luxury markets,” she says. Next year, though, will be about “diversifying in any sense. In all the verticals — luxury, auto. Another thing is we want to grow bigger in all aspects — to grow out of the space. We want insights into what that means in the markets. As a service, we want to diversify so we have a really diverse view of problems we solve. Really embracing different problems and bringing truth with technology.”Consider this from Digitaria’s Web site: “The Digitaria brand was named after a star that nobody knew existed because its light reflected upon another star to make it appear shining and twinkling more brightly.” Down on Madison Avenue the horns honk as the traffic picks up, and the ad men and women, bundled in wool and cashmere, file out of their offices and into buses, taxis and subways and vanish into the East Coast ether. But look west. Conjure up some childhood wonder and imagination. Look at the light from the setting sun. Imagine that light is being reflected east by a team in San Diego, still hard at work, with entirely different dreams.