• ONLINE SPIN
    When Media Specialization Becomes Liability
    This week at OMMA New York I participated in the "emerging metrics" panel, moderated by David Smith of Mediasmith. David's an extremely smart guy, and I have the utmost respect for him. His decision to probe new metrics in a practical, media-buying-and-planning campaign context was laudable, especially for an audience more in the mood for quick, actionable takeaways. But the more I thought about the parameters of our discussion, the more it became a problem to me.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Reading From The 'Bottom Up'
    I've been a big fan of newspapers and magazines all of my life, and I've always had a particular fondness for their "letters to the editor" sections. When reading publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly and The Economist, among others, it's not unusual to find letters from literary luminaries, cabinet officials, ex-presidents, Nobel Prize winners and, quite often, the actual subjects of the stories the publications are covering at any moment. How is it that none of these same publications permit real-time comments by sources and principals in the news stories they publish on …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Was There A Silver Bullet In New York This Week?
    This week was OMMA East, held by MediaPost, and MIXX, held by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Both dealt with the ways in which emerging platforms such as social media, mobile and online video can be used to message to the consumer--and both conferences were attended by the same people. Now I'm here to ask the simple question, "Why is everyone looking for the silver bullet?"
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Closing The Digital Brand Sale
    Being in New York for Ad Week is always interesting. Early in the week, the digital advertising conversations I have had seem to be converging around a couple of key areas: widgets and social media. While a lot of the success stories are the same, what's interesting is watching the pitch for digital branding evolve.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Social Activism, Ala None Other Than MTV
    Well, it's Advertising Week in NYC. I'll be joining my comrades at Mediapost's OMMA conference today and tomorrow. One hot topic this year is social media. It's also one I delve into quite often from a work standpoint as well as in writing.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    What Is Influence?
    What is influence? "That's the million dollar question," Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University, and an outspoken critic of influencer and viral marketing, told me a few months back. It was also the ultimate question this week at an Edelman roundtable, where I gathered with a small group of respected thinkers from diverse disciplines to tackle the issue in online environments
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Advertising Week
    For a little fun today, and since I didn't take the time this week to write a more thoughtful column, I thought that I would write about some of the things that, by the end of Advertising Week, we'll be sure we have heard way too much about.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    If Widgets Morph Into Spyware, Bad Things Could Happen
    If you are using widgets, or looking into widgets as a marketing tool, be wary -- because we've been down this road before! Widgets have become the unexpected buzzword of 2007. But I'm realizing that this buzz is eerily similar to the buzz that surrounded desktop applications in the late '90s. Desktop applications and embedded applications became hot -- right up until they became overused and exploited, and morphed into a nasty little term called "spyware."
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Conversational Marketing
    This past week I had the pleasure of attending an amazing conference put on by Federated Media dedicated solely to conversational marketing, a concept I have for some time firmly believed holds the key to the future of effective marketing. While a fixed definition for conversational marketing was never set out during the conference (somewhat intentionally), the basic premise is that market initiatives should no longer be linear. The concept of creating and pushing marketing messages must give way in a fragmented, user-controlled media market to a more iterative approach of marketing by conversation creation, participation and refinement -- and …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Can You Do The Local Motion?
    How do you find most local businesses and services? Well if you are reading this, most of you will say online. Of course, as I have said before, you and I aren't the norm, dear readers -- or are we?
« Previous Entries