Commentary
Quick, Sign On Here Before The Inc. Dries
- by Staff Report , August 22, 2013
The good news is that “advertising and marketing” companies rank among the fastest-growing on Inc. magazine’s just-released "Inc. 5000" list. The bad news is most of them don’t actually make advertising, they just develop technologies to make money off of it.
With the exception of Trada, the Boulder, CO-based creative crowd-sourcing platform, and Loveland, CO-based digital shop Madwire, all of the top 10, and most of the couple of hundred advertising and marketing firms ranking on the list are “ad tech” companies whose business is optimizing this or getting a greater yield out of that, often without ever truly explaining what the “this” or “that” actually is.
But if you really want to get a sense of where the “New Madison Avenue” is, play around with the list’s geographic filters, and you’ll see it’s not actually on Madison Avenue. Heck, it’s mostly not even in New York City.
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Filtering for New York, to use the parlance of the times, yields 57 of the Inc. 5000 ad/marketing companies.
Optimize the filters for California, and you’ll find 91 ad/marketing firms on the list.
And just because we’re curious, we filtered the ad/marketing category to see how Colorado’s
doing. And let’s just say, there doesn’t appear to be a “Bogusky Factor,” at least not quite yet. There are only 15 Colorado-based firms on the list.
Who Says Media Shops Can't Tell Brand Stories?
Oh yeah, Y&R Chief David Sable does in
MAD’s exclusive Q&A with him today.
Well, despite that, or maybe because of it, some of Madison Avenue’s biggest media shops are hoping to prove him wrong. And they’re enlisting the help of the current state-of-the-art-of-digital-storytelling (not), BuzzFeed. Specifically, Interpublic’s UM unit, and independent media services giant Horizon Media, have begun working with the buzzmeisters to figure out how to feed better stories on behalf of their clients’ brands.
“The program will provide agencies with the tools to create the most shareable branded content and provide solutions for social sharing,” explains BuzzFeed Vice President-Agency Strategy & Industry Development Jonathan Perelman.
While none of the media shops have offered concrete examples of the kinds of brand stories they’ll be telling with BuzzFeed, we can see them now:
“10 Cutest Kitten Photos Devouring The Geico Gecko” (for Horizon’s client)
“5 P
epsi-Endorsing Celebrity Photos Sneaking A Sip Of Coke” (for the UM client)
Or how about Mediapssst’s own listicle:
“2 BuzzFeed Cliches Adopted By Madison Avenue”
Want A First-Mover Advantage? Try Focusing On Movers
That’s the conclusion of a new report from Epsilon that recommends targeting consumers not based on conventional demographics, but on how transient they are. The aptly named, “2013 New Mover Report,” asserts that while demos are fine, a “more intelligent and holistic view of individual consumers can be architected with advanced data overlays,” especially the kind of overlays like “new movers” that Epsilon sells.
If you buy that, you’ll love what Epsilon Senior Vice President of Data Strategy Don Hinman has to say: “When data attributes are correlated and put into broader context, marketers can identify specific consumer characteristics within segments and target in a more meaningful and insightful manner. To drive deeper, long- term engagement, marketers must be able to identify their audiences as well as their needs and ultimately communication relevantly and on a personal level.”
Wait, what did he say?
