• ONLINE SPIN
    Welcome Back, Tom Deierlein
    Good news! Tom Deierlein, COO of Dynamic Logic, who was wounded by a sniper while on active military duty in Baghdad, is coming back to work. Read excerpts from his latest letter to family and friends.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Going Vertical !!!
    With the entire buzz being generated through numerous consolidations and mergers, it's interesting to witness the trend towards vertical ad networks and away from the previous model of broad-reach, broad-targeted networks.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    What The Social Media OS Strategy Means To Advertisers
    Facebook has fired the starting gun signaling the race to social media's next evolution, gaining a significant edge in the race. The open call is for droves of driven, innovative and funded entrepreneurs to develop feature sets and functionality to improve the quality of Facebook life, rather than focusing their collective efforts on building Facebook competitors. I guess that's the nice thing about being the one that fires the starting gun; you can give yourself a nice head start.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Six Months Into Fatherhood: What's Changed?
    While most in our business have been allocating attention to all the digital media acquisitions this past week, I've had my mind on something else: my first child, Julian, turned six months old on Monday. I'll go easy on the sappy details of my ultra-proud reminiscing, and focus on a number of key areas where fatherhood has changed me as a work-obsessed exec in the hectic media and marketing business.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    The End of "No-Man's" Land in Online Advertising
    What a month. Over the past four and one-half weeks, we've seen more than $12 billion in announced acquisitions in the online advertising industry. Lots of people are trying to understand what is going on and why this is happening now. I've been in the media business for the better part of the past 30 years, with almost one-half of that time working in the Internet and new media. While the pace and size of these deals may seem a bit dizzying to some, I think that there are some pretty clear market signals being expressed in these deals. Here …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Do You 'Think Different'?
    Back in the late '90s, Apple launched an elegant campaign which asked the audience to "Think Different." This omnipresent campaign was beautiful in its simplicity and represents one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time purely for the message that it sent -- that ingenuity and creativity are what is rewarded in life.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    The Digital Media Empire
    The death of print news is inevitable. Even with the timeline still very much in question, news printed on dead trees with ink that will come off on your hands, containing stories you'll never read, or interesting ones that were restricted by arbitrary print deadlines, already out of date in an age of instantaneous digital information access, sooner or later will go the way of the VHS. So what? If traditional media empires were really only differentiated by their logistical ability to distribute a physical good by a certain time every morning, then FedEx and UPS would have put News …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    What People Are Saying About Word Of Mouth
    They say there's nothing better than word of mouth (WOM) buzz. However, most digital advertisers and marketers don't know where to begin when considering WOM. I'm keeping a close eye on some recent studies that came out. Let me first say, they were a bummer.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Why All Marketing People Should Blog
    While I don't label myself a blogger -- it's something I do, not something I am -- I've concluded that it's one of the most important and enriching activities any marketer, especially a digital one, can pursue. Why? Blogging is one of the best ways for a person to internalize and sensitize one's self to the essence of marketing. Because when you blog, you essentially expose your ego and subject it to the most important and intense dimensions of marketing, media, communications, networks and individual relationships.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Local Focus
    I've spent a lot of time over the past 15 years working with local media companies, particularly newspaper companies, as they built and scaled their digital media businesses and as they tried to make themselves more attractive platforms for national advertisers. This week I attended Centro's Local Media Publisher Summit 2007, which included a number of panels of advertisers, agencies and service providers talking about how much they want to move more money to local online media -- and second, about how many challenges they face in making it work.
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