Posts Tagged ‘design’
Who Really Won the Big (Marketing) Game?
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009According to Reprise Media, who just released their 5th annual Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard, there were a few ads that not only kept everyone entertained, but also seamlessly integrated themselves with online search marketing and social media.
One of the best in Reprise’s eyes was Cash4Gold.com, who used the universal appeal of Ed McMahon and MC Hammer’s golden parachute pants (as well as prominently featured URL’s) to drive searches to a corporate blog that featured imbedded YouTube videos for users to check out. Pepsi’s adoption of some well-known NBC characters in some of their spots, as well as their integration of Hulu.com and YouTube in others, was also deemed a success. E-Trade.com’s release of “viral video outtakes” through various social media channels prior to the actual airing of their ad did wonders to drum up interest and excitement in the spot.
While we agree for the most part with Reprise Media’s assessment of winners and losers, we’d like to nominate one more campaign to the list of effective and social media friendly Super Bowl advertisements.
SCG Was There: OMMA Social
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009Recently, some members of our Spring Creek Group team went down to San Francisco to mix and mingle with other like-minded social media pros, gain some insight into emerging social media trends, and learn more about what the future of this industry entails.
OMMA Social, a one day conference designed to help guide marketing and media professionals through the social media field, had an attendance of roughly 300 people. In a time when budgets tend to be tight, this impressive turnout shows the huge interest businesses and clients are taking in social media tools and new media channels.
The conference was emceed by Cathy Taylor from MediaPost, and included top name speakers in the online advertising and social media industry such as keynotes Angela Courtin, SVP Marketing, Entertainment & Content, MySpace and Chris Curtin, Vice President, Digital Strategy, Corporate Marketing, Hewlett-Packard Company.
Predictions in Social Media for 2009
Wednesday, December 31st, 20081
As the economy continues to frantically zig and zag, LinkedIn usage will accelerate.
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Twitter will be forced to monetize or it will be eaten and digested by the Fail Whale.
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More and more businesses will realize that social media is an effective way to retain customers.
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Sites that use black-hat SEO will start to look extremely dated as people catch on to more effective ways to get their content indexed by the search engines.
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Newspapers will embrace blogs more fully. This arranged marriage of old and new media will creative dozens of Gawker-like networks slanted toward local content.
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iPhone App Designer will be the next hot job title.
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Effective market research will mean more lurking online and less lurking behind two-way mirrors.
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Successful Mom & Pop shops will tend to be international, online businesses more than local, brick and mortar businesses.
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YouTube comments will continue to make us doubt our faith in humanity.
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It will be a very interesting year.
Back from Federated Media Summit
Friday, October 17th, 2008The Spring Creek Group returned today from the Federated Media Conversational Marketing Summit. We’ll try to punch out a few posts commenting on specific news and insights we heard, but the general takeway is that people are desperate for some way to track the success or failure of Social Media campaigns.So far, the only thing everyone can agree upon is that there is no right formula yet. How much is it worth to have someone watch a YouTube Video? Or to create a new one? In fact, the value of User Generated Content seems to be a slippery crocodile for big agencies to grapple with. What is the incentive for “Big Agency X” to launch a campaign designed to get 25,000 people to create their own ads? While Agency Creative teams are desperately trying to control the message (and the work), there are tons of people with a camera, a laptop, an idea, and now a giant platform to talk from.
All of this makes the ROI argument more relevant. An agency needs to be able to justify why spending $xx,000 to have their NYU Art School guys build a MySpace page or YouTube video is better than the company giving a couple of film school kids a handycam and a credit card. And since there is no way to value the return yet, it’s hard to quantitatively make any kind of argument.
What does this mean for firms who specialize in Social Media? Well quite simply, it means the industry is growing up. People don’t care about ROI on having a salesperson buy someone coffee. But they care if they are going to send her to New York for 4 day conference. ROI only matters when you identify a place you want to spend a lot of “I” in. When that “I” was a few hours of an intern’s time to build a Facebook page or write a blog post, no one cared. But the fact that ROI is becoming so important indicates Social Media is becoming a real line item on the Marketing Budget, not part of the “Other Channels” bucket. And no matter what, that is good for everyone in the space.
What do you think of the Facebook redesign?
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008So, our clients have had some mixed reviews about the new Facebook redesign, and we are curious what you think.
It seems like Facebook is really going out of its way to add more advertising units – and you can’t blame them. After all, clickthrough rates on their current ad units are as close to zero as you can get and still have a pulse, so they need to do something to justify their valuation.
Anyway, let us know what you think about the new look and feel.
