by Next Wave Team | Jan 9, 2007 | Ad Agenices in Dayton, OH, Change the world, Differentiating Your Brand, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, How To Select An Ad Agency, Public Relations in the Web 2.0 world
As ludicrous as it may seem, the Dayton Advertising Club, now known as the Greater Dayton Advertising Association, has been threatening to throw The Next Wave out of the organization if we don’t swear some sort of loyalty oath not to advertise.
That’s right- the very organization which is supposed to promote and protect advertising from restrictions and legislation- wants to restrict us from advertising our Websitetology seminar outside their seminars- on a public street.
You can read about it in this post- and see the offending flyer:
http://thenextwave.biz/tnw/?p=170
We have posted copies of the correspondence as PDF’s for you to follow along. Ours were sent on letterhead- with a signature- these are PDF’s of our Word Docs.
We believe the Greater Dayton Advertising Association would do better to endorse our seminar- and teach Ad Club members about building sites that are search friendly and easy to maintain, instead of wasting energy trying to throw us out.
Groucho Marx once said “I wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have me as a member”- and if it wasn’t for our love of the craft of advertising, we probably wouldn’t be a member of the Greater Dayton Advertising Association. Unfortunately, their love of the craft seems to be conditional.
Read the letters below: (PDF’s)
First letter from The Greater Dayton Advertising Association
Dayton Advertising Club Code of Ethics and Conduct
Dayton Advertising Club Standards for Membership
David Esrati respond to The Greater Dayton Advertising Association (July 11, 2006)
The Greater Dayton Advertising Association replies (August 4, 2006)
Letter from The Ethics Committee asking David Esrati to apologize for advertising
The Greater Dayton Advertising Association contact David a second time
The Greater Dayton Advertising Association contact David a third time
The Greater Dayton Advertising Association decide not to revoke Davids membership (January 23, 2007)
by Next Wave Team | Oct 8, 2006 | Brand Relevancy, Change the world, Creativity, Design, Differentiating Your Brand, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising
Dieter Rams was a designer for Braun. Braun made stuff cool before Apple was in existence. Take a look at Apple’s products- and then read this list- and all of a sudden, you understand why the brand is iconic, the positioning is differentiated and that when hardware becomes irrelevant, Apple will still be a force to be reckoned with (at least as long as they can keep a Steve Jobs like visionary in charge).
Dieter Rams / Design Museum Collection : Industrial Designer (1932-) - Design/Designer Information
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.
by Next Wave Team | Sep 15, 2006 | Advertising, Brand Relevancy, Change the world, Creativity, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Hot New Creative Agencies, How To Select An Ad Agency, Marketing & the Web, Practical Marketing 101, Search and Business, Web strategy
Guy Kawasaki once said “Advertising is the plastic surgery of business,: a procedure to make ugly and old products look good” (“Selling the dream”) and it seems that agency types are still looking for new ways to package their same old mojo:
Ernie Schenck Calls This Advertising?: Bruce Bildsten Opens Brew. The Devil Made Him Do It.
Former Fallon CD, Bruce Bildsten, has opened Brew: A Creative Collaborative. Do not call it an ad agency or I will kill you. Brew is what I see as one of a new and emerging class of creative organizations. Says Bruce: “We are reinventing the creative team for the new communications landscape.” And Bildsten should know about new creative landscapes. While at Fallon, he directly oversaw the creation of BMW Films.“Think of Brew as the nation’s first truly unbundled creative shop—where we assemble best-in-class creative, strategy and media on a custom basis for clients,” said Bildsten.
I’m sure Bildsten is hotter than an Iranian nuclear dump- but his differentiation strategy is one of ignorance of the “new communication landscape”- you see the monster in the closet in marketing is search- the Google brand of search- and if we try to find Mr. Bildsten’s firm- well, we’ll end up looking at beer sites- lots of them.With a name like “Bildsten” he could have been like “Esrati”- a unique name for search marketing- but, I named this firm in 1988- in the days when a “Search engine” was a little old gray haired lady called a librarian and you still went to a phone book to look someone up.
I took some flack on Ernie’s site for suggesting that Mr. Bildsten was sounding like a poser on launch of his new endeavor, however I stand by the idea that the customers (marketers/clients in this case) still need to be able to define your “Creative Collaborative” by the standard vocabulary- “Meta data” of “Advertising Agency” in search- instead of forcing people into fumbling to find you.
I haven’t found the site for “Brew” yet- but I can almost bet that it will built with some search evading technology like Flash or a site full of pretty pictures with proper meta data to identify them.
If you do know the url for “Brew”- please add it in the comments.
Note: it’s been found:brew-creative.com
And if you want to see the Press release, it’s here: http://brew-creative.com/brew_press_release.pdf
Note: Dec 10, 2006, almost three months later, site is still under construction. Internet time doesn’t wait 3 months for content.
Note: Feb 8 2007, still waiting for content.
Note: April 13, 2007 it’s up. All Flash. No RSS. Search? 3 whole pages. Will there be new content from the “new” media gurus? Time will tell.
If you are really interested in new ideas for a new economy, but don’t want the same old tacking on the word “new” to the old wisdom of advertising- you are in the right place- The Next Wave in advertising- since 1988, nothing new about us, other than we were doing this long before Bildsten knew what a browser was.
We’re also available to speak to Ad Clubs around the country on the “new technology” of the “new media” of the “web 2.0 world.”
Sure hope this post has enough keywords in it.
by Next Wave Team | Sep 11, 2006 | Advertising, Change the world, Creativity, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, How To Select An Ad Agency
Those Miami based builders of buzz are adding yet another tool to their marketing array- a monograph from Warren Berger called “Hoopla”
They aren’t the first agency to do this, or will they be the last. I can look at our agency bookshelves and see quite a few of these types of books- some more useful than others.
My first experience with these types of books came at my second job in the business- working for Visual Marketing Associates (a very short lived gig). One of the partners had a copy of “Living by Design”- one of Pentagram‘s first of many books they have produced about their work and processes. It was engaging, intelligent and changed my view of how a creative company should approach a clients challenges- from the narrow- solve the problem, to the how do we create the complete WOW factor that Tom Peters later wrote about (Pursuit of Wow! 1994).
I read about wagering fees on results for a campaign for a racetrack in “Chiat/Day, the first 20 years” (now very hard to find)- and Wieden and Kennedy’s pursuit of their first car account in “Where the sucker’s moon” - and realized that even the best agencies still have to stretch to win the big accounts.
Crispin is turning clients away these days, so the question will be, how much of their secret sauce will be revealed, and even if other agencies gain the recipe- will they be able to re-create the phenom that defines Crispin Porter + Bogusky in today’s advertising battlefield?
by Next Wave Team | Aug 27, 2006 | Advertising, Brand Relevancy, Change the world, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Marketing & the Web, Search and Business, Web strategy
Google is perhaps one of the greatest market research tools ever. Want to find out when someone or something peaks the interest of the market- go to Google labs and look at Google trends. Find out when searches peak for what term.
The two major areas where search engines still aren’t very useful are by location and by time, but Google trends is one of the early tools to be able to show us time and place.
Imagine being able to track buzz by market when launching a new campaign- without having to do expensive research- look at the search for Crispin Porter + Bogusky- and see that winning a major account and winning major awards- create a bump in search.
Google Trends: crispin porter bogusky
Want to see if a new campaign started an increase in interest?
Here is the link to Google trends for the word “Pontiac”- remember they ran a campaign asking customers to google them? Well, it seems labor issues and plant closings are more likely to push search than ads asking people to Google you:
Google Trends: Pontiac
This only works for terms with huge search numbers- trying it on my name results in an error message saying not enough search volume to display graphs- and search Chiat Day- gives a graph- with no data points- but does give location stats.
Tools like this will become increasingly relevant to agency compensation structures- if your campaign doesn’t increase search, or site traffic- it’s not doing its job.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jul 27, 2006 | Advertising, Change the world, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Marketing & the Web, Practical Marketing 101, Search and Business, Web strategy
This “news section” of our site is a blog about advertising- it’s our way of letting clients and potential clients what’s on our minds when it comes to advertising. It also gets us to the top of Google and improves our search results and brings a lot of visitors to our site. Can’t beat that.
We are students of advertising- we pay attention to what is happening in the business. We believe it’s essential for us to know what leading thinkers are thinking about, who did what campaign, what the strategy is, and if it’s working. To do that- we read other advertising blogs- and often, we’re disappointed- not in the content- but in the tools they use.
Web 2.0 depends on “building community” with your readers. That’s what the little comments section at the bottom of each post is all about. It’s a way to become part of a discussion- and to build connections with people who share your interests. Unfortunately, many of the ad blogs don’t include tools to keep those conversations going- and it frustrates me no end.
Example: Ernie Schenck, co-founder of Pagano Schenck & Kay, winner of all the big ad awards, and now a freelance creative, has an insightful blog Ernie Schenck calls this advertising? He has a ton of bright readers, who comment often- however, Ernie uses a hosted TypePad solution- and has no way of notifying commenters that there have been additional comments on their thread. In WordPress, this is the subscribe to comments plug-in, and it can help your comment count (user generated content) grow considerably- fostering long discussions on a subject (we have one post with 109 comments at last count). Alas, Ernie is another great creative- with minimal understanding of the technology. Room 116 at VCU suffers from this same issue.
Same can be said of Mark Silveira’s “Ordinary Advertising” blog- again, using a non-wordpress platform, the site almost never is able to post comments without an e-mail to Mark. He doesn’t post that often, but I keep it in my feed reader because I liked his book “Ordinary advertising – and how to avoid it like the plague.” WordPress has an excellent plug-in called “Spam Karma II” that allows you to make sure you aren’t being comment spammed- and post immediately (without moderation) to keep your site discussions humming without requiring your attention to every comment (you can still blacklist bad words, or go back in and edit comments easily).
Some sites use Blogger- like “The ranch”- the University of Texas ad blog. Blogger ticks me off because to comment- they want you to set up your blogger blog. Just like good advertising, a good blog back-end shouldn’t force you to do something you don’t want to do (or make it difficult to contact you).
Luckily- all these sites can switch to WordPress- since there is a built in import and translate function for Blogger, Dotclear, LiveJournal, Moveable type and Text Pattern- there is also a way to import via RSS – which could be used for importing from some other arcane solution. See more about importing on the codex.
While there are successful blogs using tools other than WordPress- the key to good open source software is the size of the development community. The bigger the community- the more developers, bug testers, bug squashers, theme developers, plug-in writers etc. WordPress seems to be the technology with momentum- and, it also allows for a pretty simple translation to Drupal if you need your site to do much more (although the commenting functions in Drupal still don’t work as well as WordPress- see D’Arcy Normans site for info on making the change).
WordPress also has an amazingly simple, yet powerful interface- and allows for multiple authors on the same blog- with different levels of access- making it a great tool for any agency to get their entire staff into the content creation process. We’ve been so successful with results for our clients with WordPress that we now offer a seminar called Blogosopher, but soon to be rechristened “Websitetology” (due to the Midwest’s fear of the word “blog” it’s not considered a serious business tool by the local Luddite community). We’re available to come speak to your Ad Club chapter with an abbreviated version of the seminar- and/or to give the seminars (a basic and advanced course- each 3.5 hours long) to your membership- contact us for details.
Using the right tools to blog is like using the right media to reach your audience. The creative types who have taken the leap to use a blog to communicate their message to the masses are all smart people- just not all are tech savvy. Hopefully, this post will lead them to a better blog- and a larger audience.
Comments anyone?
