Creative Media Experience

What is creative media experience? Well for me it is the future of digital marketing. No marketing really works efficiently or with impact when conducted in a silo. For me the 'ahh ha' moment is when creative + media + smart, intuitive interactive user experience work together to delivery a truly integrated marketing campaign. More on this soon...

My Wordle

Simple and to the point....this is my wordle of my blog. I guess its obvious as to what I think is the most important element in digital marketing....

Social Networking is Like Real Estate

A good friend of mine who works in 'digital land' made the most fantastic observation yesterday. She said

...Facebook is the neighbourhood that I want (my brand) to live in!.

She likened this social platfrom to a piece of land, or a house, within a neighborhood that she would want to live and invest in.

People pick places to live for very different reasons....some choose location, some choose to be near their friends and family, some make decisions based on cost - cheaper to locate to an "up and coming area" than to the pricer, older, already developed locations. Others do it because they just "fell in love" with the place.

I am sure by now you are seeing where i am going with this. After my recent experience with Myspace I can safely say that Facebook is the "neighbourhood" i would like ( my clients!) to live in. The Myspace Neighbourhood needs to clean up a little first, build better infrastructure, and be a little more neighborly before I consider investing!!

Microsoft - Change the World or Go Home

It is the Blue Monsters Birthday today....more on this to come but check out what Hugh McLeod has to say on this exciting anniversary at his blog www.gapingvoid.com

Content + ( The most important part of a social media marketing campaign )

The most important component to a social media marketing campaign in one word is CONTENT. Thats it. Simple right? Well unfortunatley its not that simple...i really wish it was as my job would be so much easier. In trying to explain why content is so important I found myself always repeating the same mantra. "Its content plus measurement, its content + portablility, its content + strategy its content + analytics. You get the picture. So I have started calling this my Content + strategy for social media. And it seems to resonate with my audience.

It never ceases to amaze me how many meetings I end up in where the discussion is based around "driving users" to a "campaign landing environment" - but the question of if that CLE actually has compelling, relevent content once you have driven your audience there more often than not somehow gets overlooked. Another scenario I often find myself in is when both agency and client folks alike suggest "lets do something viral"! Virals can be wildly successful. They do more often than not put the "content first" model to play. However virals act like hit models...and more often they miss than hit. This is due to a variety of reasons but one of the main ones is the lack of prioritzation around sharing and portability. Make it easy for people to pass a long your content. Share with friends. upload to their blog, comment on it, digg it...you get where I am going here. It is becoming more and more feasible to measure this "pass a long" effect and for me this is where my job gets really exciting. Finally we can start to look at the effect of not just what search and display can have on a campaign but what the "sharing of content" has had on driving awareness or even end actions like a download, a registration and even a purchase. A company that is making great leaps and bounds in this area is Reach Machines....check them out if you can. As always i will leave this post with a question...does anyone know of any other companies - apart from the obvious ad serving tech companies - that are really making progress in the measurement of portable content and the "pass a long" effect on marketing campaigns?

Favorite Quotation of the Day...

"Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you--if you don't play, you can't win."
Robert Heinlein
US science fiction author (1907 - 1988)

Vivace...

...what would I do without you in the morning??. Best dam coffee in seattle....honestly have note found better. Let me know if I am missing something but this black deliciousness has got to be hard to beat!

what is up with myspace...seriously...

...was negotiating with them today and had the worst sales person on the phone. Honestly, so rude, so sales driven. I asked them to work with us, come up with a creative solution to our problem which would benefit my client, and Myspace and their response was "client X has millions of $$$...they just need to pay for advertising".... done and done. Well Myspace, its not done and done, and you guys need to think of new ways to monetize your platform. We work with many social media platforms and they all work with us, as an extension of our team, there are many ways to engage consumers and make money at the same time....

Creative Media

what comes first media or creative? Distribution or content? a debate that lasted over four hours today with my emerging media team in seattle? does media need to have a creative offering or vice versa? social media adds a whole other element to the discussion....what's your thoughts?

love this site....just, well...very cool

http://marumushi.com/

Obama and In Game Advertising

Even though there is no winner as yet in the race to become the next president Obama has clearly taken the lead when you view the campaign through a digital media lens. Moreover, he is the first political candidate to used social media to promote himself and his party and now he has moved into the rehlm of gaming as a way to reach the American male youth audience.Here is a sample of the whole article featured on Yahoo news last week...worth a read. Being someone who is continually tasked by my clients to develop the best methodology to measure social and emerging media ROI, engagement and of course sales or in this case votes, I would LOVE to see the metrics off the back of the Obama Presidential campaign...if anyone can share any information to date on this I would be very, very interested. thanks

Mundane Mondays

Yes, i know it is a Saturday, however i am sending you this in preparation for this Monday, and many more Mundays, sorry, Monday's to come. He's right Monday mornings should feel like Friday afternoons...www.lucaskanephoto.blogspot.com

Somebodyelsesphone....

...http://www.somebodyelsesphone.com/ is the latest ad campaign from Nokia promoting the new 7610 Supernover and obviously targeting a youth audience. I like the creative concept of the website, it kept me intrigued for some time. The brand extentions are interesting too e.g the "characters" featured have set up their own facebook profile and are actively befriending people....however, part of the ad agencies promotional strategy was to video the characters - one nineteen year old woman in particular - in an overtly sexual way. mmm...part of me thinks well this is what appeals to nineteen year old guys (actually all guys right? ) but the other part of me is like...really? do you have to be that obvious and unoriginal? sex of course sells, but this part of the campaign on facebook is both unoriginal and gratuitous. Come on creative peeps come up with something a little better next time!! ( interesting side note - I'd say 90% of the comments around the video campaign on Facebook are negative in sentiment)

a thought to ponder...

read on a blog today the following post which was in response to a discussion around the Microsoft Windows Vista campaign which has been titled "Life without Walls". The post stated "In a life without walls - how could there be any windows and gates?" this tickled me!

FM Conference

Just got back from San Fran after attending the FM Conversation Marketing conference. All the usual suspects were there and it was a really intersting two days. Most interesting discussion to me on day one was the "Why we can't measure this space?" panel. Adam Gerber, CMO of Quantcast disagreed. He thinks we can measure the space and that Quantcast is the first and only direct-measurement solution that equips all publishers to characterize their increasingly dynamic online audiences. From the demo i have had of their solution i would tend to agree. Morever, it also enables marketers to search for, discover, and validate specific target segments that are most relevant to them in order to tie together the complexities of media planning and delivery. Bascially, through Quantcast, I can segment my audience based more around behaviour as opposed to traditional demographics. I can also address the opportunity that long tail of advertising now presents us with - something that i am not seeing Nielsen or Comscore making a whole lot of headway in. Would love thoughts,feedback on this - social media measurement in general - and check out the FM site for transcripts and videos of the event.

Looking for good junior planners...

...to join our digital innovation team here at MEC interaction in Seattle. Feel free to email me with your resume...good digital talent is hard to find!

Federated Media...

...Heading to their conversation marketing conference this week in San Francisco...really looking forward to it...

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raining in seattle...

....for the first time in ages, and funnily enough i am kind of enjoying it today! So, someone i talk about a bit is Hugh McLeod and something I keep coming back to is his whole theory around the Microsoft Blue Monster. check it out. This just has so much relevance in the world of social media.

peer pressure

everyone says that you gotta walk the walk if you talk the talk...and I do a lot of talking about digital 'stuff'. Just not so much in the digital space. A love of short, sharp, tweets and facebook pokes have kept me away from all out blogging...but, mainly at the request of my clients, and colleagues, i have fallen prey to peer pressure and well...here i am, with a lot to say about this whole digital life we live! check back often!

digital portable art

the thing i like about the image of me taken at Grey Gallery in Seattle is the concept of portable art...and accessing art today, even if you don't have cash. i guess what i am trying to say is that image of the girl that i am taking with my camera phone is now with me for as long as I want it...to be honest the painting reflected a mood that i was in, hense why i identified with it, but i am actually not sure even if i did want to spend my money on it and keep it forever. it was an "in the moment" thing. I like that about digital images - i can take my art with me.

Digital Think Tank

i made it...finally....it took a while, but i'm here! check back often and look forward to your digital thoughts in the coming weeks....