I had this forwarded to me and I was extremely amused but at the same time I could relate to it. All most every boss I have ever had (either consulting or a permanent gig) always wants to come in and change the world overnight. Let’s just say with such ambitions come mistakes and here is a really good example of why you should get the facts and think things through before taking action on anything.

Arcelor-Mittal Steel, feeling it was time for a shakeup, hired a new CEO.
The new boss was determined to rid the company of all slackers.

On a tour of the facilities, the CEO noticed a guy leaning against a wall.
The room was full of workers and he wanted to let them know that he meant
business.  He asked the guy, “How much money do you make a week?”

A little surprised, the young man looked at him and said, “I make $400 a
week.. Why?”

The CEO said, “Wait right here.” He walked back to his office, came back in
two minutes, and handed the guy $1,600 in cash and said, “Here’s four weeks’
pay. Now GET OUT and don’t come back.”

Feeling pretty good about himself, the CEO looked around the room and asked,
“Does anyone want to tell me what that goof-ball did here?”

From across the room a voice said, “Pizza delivery guy from Domino’s.”

IAB Ads: 'Advertising Is Creepy'

Faced with increasing pressure from Washington, the Interactive Advertising Bureau launched a public service campaign on Thursday aimed at educating consumers about behavioral targeting.

The online campaign, created pro bono by WPP’s Schematic, features rich media banner ads with copy like “Advertising is creepy” and “Hey, this banner can tell where you live. Mind if we come over and sell you stuff?”

More than one dozen publishers — including Microsoft, Google’s YouTube, and AOL — have committed to donate a combined 500 million impressions for the initiative.

The campaign comes as policymakers are questioning whether data collection by marketers violates consumers’ privacy. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has said he plans to introduce a bill that could require Web companies to notify users about online ad targeting, and in some circumstances, obtain their explicit consent.

In addition, the Federal Trade Commission has criticized the industry for using dense privacy policies to inform people about behavioral targeting, or tracking people online and sending them ads based on sites visited.

In a meeting with reporters Thursday morning, IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg said one goal of the campaign is to address regulators’ concerns that consumers don’t understand behavioral advertising.

The ad units themselves offer information about online ad techniques. For instance, users who mouse over the “creepy” banner can pull down copy stating that companies don’t use “personally identifiable information” to determine which ads to serve.

Users who click through land on the IAB’s Privacy Matters page, which includes a description of various forms of online advertising, information about cookies (including Flash cookies) and links to opt-out pages.

The portion of the landing page devoted to cookies says they “contain data that allow a Web site to customize content and advertising to your interests but generally do not contain personally identifiable information.” A section with information about geotargeting states that an IP address “reveals nothing personal about you to marketers and websites.”

But privacy advocate Jeff Chester immediately raised questions about such statements. “They are ignoring the growing consensus that cookies and IP addresses are personally identifiable,” says Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Cathy Dwyer, a privacy expert and professor of information systems at Pace University, also questions whether the banners’ headlines are too sophisticated to draw in users. “Even ‘creepy’ itself is a technical term,” she says, adding that it’s mainly industry insiders and observers who use that word in discussions about behavioral advertising.

The FTC said this year in its report about online behavioral targeting that non-personally identifiable information could be used to identify specific users.

In the past, industry groups and observers defined personally identifiable information as names, addresses, phone numbers or other information that could be used to contact an individual directly.

Critics recently moved away from that definition, in part because Web users have been identified based on supposedly anonymous data. The most famous example occurred in 2006, when AOL publicly released search logs showing users’ queries and “anonymized” IP addresses for more than 600,000 users, Within days, one “anonymized” user, Thelma Arnold, was profiled in The New York Times after reporters identified her based on her search queries.

Schematic CEO Trevor Kaufman told reporters Thursday that a test of the campaign in late October and early November yielded a click-through rate of 0.5%. The trial involved 7 million impressions, mainly served on Microsoft’s Hotmail.

Separately, the digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology also launched a privacy campaign on Thursday — although with a different goal. The CDT is hoping to persuade users to lobby Congress for online privacy legislation. The Web site for the CDT’s “Take Back Your Privacy” campaign enables users to submit concerns directly to the FTC and to send emails to their lawmakers.

first seen on Media Post by Wendy Davis, Yesterday, 6:58 PM

A lot of people still haven’t figured out Facebook Fan Pages yet. They go ahead and make these Fan Pages and expect them to grow by themselves. The thing that most people miss in the equation is that, this is social marketing which means there has to be engagement on both fronts. A Facebook Fan Page needs to be strategically planned out in advance in order to make it work. Here are a few things you can do to make your fan page grow organically and when I say organically it means you aren’t paying to market your fan page.

Feature A Fan – Contest
This is one of the strongest methods of growing your fan base. You originally start off with any fan page by inviting mostly your own friends. Now that some of your friends are fans to this page, how do you get their friends to want to fan the page? You get the fans you already have to become little ambassadors to your page by having a virtual contests. When you “Feature A Fan” you are acknowledging them as the winner by calling them out as a “featured fan” in the post of the day which goes out to all of the other fans. 

This might seem trivial to you but the users can’t get enough.You eventually will get people “liking” the posts, commenting on the posts enough for their friends to take notice and come check out what that page is all about. They then get involved in the conversation that is happening on your page and become fans themselves. Everyone wants to be a featured fan so they keep trying to win whatever contest you are having by posting their answers, commenting and “liking” posts. All of this social interaction eventually leads to more and more people fanning your page. A company that does this well is Crackle a company I just happen to work for ; )

Giveaways
Of course another aspect to a contest is obviously SWAG (stuff worth actually getting). If you have something to give away like a t-shirt, hats, beer mugs, PlayStation 3′s. People love free things, even if its the most mundane objects you would be surprised at what people will do for free SWAG. The better the item the more people who will become a fan of your fan page and participate in the conversation. These users are not nearly as valuable to the conversation because you are incentivising them with a tangible object. As soon as its gone they stop interacting. You need to continue to have these giveaways every month so you don’t lose their interest.

Whats The Best Solution?
Using a combination of both ”Feature A Fan” and product giveaways will net you the most users in the shortest amount of time. Both users act completely different so you need to cater to both in different ways. As long as you have two different approaches planned out to these very different fan bases then you should see your fan page start to grow exponentially.

Adding Twitter Into The Mix
You can also leverage your twitter following to your advantage by using twitter as an extension to your contests. You can extend your reach and push users back to your fan page with twitter or you can hold a completely separate contest via twitter and grow your following base there. In this case we know that twitter users act completely different then Facebook users do so you need to figure out what best works for you and what you’re trying to build and accomplish.

Clicks have made us fat and lazy. And when we wind up set in our ways, there’s only one solution – weaning. In this case, we need to be weaned off the click.

That’s what the online marketing world needs right now to improve branding, according to eMarketer and experts it surveyed across the Internet ad business.

In a recent study, eMarketer found that while 57 percent of marketing executives said brand measurement was not holding back online advertising, an astonishingly high 43 percent said it was.

“Clicks and banner ads tell so little of a story,” says Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer and the author of a recent report on reinventing online brand measurement.

Research from iProspect and Forrester found that Internet users were more apt to search for a product, brand or company – or even type the company’s name into a browser bar – than to click on a promotional ad. That’s why measuring time spent, influence, engagement and responsiveness to ads is more important than measuring the actual click.

“People don’t just see an ad or billboard and do something immediately – it happens over time,” Ramsey says. “What we have to do is the hard work and wean ourselves off the click.”

Of the $25 billion spent on online ads each year, about $7.7 billion is allocated to branding ads, such as display and video. “But unlike search, which is a $12 billion business, we don’t know what that $7.7 billion is doing for us,” Ramsey explains. “If we figure it out, that number will grow. Search and online video are the two engines driving Internet growth, and search has slowed. We really have to figure out the branding component and apply to video or we will be stagnant.”

Working collaboratively to share data points can help. In addition, the solution will likely include attribution modeling, or capturing the data around both online and offline ad exposure and giving each their due. But the answer also lies in an old-school method, one that for better or worse has worked in television for more than 50 years – Gross Rating Point (GRP).

Nielsen is not perfect, yet it has become a common currency and people say we need to embrace the grp to get Internet into the media mix more,” Ramsey says. “If you can’t talk the language of the marketer, which is grp, then you are missing something and not getting on brand marketers’ tables.”

Young-Bean Song, senior director of analytics at Microsoft’s Advertising Institute (formerly Atlas) agrees. He told eMarketer, “I think it’s not having those foundational reach, frequency and GRP metrics. You will never see P&G and Unilever spend more than single digits [in millions] unless we give them reach, frequency and GRPs.”

Ramsey is one of many voices in the industry that has been calling for big change in how Internet marketers evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign. Gian Fulgoni, the chairman of comScore, has also said at MediaPost events that clicks are no longer the Holy Grail of online measurement, with time spent and brand lift being more important metrics. Similarly, Microsoft’s Advertising Institute recently said in a report that conversion should be measured across the entire digital purchase funnel and not merely by the last ad seen or the last click.

Indeed, measurement is the constantly hashed and rehashed topic at industry events, but perhaps the answers lie not in more data but in a better way to capture the interactions consumers have with brands online, relying on some tried-and-true methods, some sharing and some new strategies.

First seen on Media Post by Daisy Whitney

Greater knowledge of the digital space is at the top of marketers’ list of what they want from their advertising and marketing agencies in the next 12 months, according to a Sapient-sponsored national online survey of some 200 CMOs and other senior marketers.  

As it is, more than a quarter of marketers surveyed said from half to all of their marketing is done via digital channels, and nearly 40% foresee that in 12 months from half to all their marketing will be done via digital channels:

The respondents, all of whom are either directly or indirectly responsible for managing digital marketing budget allocation across multiple channels, were asked about the top qualities they sought in their advertising and marketing agencies in the coming year.

Based on the survey results, Sapient Interactive, Sapient’s marketing services group, issued a Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future:

1. Greater knowledge of the digital space

More than one-third of marketers surveyed said they are not confident that their current agency is well-positioned to take their brand through the unchartered waters of online digital marketing and interactive advertising.

Nearly half (45%) of the respondents have switched agencies (or plan to switch in the next 12 months) for one with greater digital knowledge or have hired an additional digital specialist to handle their interactive campaigns.

Regarding an agency’s area of expertise, 79% of respondents rated “interactive/digital” functions as “important/very important.”

2. More use of “pull interactions”

Nine in 10 respondents (90%) agree that to engage consumers with their brand it is increasingly important that their agency uses “pull interactions” such as social media and online communities rather than traditional “push” campaigns.

3. Leverage virtual communities

An overwhelming 94% of respondents expressed interest in leveraging virtual communities (public and private) to understand more about their target audience.

4. Agency executives who use the technology they are recommending

92% of respondents said it was “somewhat” or “very” important that agency employees use the technologies that they are recommending – such as Facebook, Flickr, wikis, blogs, – in their personal social media mix.

5. Chief Digital Officers make agencies more appealing

43% of marketers surveyed said agencies with chief digital officers are more appealing than those without.

6. Web 2.0 and social media savvy

63% of marketers surveyed said an agency’s Web 2.0 and social media capabilities are “important/very important” when it comes to agency selection.

7. Agencies that understand consumer behavior

76% of respondents deemed this as an “important/very important” aspect of their agency’s online digital marketing and interactive advertising area of expertise.

8. Demonstrate strategic thinking

77% of marketers surveyed ranked strategy/brain trust capabilities at the top of their agency wish list.

9. Branding and creative capabilities

67% of respondents ranked branding at the top of their agency wish list while 76% ranked creative capabilities as “important/very important.”

10. Ability to measure success

65% ranked analytics at the top of their agency wish list.

“Marketers want agencies that can deliver on these demands today – not by 2009 and beyond,” said Gaston Legorburu, chief creative officer, Sapient. “As the interactive channel becomes increasingly important, only those agencies that can create, manage and measure multi-channel campaigns will stay relevant and thrive in an uncertain economy.”

About the survey: The Agency of the Future Survey is a national survey designed to provide insight into what marketers want from their agencies in the next 12 months. Sponsored by Sapient, the survey was conducted via email and polled more than 200 respondents, all of whom are either directly or indirectly responsible for managing digital marketing budget allocation across multiple channels.

First appeared on www.marketingcharts.com