Online media can be a real paradox—an environment that represents such a wealth of creative opportunity, yet has for so long been a slave to the banner ad. Buttons, leaderboards, skyscrapers—the challenge to advertisers has been to cram as much creativity as they can into awkward shapes and sizes. Online ads have been more about geometry than creativity.
But more brands are rewriting the rules of online ads by growing the dimensions of their ideas beyond the traditional banner or video. Of course bigger is not always better—a bad idea is a bad idea in any size.  But with a great [...]

With the Internet’s ability to empower individuals, social media platforms have become powerful forces for change and community action. Social media interconnects millions of people at any given point providing everyone with a megaphone that can be heard far and fast.
While companies conventionally buy media and hire PR agencies to tell people about their charitable efforts, recently Adweek reported on a different kind of media tactic to help people discover and disseminate the good deeds of brands. More brands are tapping into people’s do-gooder impulses to spread their charitable messages through P2P endorsement. Giving the supported charity a donation is [...]

There’s no such thing as a captive audience. Gone are the days of neat and discrete moments in time where advertisers talked to target audiences. Today’s is a culture in constant motion. And the dizzying array of platforms, constant connectivity and ever-increasing speed of information has left the ad industry out of sync with its audience. People don’t live in quarterly campaigns, nor do they distinguish communication channels. They expect faster and constant communication with their brands across more media platforms and conversations. Every month, week, day, on the hour. It’s now about how fast brands can move, how relevant [...]

“Information wants to be free.” It’s the unofficial motto of the free-content movement and the populist opinion of a society that lives through and makes a living out of the free information that’s a mouse click away. We’re all used to traveling quite a distance on the information highway without any tollbooths. So for marketers today (especially in an economic downturn where every expenditure is scrutinized), expensive subscriptions to trade pubs have become easy targets for the company chopping block.
Here are some periodicals beyond the standard list of industry pubs that we think are still well worth the investment. While [...]

Everything is information and information is everything. It’s the mantra of marketing in an age where people are constantly creating collectible data—all the things we do, say, use, buy, click and share are data points in the graphs of our lives. But in an increasingly visual society, pie charts and bar charts can’t begin to do justice to this wealth of information there is to digest now. Data visualization tools are helping to change the ways we look at information and audiences. While a lot of these are just plain fun to look at, there is far more potential than [...]

People expect companies to do more than just sell stuff. They want to know what you stand for, what choices you make as a result and what difference that could make in the world. So when it comes to people making their brand choices, Cause Marketing can be a tiebreaker.  Almost 80% of Americans are more likely to switch to the brand supporting a good cause over a competitor with the same price and quality. But Cause Marketing is not just about photo opportunities, oversized checks and warm fuzzies. It can be an opportunity to turn commercial interest into real [...]

Reduce, reuse, recycle — we’ve all heard it a million times. It was the simple mantra that marked the mainstream arrival of the environmental movement. But from this clever catchphrase has grown such a cacophony of “green noise” and green-washed marketing that people have gotten overwhelmed by the right things to do. However, since 83% of people say they would change their consumption habits to make tomorrow’s world a better place, brands still have an incredible influence on environmental change. Maybe a return of the three Rs is just the point of reference people need to get some new perspective [...]

For most of us, sports touch our lives on a daily basis. We play sports, watch sports on TV, read about sports in the newspapers, talk to friends about them, buy merchandise and attend sporting events. Sports take us away from our daily routines and entertain us. But while people realize that sports need sponsors (in fact, 74% actually think sponsorship is good), their corporatization can move them away from their fans. With ticket prices sky-rocketing, hospitality areas taking up all the good seats and every square inch of the arena emblazoned with logos, sponsorships are making sports less about [...]

Art has always been a source of inspiration for the ad industry and continues to lead to new avenues for brand expression. If art imitates life, ads imitate art for good reason. Our talent is still about storytelling and words are still some of our most important tools, but technology continues to provide new canvases for bringing brand messages to life.
While paper and pixels are the default solutions for marketers to get their words into the world, there is an exciting new frontier to explore at the intersection of art and technology. The examples shown illustrate that, in the hands [...]

As revolutionary as the iPhone was when it was introduced, the ultimate potential of this all-display device was realized when apps came along. Those amazing downloadable programs that sit on your screen are transforming the iPhone from a really great mobile phone into a device that can become virtually anything you need it to be. In the words of NY Times technology writer David Pogue: “they make the iPhone (or the iPod Touch) do absolutely amazing things…stunts a cellphone has no right to perform.”  And apps not only make the device more functional and fun, they make the iPhone a [...]

Advertising, for the most part, works by appealing to people’s eyes and ears — 80% of all brand communication is audio or visual. And while mainstream ad media will probably always exist in people’s lives as mostly sight and sound, the way audiences make sense of their world is obviously a more holistic sensory experience. Taste is an important part of how people develop, well, their individual tastes and palates. Touch is how people connect with and attach to the physical world and affects people’s perceptions of value. And smell is an incredibly important part of memory and feelings, affecting [...]

Audiences don’t live above or below-the-line, and it has taken our industry too long to truly embrace a through-the-line approach. But with the explosive growth of the Internet and the need for a specialized craft, we were quick to draw another line to differentiate on- and off-line advertising. But today’s audiences don’t live in an on- or off-line world either – they live in a “nonline” world. The more people and technology advance, the less separated these two places become in our daily lives. People can hardly tell the difference anymore between when they are “on” and when they are [...]

To spend or not to spend, that is the question that a lot of people find themselves asking more and more these days. And while people’s purchase decisions often change when they’re on a budget, the decisions are not always as simple as just comparing price tags. There are two sides to the customer value equation: what you pay and what you get. And though slashing prices can be a quick way to close the sale, most people are still willing to pay for the brands that add value by adding the extras that make it worth it—the assurance that [...]

Let’s face it — people are starting to burn out on all the “going green” talk, especially from the brands that aren’t putting their money where their mouth is. Confused by a whole new green vocabulary and fed up with being told what to do (or more often, what not to do) consumers are quickly becoming eco-fatigued. But in this economic climate where consumers are making a lot more decisions by the numbers, there is a unique opportunity for the brands that allow people to calculate their impact on the environment and their pocketbook at the same time. Trendwatching coined [...]

People have always gravitated to things that are well designed. Design creates desire, but what good design means today is becoming far more than just face value. People expect more of the things they buy and use to serve a purpose; to actually solve a problem or to improve their situation, not just look nice. Good design is human-centric. It satisfies both the audience’s needs and desires, and good designers know how to put the audience experience first to get to ideas that are both solution and style. It’s called Design Thinking and it’s a way of thinking all brands [...]