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 [...]

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 [...]

This week we’re excited to introduce Media Arts Mondays, our new column series created with TBWA\Media Arts Lab’s Frank Striefler and Erik Hanson.
Every Monday, we’ll be sharing Media Arts Lab’s weekly newsletter, Media Arts Mondays, featuring highlights and insights from the worlds of media, culture, and branding. Media Arts Mondays is a newsletter that has been so far exclusively distributed to the global TBWA network, and that will now be shared and syndicated only on PSFK.
Frank explains the motivation behind Media Arts Mondays:
The newsletter is designed to provide a deeper understanding on how people live with media and digest brands [...]