What's the Idea?

There was an article today in the New York Times by Stephanie Clifford about new ad serving technology supported by real time bidding , allowing ads to be served based on keywords and cookied behavior.  Supposedly everything takes place in milliseconds before the page even load. (Is it me or are pages loading slower and slower?  Thanks ads, [...]

I am really Jonesin’ for SXSW (South By Southwest).  A couple of years ago while with Zude.com we had a music thing going so we went to South By Music. South By Music is different than South By Interactive which starts tomorrow, but they are back to back events in Austin, TX.  Interactive is about web apps and [...]

There are two factions in online marketing these days: Cashiers and Conversationalists. 
Cashiers
Cashiers care about the sale. They have the small dashboard that tracks click-to-sale and spits out an ROI calculations. Cashiers can’t wait to wake up in the morning to see the new numbers. They are in to usability testing, shopping cart abandonment, media optimization and other [...]

Noah Brier is an exciting, off-piste marketing strategist.  His post the other day suggesting some businesses would do well to have born on dating is a case in point. 
 Head of planning and strategy at the Barbarian Group, Mr. Brier is unique because he likes to question rules, norms and the tried and true. He looks [...]

Nice article over the weekend in the New York Times on the growth of web start-ups in NYC.  Silicon Valley East some might say.  Other suggest the East coast is trumping the West when it comes to start-ups in the media, mobile and publishing areas.
NY is likely to be the hub of these companies not just because advertising, publishing and media [...]

Here’s one of my favorite song lyrics. It’s from the rawness that is David Allan Coe:
The old man was covered in tattoos and scars;
He got some in prison and others in bars.
The rest, he got workin’ on old junk cars…
In the daytime.
I was reading the paper paper today and noticed a nice big Rolex ad [...]

Google and Facebook are collecting scads of data about each and every user of their applications.  They are doing something smart with that data, serving ads, but have not yet scratched the surface of what they can do with that data.
Google bought DoubleClick a couple of years ago, the world’s leading advertising server and analytics [...]

 
 We have spent million of dollars and Euros and rubles around the world trying to get kids to stop or never start smoking.  The brief has always been about one thing: smoking will kill you. It will turn your lungs black and you into a seething ball of cancer.   After all these commercials and public service [...]

I suck as an art director but that doesn’t keep me from appreciating art and wanting to play at it. Having looked over the shoulder of some pretty good art directors, watching them silhouette and manipulate images and color, I know what can be done with the right tools. The problem is the tools aren’t [...]

If you were doing a survey on healthy food habits in America would you stand outside of McDonald’s and recruit?  That’s kind of what the Pew Research Center did with the sample for its 2010 survey of Millennials (late teens and twentysomethings).  Check it out:    
Results for the January 2010 Millennial Survey are based on [...]