ANA Marketing Maestros

Integrated Marketing Promo Video

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Thanks to Yahoo! for putting together this video montage from our Integrated Marketing Conference.

Now Arriving: Mad Men

by Mark Fogelberg

"Getting paid for selling stuff is the only thing that matters."

Having waited nearly a year since I first read about this show, I eagerly welcome the Thursday debut of Mad Men on AMC. Situated in an advertising agency circa 1960, the show captures the drama and the business of a completely different era.

By picking 1960, the producers chose a crucial time in American history. Culture and society are about to be reborn just as advertising is about to be reborn.

With excessive drinking, smoking, promiscuity, indulgence and stories all told through flawed heroes, the show looks to capture a bygone era that may not be as different as we'd imagine. How much has changed and how much has not? I hope you join me in finding out July 19th.

Confessions of Rockstar CMOs

by Barbara Bacci-Mirque

What an interesting week in the marketing world.  The same week that an Ad Age article reports that CMOs have minimal impact on sales (!), the ANA and Booz Allen Hamilton release our joint publication, CMO Thought Leaders: The Rise of the Strategic Marketer.

I would like to offer some inside information on the CMO report in Ad Age - the quick headline was CMOs have little impact, but a marketing scientist familiar with the study told me that what the research actually found was that there was little difference in the sales growth between companies with and without a Chief Marketing Officer.

So back to the CMO Thought Leaders reader, I was lucky enough to be part of this remarkable publication and attend several of the one-on-one conversations with the heads of marketing we profiled.  What an education that was!  There is no magic bullet to their success but the overarching traits I observed among these marketing leaders are insatiable intellectual curiosity, lack of complacency – they continually question what they could do better – and team building internally and externally.  They all realized they could not do it alone and so had close relationships with their colleagues who specialized in finance, analytics, and consumer insights.   Some  of the marketers we interviewed are more right brain and some are more left brain but they all are incredible.  If you read the book and absorb the lessons from these marketing giants, I bet you will have more tenure in your own senior marketing role.

Suggestive Searching

By Kaitlin Villanova

I was recently searching the web when I stumbled upon StumbleUpon.com. This open-source web-browser plug-in allows for you to channel surf the web. When downloading this feature you are prompted to select interests/topics  (examples: humor, writing, cooking, macs, fashion and tennis) and then from there the tool finds web pages based on the topics that you chose. There are millions of sites in the database, all submitted and recommended by other "stumblers."

The rating system is a similar model to the Pandora music site, where you type in an artist and it finds similar music that you can then rate on a the thumbs up or thumbs down system. This collaborative filtering of sites like Stumble and Pandora, use a automated process combining human opinions with machine learning of personal preference (pretty fascinating stuff!).

The Stumbleupon toolbar looks like this:

As you can see, the tool bar contains the Stumble! icon which send you to the next page of interest, the thumbs up thumbs down option, if you do rate a site thumbs up it is stored in the "Favorites" tab. You can easily pass the sites onto friends or colleagues with the "Send to" option. There is also a news, video, photo and even a wikipedia tab.

This recommendation system uses peer and social networking principals and includes a blogging feature. It's an easy way to keep up with the news and technology and find some pretty interesting sites. Here are a few of my favorites that I've stumbled upon lately..... (sorry for the pun I couldn't resist!)

When Cloning Goes Wrong

Open Source Mac 

Cook by Numbers

Fashion Police

p> Technorati tags: StumbleUpon Open Source Pandora

Ad Spending Up But Down

by Mark Fogelberg

According to whichever recent report and whatever recent article you might have read, the sky is falling. Or not. Maybe it's a good thing. Or not.

The summary version reads, "Advertising GROWTH to taper off." Growth in spending has slowed? Rather than think doom and gloom, perhaps a pat on the back is in order? Perhaps advertisers have become more efficient, spending valuable dollars more judiciously.

Averaging 3 big name forecasts gives a percentage growth in excess of 3.1% for US paid media during 2007. That growth percentage (and the underlying billions) seems hardly insubstantial or unhealthy. Especially when factoring in new media venues - with their smaller audiences and lower cost basis - the ad business continues to do well as a whole.

There are some pockets of hurt as adjustments are made and new media forms explored but the Darwinian nature of media should allow for better opportunities for advertisers. Traditional media venues continue to deliver the audiences advertisers need - with content which draws the crowds. The fact that there has been an explosion of new choices to help marketing efforts warrants 3 cheers as mass efforts can be complemented. We can do more and reach more with integrated messages - and we can do it all more efficiently.

Technorati tags: Ad Forecasts Media Spending