(posts_from_date): March 2014

This week, Church & Dwight and Major League Baseball announced a multi-year, multi-category sponsorship agreement for Arm & Hammer and OxiClean to become “The Official Laundry Detergent and Stain Remover of MLB.”

This year’s 4A’s Transformations Conference in Los Angeles was full of informative kernels that created a mental collage for me of where the advertising and media industry is currently and where it’s headed in the near term. Many of the sessions were thought provoking, and I guess that was the point – to expose me to information that would make me want to change my way of thinking, start an interesting conversation, or alter the way I go about my daily life – if even in just a small way. Three key nuggets did just that.

(photo Credit: 4AsTransformation.com)

In late July of 2013, Google enacted a change to AdWords called Enhanced Campaigns.  The change tied mobile bids to desktop bids using a “vectoring” system, in which the mobile bid was a percentage of the desktop bid. By tying the bids together, Google essentially forced search marketers to participate in the mobile space by default. “This may be the most significant shift in AdWords since its inception,” said Chris Copeland, CEO of GroupM Next, GroupM’s digital research arm, at the time.  

If you’ve been active on Facebook in the two last years, chances are that you’ve seen an Upworthy video and probably shared it. I admit to passing them along from time to time and even posting some on my personal blog.  So how did Upworthy, coming from nowhere, become the “it” place for video content that matters?

Every March, McDonald’s promotes their green-dyed mint flavored milkshake fittingly dubbed “Shamrock Shake” to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be unusual for more people to be talking about the Shamrock Shake on social media channels on March 17th, but Mother Nature has caused an unexpected lift in social media conversations. 

Did Barack Obama get elected to the highest office in the land because of social media acumen? While pundits may ponder that question, the fact is that Obama is our very first social media president. He’s adroitly used You Tube, Facebook, and Twitter to reach younger demographics, especially during his presidential campaigns. So, when the number of 18 to 34 year olds registering for his Affordable Healthcare fell short of the 40% goal needed by the end of this month, the administration looked to digital to turn the tide. (Photo credit: FunnyorDie.com)

It’s a common request and expectation that attending SXSW means you return with a plethora of hot trends and new technologies identified. Which you then creatively bundle up and roll out to clients, colleagues and the trade with the intention of looking super smart.  The reality is, the 'SXSW wrap up' is commonplace and often lacks context. Worst of all two weeks post SXSW, once the Texan bbq smell has finally washed out of your clothes, the vast majority of trends get relegated to powerpoint graveyard, and we retract back to our daily grind.