'Hey Whipple, Squeeze This' Will Add Four Hours to Your Workday

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A few months ago, a senior copywriter recommended I read Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan. I was incredulous, mostly because I've been swinging off Ogilvy's left you-know-what since Confessions of an Advertising Man.

(Getting into Ogilvy is like reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. It will fuck with your mind.)

Just to be nice, I bought Sullivan's book, and I'm really sorry I did. Because now my walls are COVERED in strategic doodling. I am developing ideas I wouldn't have allocated brainpower to six months ago.

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by Angela Natividad    May- 1-08    
Topic: Creative Commentary, Good, Opinion, Publishing, Tools



It's a Daisy Chain of Sensory Delights!

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Okay. We don't make music ourselves, but this iPhone synthesizer is too cool to stand. Wait for the piano sequence around 2:10. Oh, and the song is pretty kick-ass too.

Brought to our attention by Shilo.tv, a team of bicoastal filmmakers, music lovers and artists. We Make it Good serves as its blog and portfolio site, where you can get a taste of neat things Shilo's involved in, like Pretty Titty's We Make It Good mix series, which went out on Obey Giant Records -- another brand we love to the point of hyperventilation -- this year.

Obey Giant was founded by Shepard Fairey, who first caught our eye with his provocative visual mashups of familiar advertising, Communist propaganda and pop and political icons.

by Angela Natividad    Apr-23-08    
Topic: Good, Online, Tools, Trends and Culture, Video



Seth Godin Praises Twitter; Seth's Tweetiquette Critiqued

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Seth Godin recently wrote a warm laudy post about how Twitter is great for building trust, brand equity and ultimately sales. Practically two seconds later, marketing and social media blogger Ryan Kuder wrote Seth an open letter declaring shenanigans.

It's not that Seth is wrong. Twitter is a great relationship development tool. I maintain daily contact with more people on Twitter than I've met in real life over the past year. We pass on streams of thought, as well as links we find interesting or valuable.

Occasionally, that interesting or valuable link brings users to our website. But that isn't only or always the case ... and this is where Ryan raises his complaint.

"I've got a beef with the way you use Twitter," he writes, "Because you don't use it."

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by Angela Natividad    Apr-14-08    
Topic: Good, Online, Opinion, Tools, Trends and Culture



PubMatic Launches Online Ad Network Pricing Service

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Want to know what other advertisers are paying to advertise on websites? As a publisher, want to know how to competitively price your ads? Now you can with PubMatic's AdPrice Index, a new service that gathers eCPM data from 3,000 website on a monthly basis. The index is compiled by independent statisticians Dr. Albert Madansky and Dr. Michele Madansky who found:

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by Steve Hall    Apr- 8-08    
Topic: Online, Research, Tools



Around Here, We Call Him the Poetic Prophet.

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It's a dude rapping about design coding!

If my mom threw out my rap cassettes and replaced them with SEO rap (as opposed to rap about seeking out the Holy Spirit), she would have changed my life forever.

And I would have thanked her (as opposed to throwing things across the room and crying, because that E-40 cassette cost me three days of unspent lunch money, and also because I would never again have the opportunity to memorize all the lyrics to "Sprinkle Me").

More SEO rap here. Topics include conversion closing, paid search, link building and social media. Lyrics included.

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by Angela Natividad    Mar-31-08    
Topic: Good, Online, Tools, Video



Media Optimization Has Trumped Creative Optimization

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It seems we've taken a step backwards when it comes to online creativity. Not so much in terms of its excellence, rather its importance as a factor in online marketing. Certainly technology has made possible a vast array of online advertising units which provide advertisers and publishers the ability to tailor programs to marketers' needs. But what happened to taking advantage of online media's flexibility as it relates to creativity?

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by Steve Hall    Mar-28-08    
Topic: Online, Opinion, Tools



It's a Flickr Search Tool for Art Directors!

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This ... this is amazing.

SF-based junior art director Bryan Denman and designer Ryan Teuscher built a flickr search bar for the advertising community. "It pulls in a flickr feed at speed (w/ some other tricks) so that an AD can quickly scour the site as a source for reference material," he wrote.

Play with it at Compfight.com. The super-fast search bar filters for images licensed by Creative Commons, among other neat tricks.

We queried "hamburger" just for kicks, and got a delicious-looking page loaded with hamburgers, hamburger restaurant signs, Ronald McDonald looking pensive, Paris Hilton eating a hamburger, and one lion.

by Angela Natividad    Mar-26-08    
Topic: Good, Online, Research, Specialty, Tools



Firebrand CEO Laments Company's Demise, Misunderstands Commercials

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Fighting to the end, Firebrand CEO Roman Vinoly shared his frustration over doubters of the ads-as-content concept with AdWeek, pondering, "Isn't it proven every Super Bowl and on lots of Web sites where people go? Isn't it proven by being one of the largest categories uploaded to YouTube? Is it that difficult to conceive that great creative created by great artists with all the money in the world could be compelling to consumers even though it's trying to sell a product?"

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by Steve Hall    Mar- 5-08    
Topic: Online, Opinion, Television, Tools



Rubicon Project Eliminates Ad Network Selection Headaches For Publishers

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Making life easier for publishers struggling to keep up with the explosion of ad networks - now numbering over 300 - and the determination of which network will yield the best results, is the Rubicon Project. Launched eight months ago by Frank Addante, the company, today, announced series B finding of $15 million bringing its total to $21 million.

We've seen a demo of Rubicon and its really fascinating. For a publisher trying to best monetize inventory, Rubicon, in a nutshell, does exactly that. A publisher joins with Rubicon, enters relevant information of their site and, poof, relevant ads are selected from the 300 or so ad networks in the system.

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by Steve Hall    Jan-28-08    
Topic: Good, Online, Tools



Gawker Eschews Ad Networks For 'Non-Ad' Gawker Artists Ads

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Gawker Media, publisher of the famed Gawker, Defamer, Lifehacker and other blogs, has, over the years, experimented in various ways with generating advertising revenue. One of the tactics they put in place a while back was to forgo the use of ad networks to fill its unsold, remnant space and, instead, offer it to artists with its Gawker Artists programs.

Gawker Artists is a collection of Gawker-published artists who benefit from the wide reach of Gawker Media blogs, gaining awareness they'd otherwise have to pay for. You see, Gawker Media doesn't charge for the ad space or for the artist's appearance on in Gawker Artists website.

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by Steve Hall    Jan-11-08    
Topic: Cause, Tools, Weblogs