By Patricia Wilson


The iPad. Promoted tweets. Interactive ads. Which hot new trends have merit for advertising? Getting to the soul of marketing. These were just some of the main topics covered at the 2010 Ad Age Digital Conference held April 13 and 14 in New York.


BrandCottage was on hand at the conference. Here are some of the event’s highlights:

Best speaker: Jim Farley, group vice president of global marketing at Ford Motor Co.


Farley, who is the cousin of the late comedian, Chris Farley, explained that Ford is riding a wave of advertising success based on the “democratization of marketing.” In both digital and traditional marketing, he explained, Ford puts the brand in the hands of real consumers. “That’s what digital has shown us: how to earn credibility among consumers,” he said.


One out of every four advertising dollars spent by Ford goes to digital, including social media. “Social media has shown the importance of being authentic, even in traditional media,” Farley noted.


Few could argue with Farley’s authenticity. At 16, he purchased his dream car, a Ford Mustang. “To be good at marketing, you have to understand the soul of what you’re selling,” he said.


See Ford’s Jim Farley Says Recession Was a Blessing for Digital in Advertising Age for full story.


Biggest news: Twitter COO Dick Costolo announced promoted tweets. It was refreshing to hear from Costolo that consumers and advertisers have a “wait and see what happens” attitude about the acceptance of promoted tweets and that Twitter was going to move ahead carefully (testing of promoted tweets began during the conference).


“We wanted to do something that just enhances the conversation that companies are already having with their customers on Twitter,” Costolo said. Of course, Twitter also needs to build a revenue model to capitalize on the company’s reported 50 million daily tweets — a fact not lost on attendees.


Twitter’s initial version of promoted tweets — in the form of keyword ads — will appear in search results. Later the ads will appear in user feeds on Twitter and on third-party clients such as TweetDeck, TwitterBerry and Tweetie, which Twitter recently acquired.


In short, each ad is a tweet that will appear at the top of a search. The promotional tweet can be re-tweeted, just as a regular tweet is passed around today. Costolo said ads would be available on a CPM-basis.


See Chats, Stats and Secrets about Twitter in Advertising Age for more information.


Biggest antagonist: Yahoo! Scientist Duncan Watts, who questioned the value of tweets.


Watts reported that, based on his research, a tweet’s average influence score is 0.28 people. “Most of them will send tweets and no one else re-tweets,” he said. “A lot of times, not that many people are listening on Twitter.”


However, Watts did not discount the value of thousands or millions of many-to-many connections. In fact, he said that advertisers would get more value from a lot of small influencers than from a big influencer such as Kim Kardashian, at $10,000 per tweet.


“If you recruit enough people who, on average, influence just one other person, you could get a much better return on investment,” he said.


Best quote: “I’ve seen the future and it’s covered in greasy fingerprints,” said Simon Dumenco, Ad Age’s Media Guy.


Dumenco gave a lighthearted speech on the transformational power of the iPad, for which he believes fingerprints are about the only down side of the device. Still, he added, publishers have only begun to scratch the surface of the iPad’s potential. “So far, the iPad’s killer app is demo-ing the iPad,” said Dumenco, quoting technologist Ben Rosen.


Cautious optimism: Digital is here to stay and marketers are getting on board in big ways. However, most CMOs and brand marketers say they are not hopping on the next shinny thing just to be first. “We never hop on the next hot thing, but the iPad made a lot of sense for us,” said Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of NPR.


For companies such as Dell, however, it’s full speed ahead. “Dell is a total digital company and it’s part of our corporate DNA,” said Dell CMO Erin Nelson. On Twitter, Nelson said the social media platform “has collapsed our customer feedback cycle and dramatically improved product development.”


In conclusion: Understanding how consumers use various media, how they react with online ads and why they join social networks in the first place — these are all important strategy questions for branders. We’ve moved way past mere reach and frequency.


What is clear is that (1) no single media owns the consumer and (2) the consumer now has a lot of influence. Smart marketers understand that consumers now seek authentic and trustworthy brands — new realities thanks to digital and social media.


Patricia Wilson is the founder of BrandCottage, a media marketing company with offices in New York, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

By Patricia Wilson


We are very pleased to announce (see press release) that BrandCottage has teamed with The Farm, a creative advertising and production services agency, to launch a new USA TODAY campaign, What America Wants.

The campaign starts today and targets advertisers and media buyers — essentially people just like us. The campaign emphasizes USA TODAY’s continued leadership role and connection with its readers via print, USATODAY.com and on the iPhone.


By the way, if you haven’t seen USA TODAY’s mobile application, you really should. It’s impressive. It “share article” feature fluidly links with Twitter, Facebook, text and e-mail applications to enable the easy sharing of information with your communities.


The campaign is running print and online advertising in trades such as Mashable, Adage, Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, TechCrunch and CNNMoney.com. Ads will also appear on television, on Facebook and LinkedIn, and on elevator screens.


Campaign components also include guerrilla marketing and social media tactics.


The multimedia world is rapidly changing and this is producing many opportunities for small, experienced agencies. What wins today are strong ideas, speed and flexibility. We are humbled to be part of the USA TODAY brand initiative.


Patricia Wilson is the founder of BrandCottage, a media marketing company with offices in New York, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

By Patricia Wilson


For online advertising providers, the honeymoon is finally over.


As a seasoned media planner, I was not surprised by a recent report designed to provide much needed damage control for the under-performing online advertising industry. The document, from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Bain & Company, highlights the many online advertising challenges being fac

ed by marketers. More importantly, the report, Building Brands Online: An Interactive Advertising Action Plan, attempts to provide a road map to improve the industry’s growing negative perceptions about the brand-building value of online advertising.

The IAB/Bain report is a much needed response to last year’s findings that online advertising inventory is highly undervalued by brand

marketers. At the heart of the problem, according to an Online Media Daily story:

. . . online sales organizations have lacked the sophistication necessary to turn the perceptions advertisers and agencies have about the value of online advertising . . .

The report also identifies five key obstacles that have kept marketers from shifting more of their budgets online:

• Online ad formats and creative have not evolved to meet marketers’ needs.
• Media companies lack category expertise when they sell to brand marketers and engage with them too late in the media planning process.
• Marketers want integrated campaigns instead of platform-specific media programs.
• While marketers see high value in online advertising and believe that it could be effective at all stages of the purchase funnel, current industry practices inhibit greater investment of brand ad dollars.
• Marketers express needs for differentiated services for their brands and believe that media companies and agencies have to meet those differentiated needs for online advertising to grow.

Measurement Intoxication

What I find most interesting is that the once-mighty “click” measurement is now out of favor, having underperformed miserably and showing no signs of being resurrected.


“Ultimately, marketers are looking for media companies to offer a true triple-play service model from direct response to awareness to high impact brand engagement,” said John Frelinghuysen in a press release. Frelinghuysen is a partner in Bain & Company’s media practice and lead author of the study.


As a classically trained media planner, I place a high value on measurability. However, just as with traditional media, we must be careful not to chase what we can measure – what fits under the microscope and what shows some ROI – just so we can rattle back some good news to CMOs and CFOs. Click rates, foe example, may NOT really be a true indication of what’s driving the Brand long term. We must avoid becoming over-intoxicated on the wrong digital measurements.


Despite all the Technorati talk of measurement over the past few years, it appears online advertising has come full circle. It is now faced with the exact same question we’ve always asked about media, including the traditional television, print, radio and outdoor channels: How do we best measure online advertising’s full impact on our brand?


Patricia Wilson is the founder of BrandCottage, a media marketing company with offices in New York, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.