Avenue A | Razorfish is one of the most successful on line advertising agencies.  AARF has done leading edge work for many of the most respected brands including Mercedes, JC Penney and Kraft.  They are in the thick of the Internet revolution as broadcast advertising dollars move dramatically to on-line in search of customers.  Agencies live in the space between Advertisers, Publishers, and Consumers.  It is a rapidly evolving field as the rich interactivity of the Web enables advertisers and consumers to meet and have a conversation about products and services.  AARF brings together professionals in marketing strategy, creative user experience design, and Internet technology to deliver world-class web-based experiences.

Advertisers Hit Fast Forward On Move Away From Typical TV Ads

The campaign is part of Levi's increased attention to the online channel. By next year, she expects the company's Web marketing spending will double, driven in part by Levi's opening its first online store last year.  "We are shifting [ad spending] from TV and print to things like online engagement marketing, like events," she said.  Avenue A/Razorfish handles both creative and media for Levi's.

http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003155641

In a classic marketing book, Al Ries explains “Positioning: the battle for your mind”.  In the first two pages of the book, I have more clearly understood than ever before the last six years of messages coming from Washington.  Do the following sound familiar:

“In our overcommunicated society, we oversimplify because that’s the only way to cope.”

“Since so little of your message is going to get through anyway, you concentrate on the perceptions of the prospect, not the reality of the product.”

An editor of The Economist in the 1950s once advised his journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. This formula is almost second nature for newspaper columnists and can make for excellent reading, but lousy guide for policy decisions.

"Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work."
-Vince Lombardi

"Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do."
-- Steve Farber, author

(CBS News)Along with his coauthor Stephen Dubner, Steven Levitt has written a book called Freakonomics, which details his innovative and brilliant way of looking at the world. Levitt's mind works in the following manner: First he asks questions that few have the creativity to ask; then he follows a rigorous statistical analysis to find the answers.

Book Review:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/04/opinion/main692911.shtml

Advertising 101

Find all the info you need on creating an ad budget, understanding ad mediums and determining which to use, creating great ads and direct mail pieces, and getting results.

(NY Times) May 11, 2005.  Wolfgang Puck introduced a new line of lattes this month. That the Los Angeles chef has stamped his name on yet another product isn't surprising. But the container is. It heats itself.

It took a California company named OnTech seven years and $24 million to create the self-heating cans, which are activated by pushing a plastic button on the bottom. Water flows into a sealed inner cone filled with quicklime, which is mostly calcium oxide. A chemical reaction heats the coffee to a pleasant 145 degrees in six to eight minutes, the amount of time it might take to order, pay for and receive a latte from a barista.

The Value of Knowledge Capital

Indiscriminate discarding of knowledge as an enterprise asset, whether in the form of accumulated employee training or junking of legacy software, has its origins in ideas proposed over a century ago about the value of capital and labor. These theories claim that only capital assets increase the productivity of labor.

Consequently, the productivity of an enterprise is measured only in terms of the productivity of its capital, such as return-on-assets or return-on-investment. The providers of capital are then entitled to the surplus, called profit or rent.

Knowledge Capital = management value-added / price of capital

This relation makes it possible to prepare a revised balance sheet for any firm, by adding a line item Knowledge Capital on the asset side of the ledger, and by increasing (or decreasing) the reported valuation of shareholder equity by the identical amount.

Knowledge as a capital asset

According to the American Time Use Survey, the government's first comprehensive time study, analyzed by American Demographics, average Americans spend 11% of their life in front of a TV screen, 35% sleeping and 33% at work. The article concludes that TV plays a commanding role in the consumer's life, with half of their leisure time spent there!

Based on interviews with about 21,000 people age 15 and older, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data goes on to show that:

• Working mothers with young children have only about three hours of leisure time a day.
• Teens age 15 to 19 sleep an average 9.4 hours a day, beating the 75+ segment by more than 20 minutes a day.
• Teenagers spend only seven minutes a day reading paper-based personal interest materials
• The 75+ group has the most hours of leisure time at eight, and read for 72 minutes a day for personal interest
• College educated workers spend 6% of their hours a day watching TV, while consumers with a high-school diploma but no job spend 17%
• Teens are active 40 minutes a day on physical activity, people from age 35 on spend 15 minutes or less, consumers with bachelor's degrees or higher tend to do more.

Read the Adage article and find reprints.

Theory of Constraints - Lecture One

The following four measurements are used to identify results for the overall organization:

Net Profit = Throughput - Operating Expense

Return on Investment (ROI)= (Throughput - Operating Expense) / Inventory

Productivity = Throughput / Operating Expense

Turnover = Throughput / Inventory

Wired News: Gore's TV Seeks Northern Insights

Short-form content -- be it viewer-submitted videos, independent film or computer animation -- is nearly ready for prime time, according to analysts.

The New York Times > Magazine > It's a Flat World, After All

Thomas Friedman

Here’s another story of “one guy” operating out of the mythical garage, i.e. today that means a blog site.  Now he’s one of the hotspots of the online media world…

PaidContent.org

"He is a genius," proclaims Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, a company that sells Web log advertising. "Everybody knows about Rafat Ali and bangs on his door to advertise with him." The fact of the matter is that in the broadband Internet world, Ali can stand alongside a Time Warner or a News Corp. and feel his power. His is an achievement that could not have been possible before the advent of inexpensive Web logging software in 2001.

Now, on the connection between media, technology, and finance, the topics paidContent covers every hour of every day, the self-effacing Ali is both a news breaker and a trusted source. Industry players around the globe regard him as a veritable new-age magnate. Ali, for his part, is modest about his rise, as befits his upbringing in a small university town in India.

New York Times to buy About.com for $410mm

Internet companies have started trading again at significantly higher multiples, and said The Times Co. would be able to use ad revenue from About.com to make up for the flagging classified ad sales that have plagued the industry.

Online advertising executives said the purchase would open the New York Times and its advertisers to a much broader consumer audience. About.com has more than 22 million visitors each month, nearly double the 13 million visitors to the NYTimes.com and related sites combined.

America Online says incorporating more video content and related advertising is job No. 1, and key to its Web at-large strategy.

A media report by Avenue A/Razorfish earlier this year expects that 2005 will be a landmark year for advertisers' use of online video. Still, video advertising represented just $121 million of the $9.5 billion spent by advertisers on all online media, according to JupiterResearch. The research outfit projects that overall spending on online advertising will swell from $6.6 billion in 2003 to $16.1 billion in 2009, with video growing exponentially.

More…

The Rise of the Consumer-Generated Media Machine

A new citizen-centric media, a sort of me-to-you "minimedia," will soon rule. That's the vision of the youthful brigade driving this movement. And for now, the wind is definitely at their back.

The unspoken secret of the blogosphere is that it's not yet as large as the recent hype would suggest. The power lies in its interconnectedness, the fluid linking from one node to another. Nevertheless, there are only about 5 million active sites, total, and most of those have but a handful of regular readers. According to Anil Dash, a vice president of Six Apart, the company that created the blogosphere's most widely used software, "The majority of bloggers are writing for only five to 10 friends. Fewer than 100 blogs have 100,000 readers. Maybe 50."

Blog to the Future - Editorial - CMO Magazine

Web diaries are moving from the personal to the professional without losing their personal touch, and it's that inherent chatty format that makes blogs the ideal way to build credibility with customers.

reveries - marketing insights and ideas

Reveries Magazine launched on October 15, 1996 and has steadily developed into a favorite of thought-leading marketers at companies and agencies, large and small, in America and around the world. Centered on the insights, ideas and energies that drive the future of marketing, Reveries aspires to be as intelligent, inquisitive and innovative as you are. 

New Scientist Special Report on India

The rewards for India of a thriving science-based economy could be huge. The investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates that if India gets everything right it will have the third largest economy in the world by 2050, after China and the US. India is not yet a knowledge superpower. But it stands on the threshold.