February 3, 2012
When Facebook becomes a public company-it’s obvious that it will be forced to generate ever increasing revenues from its user base. The only way the company can deliver these revenues is by selling more advertising and making more money through user transactions. The advertising issue is key-...
January 23, 2012
Listening to Terry Gross interview Trent Reznor, I was struck by the musician’s drive for constant experimentation. He explained in the interview that in the process of recording the soundtrack for the new movie, The Girl with Dragon Tattoo, Reznor and his creative partner Atticus Ross, purchased...
August 19, 2011
Q : Is it an ad, a short-film, a car/skateboard movie? A: It’s none of them and all of them. Q: Is it for Ford, Monster or DC Shoes? A: It’s for all of them Q: Where’s the script? A: It has no script, no plot – it doesn’t conform to anything we would know as a...
July 12, 2011
Alex Steer’s great post on The Futures Company blog about the future of advertising can be used to establish a clear set of deliverables that define what advertising now has to do. 1. Interact with your audience: It has to be interactive-the best stuff always was and still is. It allow the...
March 23, 2011
Not everyone can afford to run or produce a TV ad, not everyone wants to feel forced or confined by the limitations of the 30 second spot, but why should that mean a brand can't access the use the most powerful medium of all time- film?Do away with the restrictions and challenges of 30 seconds and...
February 27, 2011
"At GEICO, for example, we enthusiastically spent $900 million last year onadvertising to obtain policyholders who deliver us no immediate profits. If we could spend twice that amount productively, we would happily do so though short-term results would be further penalized.."Warren Buffett-Letter...
January 25, 2011
The full merging of brands into the social media space is now going to happen with Facebook's new initiative around sponsored stories. This means that your interactions with brands on the giant social network get turned into ads which get shared on the network. This development marks the point when...
August 26, 2010
Google is facing a real problem with ubiquity, while to those inside the company might feel under threat from Facebook, by playing defense they're on a fast-track to even greater ubiquity with Android, etc. Google's plan for little blue links to appear wherever possible is no secret, but the...
June 12, 2010
The Wired UK article on the battle between Four Square and Gowalla makes for a fascinating read. What's especially interesting is the career path that Four Square founder, Dennis Crowley took after graduation. After graduating in communication from Syracuse University in 1999, he wanted to work in...
January 21, 2010
According to Campaign, VW is looking for a social media agency in the UK. This will add another partner to the company's already expansive communications roster, add incremental fees and mean there's more to manage and co-ordinate. In a an environment where budgets and resources are being...
April 1, 2009
Facebook is clearly in some kind of internal crisis with the recent departure of the CFO, it appears the company is engaged in some kind of soul searching around the need to demonstrate serious revenue growth. Time Magazine seems to believe that Facebook can never make money."The reason that social...
October 23, 2008
There's a recent article in Ad Age that talks about the ANA meeting where CMOs vented their frustration with ad agencies over their responsiveness and the increasing opportunity they believe exists with media companies. "Agencies and ad networks came in for some rough treatment at a CMO
roundtable...
September 16, 2008
It's very easy for creative briefs to become shopping lists of client requests for "must haves" to include in the advertising. These living proof points are supposed validation of a brand's existence, but is this the right approach and does it leading to better ads?Paul Feldwick, the master planner...
March 2, 2008
A few weeks back Esther Dyson wrote an op-ed piece in the WSJ about the future of advertising. She uses the example of Dopplr (the travel based social network) as a way of imagining a new brand relationship. "Each user determines who will get into his own garden,
whether friends or vendors....
December 14, 2007
"Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking."Robert Stephens, founder of GeekSquadVia Social Customer ManifestoPosted by Ed Cotton
Influx Insights is the blog of BSSP's Influx Strategic Consulting Division. Up and running since 2004, the blog covers branding and the related areas of trends and technology.
