henrikharsbo.dk

With A Little Help From Google

Danish front runner ad agency WDP (also known as NetPeople) has drawn the conclusion that Google rules. Thus they have centered their site totally around Google searches. Take a look at www.wdp.dk

I see where they are going with this approach. Linking to Google search results about their work is a nifty, no nonsense way of showing potential clients that they know what the web is all about, namely search.

Still, a list of search results is a pretty naked promotion of site content and the over all design is pretty horrible in all its 'Googleness'.

That leaves me stranded between praising the concept as a nouvelle design idea and downing it for it's cheap looking design and total lack of structure.

Goodbye To Traditional Advertising

A new report states that traditional advertising will be dead within five years!

The report takes a look at a business which is indeed in rapid change. Among other things it points to the fact that the creative role of ad agencies is sliding away and that consumers are taking over with a wealth of creative ingenuity.

"Amateurs and semi-professionals are increasingly creating low cost advertising content that threatens to bypass creative agencies, while publishers and broadcasters are broadening their own creative roles."

What is interesting about the report is that it is published by IBM... I guess it goes to show that the establishment (conservative blue chip companies) is finally coming to terms with what was said in The Cluetrain Manifesto 8 years ago ;-) 

Newspaper Readers Are Shifting To The Web

It has been obvious for a very long time (in Denmark too). But now there's actually a statistic to back it up: American newspaper readers are moving from print to web.

Sales of American newspapers fell almost 3 percent over the spring and summer compared with the same period of the year before.

The drop is reported by Audit Bureau of Circulations and it reflects the growing shift of readers to the Internet, where newspaper readership has climbed.

According to The New York Times an analysis of 88 major papers shows that in the last two years, about half had seen no significant change in combined print and online readership, or showed an increase.

The newspaper industry now hopes that the shift in readership will make an impression on advertisers, who have been retreating from newspapers despite an expanding economy. Advertisers generally don't consider an online reader to be as valuable as a print reader. It still remains to be seen whether these latest umbers will change their perception.

Warfare Or Marketing?

Advertising is war! At least it's kind of creepy how much of the lingo spoken among advertising professionals stem from military jargon:

• We aim our message at a target group
• Hoping to hit them with our punch lines
• Some times we use guerrilla marketing
• Or seek to infect the market virally
• ... via a well planned campaign
• And then we sit back to measure the number of hits to our web sites

Who said that we are now in the era of dialog marketing?

Blasted Marketing

If you are being paid to blog about a specific product you bring a full disclosure!!

That is and has always been the rule in the Blogosphere. But a new service payperpost.com, where bloggers are paid to write about specific products, tumbles this rule like dry weed.

Currently  the site has offers like iTunes, Superman Returns, Match.com and many other products for bloggers to cover while getting paid. The site does not require that the blogger run a disclosure about the writing being paid for. And that sucks!

This service is as bad as spam mail and other forms of direct marketing. As a matter of fact I think it is even worse as it cloaks marketing by dressing it up to seem like honest blogging. Even worse the whole scheme helps undermining the credibility of all bloggers.

Tv Under Fire From New Media

While U.S. television networks are about to present their fall programs next week, the buzz isn't really about the next hit sitcom, drama or reality show. The center of attention is new media: cellphones, portable music players, video games and the Internet, writes Reuters.

When broadcast networks ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox on Monday start their annual event for advertisers to book commercial space for the 2006/2007 prime time broadcast season, the prediction is that new media will steal a fair share of the advertising money.

While TV remains the dominant outlet, viewership is nonetheless falling as everything from music downloads to video games compete for people's time.

"Upfront buying still makes sense, and TV is still a very powerful medium. But it's about strategic decisions, and because there are a lot more choices, because consumers are utilizing more and different kinds of media vehicles, we can't ignore them," says Charlie Rutman, Chief Executive Officer of Havas media buyer MPG North America to the news wire. 

Technorati: Advertising | Tv

Stop The Blog Spammers

The Blogosphere is slowly drowning in spam comments, writes news.com. Don't I know it. At least four times a week I have to remove a comment advertising porn or gambling from this blog.

And that's just my humble publishing space. Slightly more popular blogs like Boing Boing ;-) has had to totally remove the comment function, mainly because of an explosion in junk comments. While Robert Scoble's Scobleizer blog manages to round up 100 spam comments a day.

While there are filters and other software to combat the spam, it remains a problem for both blog owners and readers.
»It reminds me of visible smog, because it obscures what you want to be looking at. You have to waste brain cycles to filter it out,« says Mark Frauenfelder, co-editor of Boing Boing to the techie news site.

Why don't spammers understand that by posting irrelevant stuff on a blog, they annoy the readers -- thereby alienating the very customers they want to sell their product to? In fact it is somewhat comparable to a grocer hitting people in the head with a six pack of beer in order for them to notice and buy the damn thing.

Technorati: Spam | Blogs