I had the pleasure of attending a dinner last week with a dozen CEO’s/divisional executives in the ad/digital media industry. As we went around the table, I was pretty surprised at the limited focus (I’m being polite) on marketing via conversational media. I tried to instigate a bit on what - to me - feels like a compelling question to be asking these days…

“How can you integrate conversation into the message, and how can you effectively distribute the message into the conversation?”

While conversational marketing doesn’t seem to have “hit” Madison Ave the way Search has, everyone does see it coming. But, in the absence of a “clear and present danger” to the ad business, this still feels like a powerpoint-centric exercise. (more…)

social, strategy | 1 Comment »

There is an interesting post at the NAA Digital Edge blog, commenting on a new study done by the Media Management Center at Northwestern on how teens consume news. An excerpt from NAA’s summary below:

…the Media Management Center is recommending taking that “catches my eye” phrase and using it s a central point in a teen/young reader growth strategy. This doesn’t mean putting humorous kitten user-generated video content on the top of your news site, but it means putting sports, entertainment and features stories out there for teens to stumble across.

The conclusions put forward are really sound - push your content out, don’t wait hoping that it will find you. (more…)

strategy | No Comments »

Local search with that promise gets my attention!

That’s a line from BMW’s announcement of (purportedly) the world’s first Google Local Search showing up on a dashboard. You can see photos and more details at Jalopnik, a niche news site for autophiles. Only available in Germany on BMW cars, it’s the next logical step from prior announcements from Google, Yahoo and MS on their “send to car” features. You can get a little orientation on YouTube here.

So, is the dashboard yet another media screen worthy of attention? (more…)

mobile search, strategy, maps, local mobile | 1 Comment »