Ignite Raleigh - Creative Community On Fire!

If you were given 5 minutes to stand on a stage in front of an audience and the spotlight was on - what would you say? That is the question posed and the premise of Ignite_(insert city here) events. Last night, it was Raleigh's turn and I was proud of our creative community and the evening's presenters. While the common thread was social media - it was more about the conversations and the community and less about the medium. You'll read all about the specifics on Twitter (if Twitter was working today) by following the hashtag #IgniteRaleigh and I'll post the videos of some of my favorites here, too.

@ZachWard did a fantastic job as MC and Rhett and Link tickled everyone's funny bones with their songs and style. If you haven't checked them out yet, you're missing out on some very entertaining local talent; they dub themselves Internetainers. The duo is NC's own Flight of the Conchords.

The evening worked like a talent show but without an air guitar band act or a Wizard of Oz skit. There was nothing business about it - all fun, some inspiration and a lot of motivation. Ignite is about sharing and spreading ideas. I was blown away by photojournalist and cell phone photographer Shawn Rocco's work - check it out at CellularObscura.com . James Avery had the best slide deck, IMHO and gave great ideas on how to bootstrap it through startup phase. What Would Jesus Tweet caught everyone's attention and earned it - Derek's delivery was exceptional and really funny. Ryan Allis, CEO of iContact got up and did his thing and shared really, the one idea of the evening that could change the world; working to end poverty globally. He lives his slide deck every day and did a terrific job of encouraging us to recognize our good fortune and to work to help others who are not as fortunate. I'm a ladyist and it was a real pleasure to have so many smart women represent for us all, all night! @Ruby kicked it off - check out her thought provoking work at OrangePolitics and Kristin Zaccheo made a strong case for getting science and research online and not just stuck in the laboratory.

While host Wayne Sutton's presentation on Why The Triangle is Better Than The Silicon Valley was funny and he made some decent points... his envy was showing. ;o) Wayne, I think you have to at least go to the Valley before you make such claims. Full warning: you'll be hard-pressed to leave my friend! I was.

But it's nights like last night that make me proud to live where I do now and grateful to be a part of the intelligent, collaborative and creative community that we have found here in Raleigh.

I hear you but I still haven't made up my mind

"There will be no interactive agencies or traditional agencies in a few years - there will just be advertising agencies and each will do it all under their one roof."

Recently, I've spoken to a few recognized thought leaders and also a few regular media Jacks and Jills and it seems that a lot of us are talking about the sustainability of specialization in this field. The reason this is a buzz-worthy topic within my network today is because interactive shops are now taking on traditional services. Traditional shops have been bringing on interactive arms and touting full service for years now; there are plenty of full service agencies who were once TV, Radio and Print powerhouses which now "do interactive".

Some of us think that the move towards Full Service - where ad agencies will direct the entire media mix and the sum will be in theory, greater than all the parts - is happening now for digital shops and it's a good thing. And it could be - digital should drive the marketing mix (for all the reasons frequently stated on this blog). However, traditional shops have done a pretty lousy job of integrating interactive into their core competencies at the level that delivers real value to the client. The two fields move at dramatically different paces and are held to very different expectations. Undeniably though, each needs the other to reach optimal results and it makes a great deal of sense to have one firm directing the mix and capitalizing on all that data, negotiating cross-channel pricing and effectively communicating intelligence under a sole set of objectives. Others say "specialization breeds excellence" and there are too many parts for one company to do well.


I'm on the fence but I'm leaning... How do you feel?

Blog Neglect or Anticipation Building?

There are plenty of new things going on at Media Two including our very cool new office digs located at 319 W. Martin Street in the warehouse district of Raleigh. The street level sign just went above the door this week as shown in the picture… We had our mid-summer interns get started, we are hosting the SEO/SEM Meetup next week, we’ve had several clients over, 10-15 vendor partners (if you count each of Louise’s trips – we’ve had like 100!) and a whole lot more going on!

I just wanted to thank everyone for their patience as moves are never fun – and just as importantly let you know that our Media Two Point Oh! will be resuming shortly with a whole new look and feel. Yes, we are finally dedicating time to updating our own blog – and we’re actually going to get our content updated on our website so that everyone knows we have full service media capabilities (yes – we even do traditional), a rock star design & development team as well as social media capabilities and a whole lot more.

We're excited to be in Raleigh - and we welcome everyone to come visit us! If you can't make it - there are a lot of exciting changes that we'll be posting online as well - so stay tuned! Thanks from all of us at Media Two!

Search Engine Marketing: Bing Review

Well – we’re early into Microsoft’s release of their latest search engine Bing (code name Kumo, formerly known as Live Search, formerly known as MSN Search, etc, etc), but I wanted to give my 2 cents on the early launch.

I’ve found some interesting things, such as try searching on the words “google”, “yahoo”, “aol” or “ask” (all competitors to Bing), and what you’ll get is one single result found for each. At first, I thought that was very impressive and nice of them – but then I realized, it is completely eliminating all of the other components to those such as eliminating their analytics, or eliminating companies that offer Google services, etc… I still haven’t decided whether this is good or bad – just interesting. Now do a search on “bing” – and you get a little bit of everything. One has to imagine that because you’re on Bing already, you’re probably searching for something other than Bing – but who knows. So I did a search on “MSN Search”… Interestingly enough – Live.com was there – but no bing?

Of course the thing I’m interested in the most, is searching on “Media Two”. As you can see from the screen shot – we didn’t quite make the number 1 spot. This is interesting to me, as I know our traffic numbers are greater than the first one (according to Compete we have more than 10x the unique visitors), the name is used in our title tags, description and our URL – whereas the person in the number one spot is missing it in their description… So just another interesting observation, but it appears that a “.com” address holds more weight than a “.net” address.

One feature I do like is the mouse-over effect on the right of the listings… It continues the description from the meta description into a convenient pop up window. This however, is not new technology as places like Ask.com have been doing it with preview windows that even include imagery for a while now. And I do like that the results seem to be fast, and for the most part pretty relevant – but I think that’s been established in the industry for a while… So what is new and great about this search engine called Bing? In their current preview stage, it just doesn’t appear to be the next best thing in search, and until someone comes out with that, they’re still going to called acronyms such as the one I’ve heard twice already this morning: “But It’s Not Google”.

DOES SIZE REALLY MATTER?

As I "re-imagine" interactive advertising design as part of IAB's new task force to update their new standard ad guidelines, I ask myself, "Does Size REALLY matter?". The answer is less than you might think.



I have a feeling that more people will jump to the conclusion that increasing ad sizes will magically reverse the trend of declining online metrics. Not so fast my friends. The answer is in positioning, not size. Think about it. Where do you see most large rectangle units? Homepages and within content/stories. Now, where are the smaller units? They are on the peripherals within the navigations - where no one is looking. It's not about the ad size of a takeover ad. It's about the take over itself. Same thing with a Welcome Ad. To this point, there has been chatter of getting rid of the leaderboard unit based on performance. The size isn't obsolete, the position is. Hey, I've been on the publisher side, so I undertand the need for buttons, leaderboards, skys. But if we want to really improve the performance of the online channel, then we'll put our thinking caps on and come up with better positioning and user experiences.

Quick quiz: Without looking, which one of these is in the header of this blog? A. Clouds, B. Trees, C. Birds. Don't know? Thought so, but I bet you saw the ad for the Entertainment Book.

(Media Buying Tip: Ad networks or any buy that involves remnant inventory will charge the same rate for a bundle of ad sizes (468s, 160s, 728s and 300s) compared to portals or contents site, which put a higher value on the bigger sizes - as well as they should. So take advantage of this and opt to run only the bigger sizes, or the 300s only. You'll end up with better metrics and more importantly, better positioning as well.)