NEW METHOD IN OUTDOOR ADVERTISING

A new method to billboard advertising is starting to emerge..."clustering," or "storyboarding." Creating a story through a series of clustered billboards over a short distance can have a big impact on retention and increased ROI. Next time you're looking at investing in outdoor advertising, you might want to consider this "storyboarding" method.

SERIOUS DECLINE IN TRADITIONAL AD SPENDING PREDICTED

Local ad spending forecasted to decline through 2013 according to Tomn Buono, CEO of BIA Advisory Services and reported by Ad Age. According to the report, ad spending was more than $155b last year, by 2013 traditional advertising could drop to $112b.

In contrast, Interactive Media is predicted to continue its rise, from $14b last year to over $32b by 2013. It's no wonder major newspapers around the country are filing for bankruptcy or closing all together.

SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH: CREATING HUMAN-CENTRIC LENS

Social media is changing many aspects of business from how we talk to our customers to how we listen to the people who make our livelihoods possible. Over the past several years, social media marketing has been elevated to a degree of credibility within public relations, marketing communications and customer service. The information from the raw voices of our customers (consumer generated media) that occurs without a traditional statistical overlay has been slower to be embraced by the marketing research industry. Click here to read more...

THE SHORTEST URL COMPRESSOR POSSIBLE...

You may have heard of TinyURL.com to shorten your web addresses for sites like Twitter, but I've recently discovered the shortest one possible, Is.GD.

KINDLE 2 IS NOW AVAILABLE

Kindle 2 is now available...what does it mean for the publishing industry? If you're not familiar with Kindle, it's a wireless reading device in which you can purchase books, magazines and newspapers and read at your leisure with now bulk to lug. It's possible Kindle could do what MP3 players/I-Pod did for music, but only time will tell. From a marketing perspective, I'm curious as to what types of advertising opportunities there will be and who will manage it. If you'd like to learn more from a users perspective, check out the video below.

'SEARCH' IS EVOLVING...GETTING SMARTER

Over the past decade Starbucks has help evolve the coffee business and opened the doors for many Mom & Pop type places to thrive. Today, the likes of Google and Yahoo are doing the same with 'search.'

The days of people typing a couple of words into a search box and hoping for the best are numbered. Companies big and small are moving things forward, experimenting with searches based on complex sentences, images and audio, mashing up mobile search with location data, and aiming to make results more useful than the traditional list of blue links.

One approach is to show results in a more visual style. Viewzi, for example, has a number of options, including viewing results from Flickr as a photo thumbnail cloud; viewing thumbnails of web pages found by Google, Ask, Yahoo and Live Search on one page; and viewing news results from Google News in the style of a newspaper front page. Seachme, also presents its results as a series of web screenshots, mimicking the iTunes Cover Flow look.

Click here to read a comprehensive article by TechRadar.com on the evolution of search.

SITE THAT HELPS MEDIA BUYERS FIND SELLERS

Alternative advertising approaches appear frequently, including the efforts of Curb and Brand Girl. Aiming to make it easier for brands to find such opportunities, DOmedia is an online marketplace and community designed specifically to support the alternative advertising industry.

DOmedia bills itself as a sort of matchmaking service for media buyers and media sellers. Listed in its media database, for example, are opportunities to advertise on college student notebooks, on phone kiosks, on golf carts and in restrooms. Media buyers can search through the listings on DOmedia for opportunities they like—searching by geography, advertising category or venue, for example—using its campaign management tools to save, share and organize the ones they identify. Media sellers, meanwhile, can use the site to promote their inventory. Finally, the online DOmedia library provides a glossary of terms, new technology spotlight and DMA rankings, among other information.

As traditional advertising continues to struggle, alternative approaches will be sure to expand. No shortage of opportunities making all the right connections.

SOCIAL MEDIA NUMBERS SKYROCKET

The usage of social media networks continues to escalate and now there is a new king...Facebook! Facebook eclipses News Corps' MySpace for the #1 spot with over 68 million unique visits, well ahead of MySpace's 58 million. A relative newcomer, Twitter, surges all the way to the #3 spot. LinkedIN also moves up quite a few spots to #5 as the most popular social media networks. To see the complete list, click here.

"CLICKTALE" IS A POWERFUL ANALYTICS APP

Just ran across a fairly new and interesting analytics software app for tracking blog and website traffic that's pretty powerful. ClickTale actually creates movies of your visitors' actions so you can see exactly what they are seeing and doing on your site. This tracking information could have a HUGE impact on your bottom line! To learn more, read this article by Venture Beat or watch the demo below.

DELIVER YOUR BRAND IN NATURAL MEDIUMS

CURB...an out-of-the-box agency dedicated to helping their clients deliver brands and messages using natural mediums....like sidewalks, grass, and even snow has some pretty cool ideas.

GOOGLE EXPERIMENT COULD SPARK SEO CHANGE

Preferred Sites is a new experimental feature for Google Search that lets you personalize the results by adding a list of sites you want to appear more often when you search. Read More from Google.

GREAT COMMERCIAL FOR CENTRUM SILVER

I heard this commercial was banned from prime time...great spot!

WHAT TO MAKE FOR DINNER...

Okay, here's a good idea...You get home from work late and there isn't much in the way of food in the fridge or cupboard...what to do? Well, you can type in what ingredients you do have into a website called Not Beans Again and they will come up with a recipe for ya.

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA ELECTED A PRESIDENT

If it were not for the Obama campaigns' astute understanding of online marketing, it's very possible we'd have someone else in the White House right now. Read More or download Obama's Social Media Toolkit