The first banner ad appeared on HotWired 18 years ago. That banner asked, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE?” An arrow pointed to the words “YOU WILL.” When people did click they were whisked off to the AT&T Solutions Web site. In spite of the apparent lack of creativity, novelty ensured that people did click. Unfortunately it did not take long for the novelty to wear off.

So where are we today? As Brian Morrissey notes in the article “Banner Ad’s Creators Dismayed By Its Current State,” online advertising is now big business but one that ...

So I finally caught up with some of those “famous” viral videos that “everyone” has been talking about thanks to AdAge’s fourth annual Viral Video Awards.

In spite of my interest in viral advertising, several of the featured videos were new to me. I guess I am just not that into viral videos after all. Or maybe an alternative explanation is that even the best viral videos still fail to reach an extended audience, unless interest is seeded by mass media or personal recommendation. 

One of the videos I had not seen was the one for Angry Birds Space. ...

With all the news about Facebook’s collaboration with HTC to produce the HTC First phone, it might be easy to lose sight of some of the more fundamental shifts taking place behind the scenes at Facebook. With the acquisition of the ad server Atlas and other moves, some have suggested that Facebook’s social graph has not lived up to its ad targeting promise.

Essentially, what Facebook has done is to adopt the ad re-targeting protocols prevalent elsewhere on the web. As this post explains for dummies like me, that essentially means that now ads on Facebook can be targeted to ...

I arrived in Kenya last week just before the results of the latest election were finally announced. It was four days after the vote, and Kenyans still did not know who their new president would be. Needless to say, things were a little tense in Nairobi and elsewhere, but, unlike the 2008 election, the waiting period passed off quietly and Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta was declared President-elect on March 9th.

While the fact that the election passed off without violence was appreciated by Kenyans and visitors like myself, I suspect the international news media had a slightly different viewpoint. ...

In this Ad Age article, Sarah Hofstetter asserts that marketers are fascinated with real-time marketing and suggests that it actually may not be right for every brand. I am sure she is right. Just because you can do something, it does not mean you should do it, and that principle encompasses far more than just real-time marketing in social media. 

Hofstetter states:

Even for brands that have the strategy and structures in place to warrant it, not every major cultural moment deserves a real-time response.

She proposes that brands need to invest time and resources ahead of an event ...

According to this article by Emily Steel, published in the Financial Times, smartphones are responsible for a reduction in purchasing of impulse items sold at the checkout. It confirms that I made a mistake today when I walked into town and left my BlackBerry behind. If I had taken the BlackBerry, maybe I would have been busy tweeting instead of grabbing a bar of chocolate.

Apparently the use of smartphones to while away the time in the checkout line is wreaking havoc on the magazine industry. The number of single-copy sales of U.S. magazines at newsstands and retail outlets ...

I have to admit that I am a Google+ doubter. Like many, I signed up soon after Google+ launched and then forgot about it. But according to a post on globalwebindex, Google+ is the second most popular social network in the world (thanks to Rob Valsler for the link). Who knew?

The reason that Rob highlighted the status of Google+ is that when I asked for examples of brand extensions that went badly wrong on The Greenhouse (Millward Brown’s own social network), Andrew Jerina proposed Google’s Wave and Buzz as failures and seemed to imply Google+ was destined to ...

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague David Kimmett, Director of Client Solutions in North America, sent me a link to this post on the Nieman Journalism Lab about a National Public Radio (NPR) experiment on Facebook. In his email, he said:

I saw this and thought you’d be interested. I was intrigued by the commonalities between segment traits for the successful NPR stories and successful marketing comms.

Well, David was right. I am interested. And I think that there is a lot that marketers can learn from the experiment.

The most important finding is only mentioned in passing ...

Millward Brown has just released its Digital and Media Predictions for 2013. This year’s crop of predictions seems particularly good to me. But then the nice thing about predicting the future is that, while you can safely assume that most of the things you predict will prove to be wrong, equally, most people will have forgotten what you said by the time you are proved wrong.

Of course, some incorrect predictions do go down in history ascribed to the unfortunate individual who made them. I rather like the following one:

So I repeat that while theoretically and technically television ...

Back in 2010, we were still observing the mindless pursuit of fans and followers by some brands. They assumed the more fans their page had the better, but they didn't have a clear strategy for engaging those fans once they were there. Little thought was given to who the fans were, why they might want to like or follow the brand and what they expected to get out of the association.

Since then, things have changed as marketers have become more mindful about their use of social media. Recognizing that an engaged fan is likely to be someone who already ...