David Armano on Influence Ripples and Social Media Fragmentation:

Successful personal and corporate brands alike will be the ones who take a holistic view when creating, maintaining and amplifying their ripples. This means avoiding the temptation to hyper fixate on one venue thinking it's a replacement for another.

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Neil Perkin on social networks and what they mean:

Networks are fundamentally changing the profile of our communication and the way trends propagate. 'Exhaust data', 'phatic communication' – hugely powerful forms of communication about which we know very little.  Networks not only enable, they magnify trends – at a speed and power never seen before.

Go read the whole thing.

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Richard Huntington on big brand ideas:

Maybe it's time to free [above the line] advertising from the need to represent the entirety of the brand idea and recognise that other disciplines are capable of doing this in a richer and more rewarding way. In particular, for many brands it's their online experience that should be delivering the big brand idea in all its technicolour glory.

The bad news for ad agencies would be the decline of the set-piece brand ad as the discipline got back to the job of selling. Seeing advertising recast as the new below-the-line discipline is unlikely to be popular in Soho.

On the other hand, the good news for ad agencies is that few of the brand's other business partners can frame the big idea in the first place. And this remains the most serious challenge for standalone digital agencies in the era of the big brand idea.

Digital may be one of the very few marketing disciplines that can cope with the enormous bandwidth of today's ideas, but unless those agencies have the intellectual and creative firepower to conceive of the idea, they'll struggle to usurp the traditional ad agency as the primary brand partner.

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Videos from Russell Davies' "Interesting" conference have started to be posted on his blog – a mere two months later. It is worth the wait nonetheless.

So far contributions from Sophie Dollar, Andrew Hovells, Grant McCracken, and my favourite so far Adrian from howies on how to split a log with an axe.

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Gareth Kay asks 'Is planning broken?'

The sole responsibility of the planner is to ensure that the work works. Yet all the data suggests that this is clearly not the case.

As my title suggests, we may as well be asking 'is advertising broken?'

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Greg Verdino has an amusing rant about Maurice Saatchi and One Word Equity:

the premise behind one word equity relies on a faulty notion that your "one word" and my "one word" for a brand will be the same. No matter how much you invest in ad messages trumpeting your brand essence, the consumer (though they may be influenced by what you tell them) will always define your brand in their own terms.

Go read the whole thing.

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Time sums up somes up some recent research:

Children given the same French fries and chicken nuggets in different packaging preferred the taste of the food delivered in McDonald's wrappers. "Ideally, a manufacturer increases the quality of a product, and that in turn increases word of mouth and media coverage. But advertising shortcuts this process. There's no longer a connection to quality."

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Yahoo have taken behavioural targeting (defined here and here) one step further with Smart Ads. As Adweek reported last month, Smart Ads:

automates the creation of banner ads, allowing advertisers to run potentially thousands of permutations tailored to user behavior.

The rich media banners are created on the fly, combining Yahoo's trove of user behavior data with inventory feeds from advertisers. The result is executions based on what users have searched for and one on Yahoo! matched up with product listings from advertisers.

For example, Yahoo! could detect a New York-based user who has recently searched for flights to San Francisco. Working with an airline's listing of fare deals from New York to San Francisco, a banner ad promoting a sale on that route would be generated from assets provided by the airline's agency. For agencies, this means not having to worry about creating thousands of different banner ads.

Yahoo! has begun with the travel industry and plans to move to retail and auto. The SmartAds placements are receiving two-to-three times higher click through rates than regular placements.

David Kenny, chairman of Digitas, said technology platforms like SmartAds hold the promise of bringing the hyper-targeting and effectiveness of search into the 95 percent of Internet pages that are not search results.

"It can be a very important piece especially for retail, financial services and travel," he said. "For those clients, who spend a big chunk of their [online] budgets on search, it's a big deal."

Tom – this makes the NYT piece on Publicis' digital strategy make a bit more sense, no?

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Etsy's Robert Kalin:

corporations try to sanitize all their outgoing messages for the sake of keeping face. It is very easy to identify this kind of behavior. Whenever you read something…

… and it sounds like a series of pre-made phrases strung together, instead of a human being speaking, this is sanitized communication. To me, this stuff sounds inhuman.

I want Etsy to stay human. This means allowing each person’s voice to be heard, even if it’s squeaky or loud or soft. I will not put a glossy layer of PR over what we do. If we trip, let us learn from it instead of trying to hide it; when we leap, let’s show others how to leap.

As Dino Demopoulous points out:

Internet companies like Etsy don't have all of the answers, not by a long-shot, but there is a lot to be said for the 2.0 web way of thinking (if you could put it that way). In a word, "Be More Like the Internet".

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Forrester's new report looks pretty good:

The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers' trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach.

We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.

On their blog, they go on to describe the four components:

1. Involvement – Includes web analytics like site traffic, page views, time spent, etc. This essentially is the component that measures if a person is present.
2. Interaction – This component addresses the more robust actions people take, such as buying a product, requesting a catalog, signing up for an email, posting a comment on a blog, uploading a photo or video, etc. These metrics come from e-commerce or social media platforms.
3. Intimacy – The sentiment or affinity that a person exhibits in the things they say or the actions they take, such as the meaning behind a blog post or comment, a product review, etc. Services such as brand monitoring help track these types of conversations.
4. Influence – Addresses the likelihood that a person will recommend your product or service to someone else. It can manifest itself through brand loyalty or through recommendations to friends, family, or acquaintances. These metrics mostly come from surveys (both qualitative and quantitative).

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