Nice to know that portuguese brands are spreading some link love to from national bloggers. Rather than the usual top 100 blogs, the portuguese brewery, is awarding the best portuguese blog with €3000.

From the site:
“Super Bock Super Blog Awards are a tribute to you and all those who celebrate every day the portuguese language and the freedom of speech, helping to create a new Internet, a Web 2.0. Let’s make our own blog party in Portugal, awarding the importance of this (…) platform”.

“With this initiative, Super Bock intends to promote the best Blogs, and invite all portuguese to be part of our national online identity”

There’s not much of a chance for me to win, since they only allow portuguese written blogs. Go figure.
Anyway, if you’re a portuguese blogger, go ahead and register your blog.

This is an unusual football post, but as a huge fan of SL Benfica it’s my main source of inspiration for today: Freddy Adu is heading to Benfica !

© Associated Press

Besides being a rising star that luckily will be traded with profit in 2-3 years, he’s also a cashcow in merchandising, with his Benfica jersey representing good sales in the States (he’s captain of US National Team).
Last year Kikin fonseca was the cover for Fifa07 Soccer game, and this year another high profile american player is signing. For a global brand such as Benfica, it’s a great move, and if football (soccer) reaches more audience/viewers in the US in the next years, it will be nice to know that my club has built such a big brand awareness.

Actually, this post might not be totally off-topic since Freddy is kind of an Internet phenomenon, with his YouTube videos with more than half-million views and having his own website.

I don’t know if it was the above video that convinced the team to sign him off, but it surely had importance.

Which brings me to some final questions: how do scouts and sports teams use the Internet? Could YouTube replace global scouts? Should player agents invest heavily on Internet PR?

If you have interesting thoughts or examples regarding the use of Internet on sports PR, please drop a line in the comments.

Last week, Publico interviewed me about the recent changes on the online advertising industry. As the article is only available in portuguese to premium subscribers, i’m posting here my answers to João Pedro.

With online advertising budgets increasing, should we expect that it will surpass the investment made at the other media?
Even with changing consumer habits, where consumers are wired for about a third of their time, most of the large media budgets are still invested in traditional media, usually called above-the-line media. Some change is happening and the numbers are there to prove it: IAB, the Internet Advertising Bureau recently announced that Online Advertising has reached 17 bilion USD, with a 35% growth rate from 2005. These values are the cornerstones of projections that media such as radio or press will be overthrown by internet until 2010. I don’t think tough, that Internet will replace old media, but rather complement these or other media, increasing the proved positive correlation between online and offline campaigns. Much of this budget migration will happen thanks to greater accountability by interactive advertising technologies, richer consumer involvement and more personalized and targeted online advertising.
In Portugal, we’re only at the beginning of this trend, lacking true integrated marketing strategies and substantial online budgets, even if this kind of advertising is much more qualified and less expensive per reach than traditional media.

Is there any trend by advertisers to choose Google platforms to launch their campaigns? Or are they used as a side-strategy?
Big advertisers usually perform some risk management by diversification, with their specialized media agencies, optimizing campaigns and choosing the right channels and partners. Google, of course, is one of those partners, but is being referred as a frienemy, a short-term friend and a long term enemy, with several conflicting interests for being at the same time competitor and supplier.
For medium or small business, these platforms (Adwords, Analytics) are quite efficient for their small marketing budgets, with qualified targeting and easy campaign management. Google’s advertising solutions are now reaching also print or even TV, taking the next step to campaign integration and management for a large group of companies.

Some say that the recent purchases (specially by Microsoft and Google) of advertising companies can be a sign of a new bubble. Is this a sound argument?
While Microsoft reacted mostly to their failed attempt to buy DoubleClick, and didn´t intend to be left out of this industry, Google’s purchase of the DoubleClick is a bit different from the normal acquisition strategy, where smaller companies were the target. But if we understand Google as a advertising company, it makes perfect sense to increase their online advertising solutions portfolio with display advertising, or even with RSS advertising, as recently happened with the purchase of Feedburner.
Google’s information added to 10 years of DoubleClick’s consumer profiles will provide a huge and robust online advertising platform. All these internet media giants are buying more than companies� — they’re buying data, huge amounts of data, and that’s the extra value they were charged for. We’ll surely won’t see any bubble, as most of the growth of these services is based on real needs, with consumers adapting to a new digital lifestyle, and in consequence, more and more investment by brands in this medium.

© Publico 2007

Here’s a nice one from Portugal: Montepio Fun. Web agency View produced the interactive experience for the bank’s “future” clients, the kids.

Users learn some personal finance basics and the many online contests are a good starting point to build a relationship marketing and brand loyalty program to future generations. Great art direction and special care in bringing visitors back is something we aren’t used in a lot of sites, specially in financial instituition, so congratulations to João Fernandes and team.

I’ve just attended a conference by Guillaume Van Der Stighelen at the 9th Festival of Portugal’s Creative Club.

He is one of the founders of Duval Guillaume, one of the most acclaimed European advertising agencies, and in his speech he focused on how to become a advertising S.TA.R. It goes a bit like this:

• Start with a big idea: but don’t just start running looking for ideas; instead let them find you, go out for a beer with friend or let some tune on the radio spark the creativity
• Terrorist action:after you get the idea, you have to really act like a terrorist so others don’t grind you down and kill the idea. Don’t be afraid to fight against the status quo.
• Admirable Agreeable: have a nice attitude with clients and do your best to understand their point of view.and be receptive to other points of view
• Respectable Respect the others : let other earn their share of success, and understand that we are all human beings craving for acceptation .

Other than this precious acronym gem, he also showcased his agency work and shared some great stories, specially the closing note with a scientific explanation of why society needs advertising, based on the works by Geoffrey Miller. (Buy at Amazon UK / US).

Here’s one of Duval Guillaume commercials:

Some quick notes on the E-mkt 2007 conference:

- Alain Heureux, IAB European president, gave a quick overview of digital marketing and the challenges that our industry faces to be recognized by companies as a trustful medium, and the perspective of creating a IAB portuguese local office. Alain also challenged/invited us to be at IAB Congress “Let’s Interact” in Belgium, the next 4th and 5th of June - if you’re planning to attend, leave me a message and maybe we can plan something.

- Alison Fennah, Executive Director of the EIAA, had the most interesting presentation of the day, with great qualitative research and solid figures (if i’m not mistaken the name of the study was MediaScope) about the European internet industry.

- Ricardo and Luis, from Elemento Digital (one of the main sponsors), did a quick overview of what e-marketing can do and explained some terminology less familiar to the audience.

The most awaited presentations were from Google, one of the main reasons people attended the event. To my surprise, they actually under delivered. Most of the talks were rather commercial, only evangelizing their products (Webmaster tools, ADWords and AdSense) and not addressing the challenges of publishers and brands.
I guess that explains the FOG (Fear of Google) feeling that was among some of the audience, that had some interesting questions during the day:

Ricardo from SearchMarketing.pt had some hands-on questions about SEM campaigns, and Maria João from Sapo (the largest portuguese portal) pointed some concerns about the discretionary decisions on banning publishers from their Adsense program. My guess is that she didn’t read the terms of service quite well, and probably the site was banned for running a competing platform.

One of the questions i made, remains yet to be answered: “What will happen to DoubleClick? How will it fit in Google set of technologies?”. I guess the folks here at Europe don’t have a clue about strategic decisions made at Mountain View.

Overall, it was a good start and maybe next year other professionals, organizations and advertisers all gather to look in a different way at e-marketing, a essential discipline at any marketing mix. We surely need more of these events to share our best practices and (here’s my challenge to fellow professionals) create our own national association.

Busy times at the portuguese webdesign scene, with two projects being recently given a Favorite Website Award (FWA).

First there was Triworks, the company from Aveiro and offices in the USA, that launched their BlackVersion 9.

The dark and minimalistic website, with prominent highlight to their latest projects, is a pleasure to the eyes. They still deliver smooth transitions as in the previous versions and had extra care in interface design.

Next came Tinoni Aventura, by Tungsten, a public awareness site teaching children about security problems such as earthquakes, internet or road safety. With nice illustrations and 3D animation, it’s a beautiful example how public institutions can use the web to promote citizenship.

I just hope the rest of 2007 keeps this promising.

I had to mention this today, since some of the authors are fellow bloggers.

Tubarao Esquilo went live today, being one of the most serious attempts as a federated content network of portuguese blogs. Nothing too pretentious at the beginning, but from an ad agency perspective i’m curious to see how this goes.

Not that i’m expecting anything too serious such as The Deck, Federated Media or 9 rules (although technically 9 rules is more of an aggregator). And while the mainstream portuguese marketing is still more comfortable with online display ads or AdWords, it’s a matter of time until some brands start innovating with micro-targeting in more specialized niche content.

Good luck, folks!

P.S.
- thumbs down to no only one women on the initial authors list
- i still don’t get the name (translated as Squirrel Shark). A really poor branding choice.

Re-searcher.com is the child project of Paula Balreira, Carlos Quitério and Graça Santos, that showcases some fine illustration from Portuguese and foreign artists.

It served initially as a representation for the affiliated artists but later extended their mission, developing several cultural activities in Portugal.

Besides the Gallery with all the portfolios, on the front page you’ll have a rich cultural agenda and great links from the illustration world. There’s also a online store, that will surely have more titles available as soon as the site gets some visibility. Go feast your eyes then, on some quality illustration.