A Source Of Inspiration

These might have been the words from Morrisey describing online advertising budgets. Indeed, in the recent US online advertising boom some industries were the main drivers, with Auto and Telecom categories leading the way.

As for Portugal, i’ve seen some some odd behaviors, with the big advertisers coming from the financial sector, mostly from personal loans and credit, followed closely by the telecoms, mobile and ISP providers.

Browse through a bunch of Portuguese websites and 7 out of 10 online ad units are probably some credit card or personal loan company. That surely explains the large deficit in family’s budgets (more than 110%), quite different from the private savings rate we had 20 years ago (about 20%).

Telecoms and mobile operators are also extremely aggressive, specially the ring tone operators that get quite happy with a CTR of 0,00001%. Go figure. I wonder what will become of these banner-spammers when the iPhone arrives or people become more tech savvy and learn to upload a MP3 to their phone.

The question that remains to be answered for Portugal is why the auto companies seem so reluctant to invest heavily in Online Advertising. I know that the industry is going through a long crisis, but a high ROI medium seems a good medicine, don’t you think so?
If you have any other strange national (non US) market behaviors to share, i’ll be glad to hear from you.

New media industries have really changed the rules, and that goes for recruitment also. Red 5 Studios, the makers of the World of Warcraft,  set the bar really high when it comes to finding the best professionals in game development with a fantastic direct marketing campaign: Golden Ticket

They realized that the usual recruitment tactics (usually email or phone) wouldn’t be enough to catch the best minds, so a different approach was in need.

A unique invitation was sent to one hundred professionals, highly admired in the industry. Their work, habits and personal tastes were studied. With that knowledge in hand, the design agency Pool handled the invitation and really made a offer you can’t refuse.

The iPod had a personalized message from Red 5 and access codes to a website, where the professionals could find out more about the job they were being hired for.

Result: nearly 100% response rate on their campaign. And of course, a kick-ass team of happy developers.

Vitamin has a great post on naming your company, with a step-by-step guide:

1. Set Your Constraints
2. Schedule Your Time
3. Structure Your Brainstorming
4. Sleep on It
5. Test it

Definitely worth reading.

* Part 2 of 3 of my lecture “Advertising 2.0″ [read part 1]

In 2006, Chevrolet launched a website endorsing the reality show “The Apprentice”. Users could play with the site tools to create their own version of a Chevrolet Tahoe commercial, mixing several audio and video clips. But not everything went the way it was supposed to …

Of course there are also some positive examples, like this one, created by Firefox fans.

[Read more …]

From http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000201.html
Quote: Jon Gay and Robert Tatsumi (the creators of Flash) have teamed up with Gary Grossman (the creator of ActionScript) and Peter Santangeli (former vice president of engineering at Macromedia) to create a new start up company named Software As Art. So far, no public information on the new company’s products or services is available. Looks like for now, we’ll all just have to wait and see what these Flash pioneers get up to.
Posted by moock at November 8, 2006 06:35 AM

Will we have a new “Art Player” ?

Just found on BBC, an audio recording by Charles Handy about Semler, one of most influential gurus in Human Resource Management.

He is the one of the most important business person’s in Brasil and author of bestsellers Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace and The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works, encouraging us to look at management in an entirely different way.
Gosh, if only i could work at Semco.