Lisbon Ad School and Torke are announcing the first Guerrilla Advertising Awards, showcasing works in categories as diverse as ambush marketing, urban intervention, PR Stunt, ambient media or viral and interactive. And just to make sure guerrilla is for everyone, there’s an Old Croquette Awards, for senior creatives.

You can submit your work for FREE, as a team or on behalf of your agency, with winners announced the next July, 24th.

Disclaimer: I’ll be one of the online categories jurors

Photo by occhiovivo

Photo by Mark Busse

Photo by midnightglory

Photo by fensterbme

Photo by william addington

Photo by DHdesign

All pictures were selected from Flickr, under a Creative Commons license, so make sure you credit the authors if you use them.

With over 800 bloggers it would be really hard to track down all the twitter profiles, so i focused on the top 300 and with the help of Twitterank and Dapper, and partly inspired by Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs, here’s the January 2009 list for the top 150 twitter users with advertising and marketing blogs:

The sweet irony is being left out of the list, with a close call at #156. So, you know the drill: if you appreciated the hard work (i had to visit each blog to get the usernames i didn’t follow already), start by following @armandoalves and help me reach the top 150.

The PHP script that parsed the Power150 OPML file was programmed in less than 1/10th of the time it took me to figure out all the twitter profiles, so feel free to comment  if your blog is on AdAge’s Power 150 and you would like to be added to the remaining 700 profiles.

I had a few surprises along the way, with nearly 20% of the 300 parsed blogs not having a Twitter account and having to decide which profile to rank on multi-author blogs (i ended up choosing the user with most followers). Also worthy of notice is the inverted pyramid for SEO/SEM blogs. In the end, Twitter is more conversational and not very friendly for “get rich today” tweets, and that gets reflected on the top tweeple listed.

Update:

Seems the list is getting some buzz, and it starts to makes sense to build a live ranking.that hopefully will be at: http://www. twitterpower150.com

Really. In fact,  i’m not a big fan of Facebook, but the way they manage their display advertising won me over.

They are one of the few publishers who offer a solution to rate ad quality, adjusting the relevance of ads according of to the vote of consumers, and not only on some obscure bidding system.

Lately i’ve seen a few articles on how advertising is intrusive and sometimes annoying (non activated sound on display advertising kills me …), with users building more banner blindness or solving the annoyances with browser extensions like AdBlock.

Please excuse while I bust the ad junk above.

Believe it or not, most of these problems are the fault of advertisers. By not increasing the online display advertising budgets, advertisers leave publishers with online ad inventory that is filled by blind ad networks, an easy target for low quality ads and low bidding advertisers. From casino bets to value added mobile services, we’ve got fed up with all this ad junk.

Considering the ROI of online advertising, we still have a lot to fight for digital’s  larger slice of the advertising budget. When that happens, supply and demand laws kicks in: the “bad” advertising has no economic stimulus (low CPC/CPM) to invest in blank slots (if any still remain) and creative ads get the spotlight.

If you miss a good old (non-intrusive) banner, visit BannerBlog.

When Yahoo homepage had their inventory bought in advance for a year, most of the advertising was not intrusive, with interesting display ads served from time to time. On these conditions, as with offline advertising, the way for advertisers to break the clutter was through creativity and relevance, so no wonder the ads were good.

But then we have Google Ads, that unlike Facebook, doesn’t allow a easy feedback regarding their display advertising , disregarding the experience of the user, in what might be a long term shot in the feet. And they don’t make it easier for publishers filtering the ads.

With users getting used to online reviews, rating and social recommendation, it’s time for online advertising to change their minds and let consumers have the same level of interaction regarding their ads. Advertisers will have the chance to know what consumers think of their ads and publishers have a better chance of increasing their CPC and revenue.

So, quoting a user:

Mr. Webmaster, if you own a website, and there is a sonorous ad, please remove it. I’m willing to see your advertising, but please respect me.

While i try to keep this blog mostly personal, it’s great to know that DraftFCB launched a corporate blog (i knew about it a few weeks ago, but now it’s official). On a effort to remain impartial as a blogger, my main critic goes to their decision of not choosing a true blogging platform. These days, any teenager knows how to setup WordPress.

If you’re interested in our thoughts, insights and opinions about the ad industry, give it a push and subscribe to the RSS feed.

The term hardlink is used by mobile industry to represent the connection between the physical world with the mobile web. QR codes for instance, allow users to capture the data and translate it into a URL.

Mobile technologies offered us multiple solutions to connect the physical to the virtual. And yet, we seemed to forgot one of the most widespread form of these connections: the URLs printed in ads, on the back of business cards, displayed in TV commercials, even in our own skin or landscapes.

Photo: Christian Johannesen, under Creative Commons License

… to softlink

Shortening the description of “URLs used in offline promotion” i’m calling them a SOFTLINKs. They are indirect hyperlinks between a physical object or media and the web, with the intent to create a future recall on the consumer and induce him to visit the website. Hyper-graffiti, call-to-action or content traps, offline URLs have a increasing importance in a brand’s image.

Do you remember the URL?

So what’s in a softlink? What’s the effect of placing it on your marketing materials? Do people actually remember it?

According to the The Magazine Publishers of America and The Newspapers Association of America, they do.

• Offline media perform well in driving web traffic and search, with media sinergy being a strategic asset. Ads with URLs are more likely to drive readers to advertiser sites overall, with study subjects 13% more likely to visit advertiser websites.< br />
  MPA, Accountability Guide

• 47% of people who responded to a newspaper ad by going online went directly to a URL they saw in the advertisement, but a full 31% chose to use a search engine (overwhelmingly, Google.com).
  NAA, Newspapers drive online traffic

Source: Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo and Google study for NAA, Newspaper Drives Online Traffic, PDF

Not only do these studies highlight the importance of a web presence, but there’s a sweet irony in being print associations to reinforce it.

While a web presence is obvious to big US centric companies, many small businesses are yet to get their URLs and companies in developing countries are still looking for the right way to build their web strategy. It’s still quite ordinary to find small business owners that don’t realize of the web’s importance on the purchase funnel, so these reference studies should help broaden their minds.

Keeping your customers URL happy

It sucks when reading a newspaper article and realizing you can’t bookmark it for reference or later review. Perhaps that explains how the Amazon Kindle is performing better that expected. Or why QR technology is booming, even if it’s mostly used as a hack to insufficient advertising real estate and excuse to accountability..

Photo: Chika Watanabe, under Creative Commons License

When creating an offline media ad, it should be taken in account that people do take mental URL notes for later reviewing, so let’s keep their task simple. A memorable URL is even more important offline, and from big brands to small business, it has become common practice.

It’s my opinion that prefix subdomains should be used only if there’s a clear need to reinforce the brand name. Web aliases and brand/campaign domains are much better way to insure a later recall (heck, they’ve got less dots).
As for the long, long URL, with dozens of query parameters, don’t do it unless you invested in some heavy SEO. You’d better use URL shortening services like TinyURL, that now even allows a custom alias (altough i never seen it offline).

I know unique names are hard to get, and with all that cybersquatting around (now with the new ICANN brand TLDs), it’s a legal and brand manager nightmare, but if you want your consumer share of mind you have to play the game.

Softlink like Adwords

The next time you need to choose a softlink for offline promotion, do it like you’re optimizing for AdWords, with some of their performance tips:

• Choose an effective keyword: that means find a short, distinctive and sticky domain or alias
• Make your URL bold: don’t put it a 7pt size, near the footer, in a 2 frames sequence or whisper it on a radio spot.
• Avoid the use of similar or confusing character sequences (I and l, or example). ALLCAPS is a bad idea, but you could try Camel case for a change.
• Target your softlinks by using several matching options: i wouldn’t go as far as Converse did recently by using dozens of URLs in a campaign, but registering similar domains, synonyms or type mismatches are all valid domain options to consider.
• Optimize your softlinks with a focus on themes and call to action phrases: That means that sites like GetTheGlass.com or halo3.com/believe should be awarded also in this category.
• Include prices, numbers or promotions. It doesn’t get closer to direct marketing than this: audi.com/R8.
• Use your powerful brand name in the softlink. If your brand isn’t there yet, you could try your luck with some unique domain names, like this one
• Drop the http:// and the www. Your users are not that dumb, and your webmaster should know how name servers work by now. Save a few keystrokes, save the ad.

With this info and tips, go ahead and spread some softlink love on your next campaign.

Halo 3 and Whopper Freakout won at Integrated .

On Cyber, Uniqlock had a important win, specially for showing that blogs are a a valid online media alternative.
Other works featured here were also winners at Cyber: Absolut Machines, A Blind Call, Who is Fermin and Orange Unlimited, Red Cross Horselstest, Coke Zero, Get Out and Play, First Few Words, Flugtag Flight Lab and Bring The Love Back.

I guess i have an eye for winners. Perhaps it’s time for the folks at Cannes to invite me as a juror?

Ricardo from Elemento Digital did most of the hard work (along with Alain Heureux, from IAB Europe) and got great feedback from the major Portuguese online media players, that are finally agreeing on the urgent need of a reliable institution heading the interactive marketing industry.

In the next few months, IAB Portugal intends to discuss the main goals and business plan, inviting all the players to the table (remember my comment?).
So, if you’re in Portugal and concerned about the future of advertising, have your say at IABPortugal.com.