Marketing + Technology Mashup

When I think about great authors I was exposed to in high school, college, and in my personal selections, well-known names like Chaucer, Milton, Dante, Edwards, and of course Faulkner (I am, after all, Southern) come to mind. But surely these weren't the only folks capturing the zeitgeist. Right? Clearly there were more than a handful of authors putting pen to paper at any given time in history. Enter Google.

Google has scanned more than 12 million digital books, giving gentle readers, egg-heads, and humanity buffs a wealth of prose and poetry, right at their fingertips. They recently awarded the first ever Digital Humanities Research Awards. National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Jim Leach said,  

In the modern world, access to knowledge is becoming as central to advancing equal opportunity as access to the ballot box has proven to be the key to advancing political rights. Few revolutions in human history can match the democratizing consequences of the development of the web and the accompanying advancement of digital technologies to tap this accumulation of human knowledge.

The whole Google library isn't available to just anybody, what with copyrights and such, but the winners are getting some special access privs.

I wonder what great insights might even be hidden in current works: articles in periodicals, blogs, and other rags freely available online. There are tools on the Web today that attempt to aggregate data from a variety of sources (think SocialMention), but are there any tools that attempt to look at what is currently being written and view it as a study in the humanities?

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

While there were several good points made in the video, two really stood out for me:

The first was the two reading modes, one that focused on the text with in-line imagery, the second on large brilliant images. To me this can, if well executed, offer a real improvement over the printed page.

The second was the comment made about the user understanding how much content there was available, that one would feel like they had consumed an editorial package... there was a beginning and an end. Unlike an RSS feed that goes on and on forever. I often feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of activity in some feeds to which I subscribe.

As marketers and branders, this content metaphor will not only present new opportunities to communicate with stakeholders and consumers, but also challenge our ideas about information sequencing, writing, and how brand messages can be embedded in a way that are at once noticeable, but not disruptive.

On a side note, the presentation of these concepts is beautiful. This guy is who I want to be in my next meeting with a client.

Many people will tell you that banner ads are dead... and maybe they are. Paid search has squashed the banner ad, it would seem. Lately there has been a lot of Web chatter about new technologies like ad exchanges and DSPs making the banner ad more relevant and timely. This is what I know:

Ad exchanges, like Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange, allow ad sellers to connect with buyers. Sellers get visibility to a wide audience, buyers have a large pool of possible impressions to choose from. The real magic is that you can select the audience you desire, and the exchange finds the right sellers/sites to improve your chances of click through. Google uses its AdSense data (and I'm sure other use metrics) to select the right sellers for your needs. Other exchanges include AdECN and Right Media.

Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) allow a buyer to connect to multiple exchanges simultaneously, thereby broadening their search for the optimized impressions.
 

End of what I know.

So have you had any experience with ad exchanges or DSPs? Let me know your thoughts on their effectiveness and how you have used them.

"Get it right, get it quick, get it out, and get it over. Your problem won't improve with age."

• "I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over."
• "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."
• "There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult."
• "I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me."

I just read a great article about Google's mobile strategy. Mobile Marketer's coverage revealed some fascinating facts with implications for all of us involved in brand consulting and particularly digital marketing strategy.

Alex Barza, mobile ads sales lead at Google, covered a variety of topics in his speech at Mobile Marketing Day, hosted by Mobile Marketer and the Direct Marketing Association. Google sees the recent increase in web-enabled mobile device adoption, combined with the ongoing increase in mobile processing power, and the mass amounts of data stored in the cloud, as a perfect storm for innovation in the mobile arena.

Some interesting facts as reported by Mobile Marketer:

• Two-thirds of the world’s population has a mobile phone subscription—4 billion people—and there will be 5 billion wireless subscribers worldwide by the end of this year, according to some estimates.
   
• “Mobile will soon have more reach than TV, radio or the Internet,” Mr. Barza said. “Mobile is the access point to the Internet in the developing world."
   
• “That’s where we feel the future of mobile is going and where we’ve focused our energies—high-end Web-enabled mobile devices are the future of mobile,” Mr. Barza said. ”Bigger screens, more connectivity and faster processors are enabling us to do a lot more... I point my Nexus One out my hotel window in Chicago and within milliseconds there’s an augmented reality interaction telling me ‘You’re looking at the Chicago Watertower,’” he said. “There’s also optical character recognition, so when you’re reading a menu or document in a different language, it can translate that into 100-plus languages.”
   
• One out of every three search queries on mobile have local intent, according to Google.

For those of use wondering how Apple's App Store is doing, and if app developers are making out like bandits, here is an answer. This great graphic from GigaOM really gives some interesting insights. Be sure to read the comments.

At our Memphis design firm, several of our designers have expressed interest in creating a mobile app. Other firms, like Ogilvy Group UK, have released entertaining apps like Chrimbell. (It was actually built by Golden Gekko for Ogilvy.) I found it quite entertaining over the holidays, my kids loved it.

At any rate, check out the GigaOM site and maybe you will be inspired to build an app.