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Advertising Agency: Hjaltelin, Stahl & CO., Copenhagen, Denmark
Creative Director: Nicolai Stahl
Art Director: Peter Strange
Copywriter: Mathias Caspersen
Photographer: Martin Juul
Published: February 2008

To drive home the point of how many actually die from smoking, ASH and DDB New Zealand compare the cancersticks to the twin towers. I have a weird feeling that I’ve seen this before.

Toby Talbot – Executive Creative Director & CD
Paul Hankinson – Copywriter
Mike Davison – Art Director
Retoucher: Grant Allen/Slice
Ad Execs: Jenny Travers, Paul Wilson

Production co HANraHAN would like to remind you that if you’re after some excellent kids performances – who you gonna call? Why director Bill Scarlet of course – see a cute film on why inside.

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So, you are launching a new web business and your main business model is selling advertising space, at least until your customers start paying up for your services. It’s likely that you will have to deal with an ad agency at some point, and here are some thoughts from the buying side of the table.

1. Demographics. Your site’s demographics (or, lovingly, the demo) is what you sell to the agency. Not features, not good design, not your management team. It’s the demo. Currently, there are two major ways to present a demo. One is through its descriptive characteristics: “our site is designed to attract people of such and such gender, age, occupation, geography.” The other way is through the audience’s collective behavior: “our site is for people who are in the market for computer peripherals”; “our site is for the die-hard ice-cream fans.”

There are other ways to describe your audience. Psychographic description (“our site is for very honest people”) is an interesting approach, but it is yet to be widely adopted.

If you don’t have a large audience already — large enough to register on Comscore’s radar — I think you are better off with pitching the behavioral traits of your audience. This will narrow the number of potential advertisers, but the advantages of advertising on your site and not someone else’s are more obvious, and you can command higher CPMs.

2. Build your site with advertisers in mind. Very often, site designers focus on user experience but forget that advertisers, too, are users who have their own goals and needs. (Oh, look, we have some space left here — let’s slap a placeholder for banners.) Audience planning should be among the first steps in designing an ad-supported site, not an afterthought. Generic media kits behind email forms frustrate media buyers who are juggling multiple plans under pressing deadlines. And if the ad unit placement is such that it doesn’t generate interactions similar to the rest of the campaign, your site will be “optimized” off the plan

3. On the other hand, don’t let the ad greed cripple your design. CPM ads tempt designers to add extra steps to even the simplest processes for the sake of page views. You’ll have to weigh the benefit of every extra page view against the risk of having the user leave the site in frustration to never come back.

4. Allow standard IAB ad formats on your site. You’ll never guess how much overhead goes into banner production, and budgets have their limits. Plus, resizing banners is no fun.

5. But custom high-engagement formats can sell for more. Think of Facebook that sells branded pages for $300K/3 months.

6. Allow enough technological wiggle room to accommodate for ad formats the demand for which may come up in the future. Yahoo bought eGroups email list service in 2000, it is ad-supported, but I think you still can’t target the banners by group categories, not to mention insertions at the individual group level. Also, create the most precise targeting mechanism possible — you’ll make more money. If you collect users’ age, gender and zip code during the sign-up process, there’s no reason why you can’t allow targeting by any combination of the three, at a premium.

7. Allow low-cost test drives. Agencies would love to be able to incorporate new interesting media into their plans, but they can’t sell them to their clients without solid numbers upfront. The only way to get solid numbers from a new medium is to test it at a cost that is not prohibitive.

8. You can’t overmeasure your audience. Offer metrics that go beyond the basics of impressions and clicks. CNet’s sites put a link to a feedback form under each banner (I wonder if they share results with the advertisers).

9. Make data PowerPoint-friendly. An intelligent good-looking graph goes a long way.

10. Media buying cycles are always longer than what you’d prefer them to be. At least online, media buying is rarely reactive — every new opportunity will be evaluated and filed in an appropriate folder to be pulled out at the beginning of the next cycle.

• Obama victory will prolong US racial divide, says British equality chief – Times Online
  "If Obama can succeed, then maybe they can imagine that [Martin Luther] King’s post-racial nirvana has arrived. A vote for Obama is a pain-free negation of their own racism. So long as they don’t have to live next door to him; Obama has yet to win convinc
• The Cold War-Era Assault on Comic Book Culture, Revisited
  Trashy comics were the NC-17 videogames of their day, and their suppression remains a sad chapter in US cultural history.
• Bionic implants raise ethical questions (ABC Science Online)
  philosophers say it’s time to find out how the public feels about bionic research, which in some cases is being used to enhance human memory, physical abilities and perception.
• Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab – BankrupTED
  To TED: "You’re putting forth a new colonialism for the 21st century, a strange hybrid of techno-neo-hippie-colonialism."
• Is The Suburb The Next Slum? on PSFK
  will the flight from America’s suburbs and exurbs by folks who can no longer afford the housing have the similar negative effect as when people fleeing the cities in the sixties and seventies?
• Military Recruitment Ads From Around the World – Advertising Lab
  YouTube compilation of 13 14 recruitment ads from different countries. Comparative military propaganda highlights of the weird: The three Swedish spots are the best. Au Pair targets women and lures them with an opportunity to blow up bridges (when was the
• Masters of Media, New Media MA Amsterdam » Mobile city conference – Stephen Graham on the politics of urban space
  Where technology fuses itself into the background of daily life, all sorts of scenes (art-commercial- governmental etc) are utilizing new technologies and seeking combinations, weaving them into certain directions simultaneously. We are moving towards a s
• InternetActu.net » Nanotechnologies : qui croire ?
  Seul un tiers (29,5%) des Américains considéreraient les nanotechnologies comme “moralement acceptables“, contre 54,1% des Anglais, 62,7% des Allemands et 72,1% des Français. Cette forte suspicion du public américain n’aurait rien à voir avec l

(TrendHunter.com) Here’s a solar laptop that would make Maxwell Smart a happy dude. It has solar powered rechargeable batteries, satellite link Global Positioning System, internet access and satellite phone. Anyplace on the earth you can be in contact with the Boss to get your next assignment to save the earth from t…

The Trembled Blossoms video and the Fantasy Lookbook created by PRADA for the Spring/Summer 2008 season feature a sophisticated amalgamation of nature and urban elements.

The fashion house is fusing the rising consciousness of environmental issues with the complicated, superficial, plastic world. …

(TrendHunter.com) Taking a cue from mother nature, GROW is an innovative and aesthetically ingenious solar and wind power solution inspired by leaves; that utilizes the best of green technology and ecology.

GROW, which is developed by SMIT (Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology), uses a series of flexible sola…

(TrendHunter.com) Here’s a new kind of lab coat; the jacket is actually grown in vitro. The science is no longer just for breeding animals and people; it’s now been applied to animal products including leather jackets. This makes it possible to wear goods such as animal skins without ever having to harm a creature.
…

Advertising Agency: Creature, Seattle, USA
Creative Directors: Matt Peterson, Jim Haven
Art Director: Lara Papadakis
Copywriters: Justin Galvin, Jim Haven
Broadcast Producer: Jenn Pennington
Print Producer: Michael Dwyer
Account Director: Steve Hawley
Account Executives: Beth Randolph, Nathan Ramerman
Designer: Ramon Vasquez