Hasta La Creative!

Times Square isn’t just a place for confused tourists and Creepy Elmos.

From static ads to multimedia, if you want your (client’s) name in lights, it’s the place for creative shops across this great land of ours to test the waters and see what floats.

How much do those shops spend? How hard will clients break the bank? Who do they all want to attract?

Carlos Monteiro, infographics editor of iNewspaper in Portugal, collected some interesting stats to answer those riddles after the jump.

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The Onion.com, known for its deadpan humor and mock-news network, has been expanding beyond its namesake site. Onion Inc. now boasts The A.V. Club, its entertainment-based sister site and Onion Labs, its advertising/marketing layer.

Onion Labs has created campaigns for everyone from Microsoft to Ford to Home Depot. Mike McAvoy, president of The Onion, recently talked with Mediabistro about this new branch of the company. McAvoy says: “It became our pitch really as a business [to] evolve with the whole native-advertising movement, as well as advertisers’ decision to change how they tried to reach millennials.” McAvoy talks about the most successful campaign they’d had so far:

I think we’ve had quite a few that have been good and have gotten good plays. We haven’t had the Old Spice viral campaign just yet, you know, where we’ve gotten 100 million [hits]. But we’ll let you know when we do. I think our most successful piece, our most viewed piece was [an] April Fool’s joke for YouTube [last year about the social-media site selecting the best video on YouTube], which has been seen by [over 11 million people]. We do a lot of work that is behind the scenes, white label or work for hire, where we’re creating content for a brand and the audience, or the world, doesn’t know it.

To hear more from McAvoy, including how he deals with native ads on his own site, read: So What Do You Do, Mike McAvoy, President of The Onion?

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An early step in the media planning/buying process is sometimes ignored in the name of saving money. This is a misguided strategy. Effective trafficking and tracking gives clients an early picture of the performance they might expect when their campaign goes live and is a great way to avoid unhappy surprises.

Paul Hirsch  has been practicing communications since 1983. He now owns his own marketing/pr firm in Northern California. Paul specializes in media relations, marketing collateral, website development and ad design. You can learn more about him on Facebook or by visiting www.nowville.com/paulhirsch.

Agencies are notoriously late to the carcass of online media buying. Mediabrands only now offers targeted buys with analytics across a broad spectrum of websites. Meanwhile, WPP, Havas and everyone else is diligently grinding out their own software and analytical systems. This is a natural extension of their business considering that agencies have long been buying print and broadcast time for their clients.

But, seriously, where were they five years ago? Oh right. They were waiting for smaller companies to due to their work for them. All the while, they were losing dollars, market share and projecting an image of naivety above the internet to clients. Rob Norman, chief executive of WPP’s digital-media unit, Group M Interaction Worldwide told the WSJ that tech firms “got there first and dealt with the science before we did.”

Yeah. Yup. You snooze you lose. Now, all these big guys are going to be fighting for market share not only among themselves, but with established players in the game like Big Mama Google. Agencies need to think forward from here on out if they want to survive. Let’s not be afraid of technology. Let’s use it to our own ends and actually create the carcass to be picked over, rather than waiting to be the vultures hovering, hungrily at the end.

More: New Agency Alert: Seisser And Landsberg’s Grok

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media