Hasta La Creative!

Media buying. It’s changed a lot since the days of Mad Men’s Harry Crane. Want to know which publishers will perform best for your campaign? How about which Display Ads your competitors are running and which campaigns are most successful for them?

This Adclarity webinar will explore how to effectively use competitive intelligence to dramatically improve your media buying.

Join the live webinar to learn how to:

• Uncover your competitors’ online media planning strategies
• Learn and improve on their success
• Avoid investing in poorly performing traffic sources
• Easily profile and approach new publishers? and networks

Watch this webinar now to find the best traffic source that will dramatically improve the results of your campaign.

Visual content is being used in a variety of ways to communicate. Large amounts of data are being packaged into easily consumable infographics. Videos are being used to tell dynamic stories. Even consumers, knowingly or not, are in on the visual content creation with sharing pictures of their interaction with products and brands. All of this content needs to be managed in order to be shared and used. Get the most out of your visual content with these 5 tips for managing visual content.

Maintain quality in content and format. Quality content is what captures people’s attention and inspires people to share it with others. A stunning photograph of a social issue can say more than a 1,000 word essay would for a non-profit. Images can create an instant emotional connection that resonates with the viewer.

In order for the quality of your content to shine, you must maintain the quality of the file format. That stunning photograph won’t look so stunning if you used a lo-res JPEG for the cover of your brochure. Understand the best practices for file formats and file conversions to maintain crisp, clean looking visual content on any medium.

Keep it all together. If you work on a team with multiple visual content creators and multiple people who use those visual content files, central organization is crucial. It keeps your files accessible to the whole team the moment they are added, maintains consistency in content, and prevents time and energy lost to duplicate content creation.

Take advantage of an online storage solution to keep all of your visual content accessible from anywhere. Your sales team can show some new product photography while on the road with a prospect customer and you can share social content even when you aren’t at your desk.

Use file naming conventions. An important part of keeping your files organized is using proper naming conventions. Using IMG1490139 for a photograph does not provide any value. Creating clear, descriptive yet concise titles provides valuable information on what the content is. It also helps optimize your content for search. Pair that descriptive title with a naming convention to keep your content uniform to help organization.

Provide visual content guidelines. Not all visual content is to be used the same. Some files should be treated differently than others based on their content and purpose. Make sure you provide guidelines so your visual content is used properly and consistently. This information should be available to all who have access to share and distribute your visual content.

Control access. Obviously, visual content is most effective when seen. But it’s important to control access to who can edit, view, download and share what. Unreleased files should remain private until released. Updating files should only be available to those designated to do so.

Create a hierarchical structure that gives users just the amount of access they need and no more. This will guide proper management of your visual content. Also, users won’t be afraid to mess things up if they don’t have that the level of access to do so.

For your content to be most effective, it must be properly managed. What best practices does your organization use to manage visual content?

This guest contribution was written by Nate Holmes of Smartimage.

Self-anointed “real-time marketing platform for agencies and brands” SHIFT has announced the SHIFT Media Analyzer, an analytics tool for social advertisers. SHIFT Media Analyzer is said to enable marketers to analyze paid media campaigns across various brands at a global scale – all within a single dashboard.

SHIFT Media Analyzer provides analysis per campaign, as well as per creative, regardless of which tool or application was used to build the campaign. With real-time analytics, the offering promises marketers the insight they need to determine which campaigns are driving conversions which should help marketers maximize their social ROI.

The SHIFT Media Analyzer features:

– Real-time Visuals: Interactive charts and graphs enable marketers to easily hone in on specific campaigns and identify which ad creative is driving the highest engagement.

– Campaign Analytics: Visualizations make it simple to spot anomalies in any campaign, ad, and targeting performance; allowing advertisers to focus efforts on initiatives that have the most impact.

– Timeline Analysis: Monitor campaign performance indicators over time, as detailed as down to a specific day.

– Keyword Analysis: Find which keywords are working and which are underperforming to take action in real time.

-Collaboration & Sharing: With one click, charts and graphs can be downloaded and shared with team members inside and outside of the SHIFT platform.

“Topsy not only helps me understand what the most influential people are saying, but also allows me to determine who my clients should engage with and when, and which words they should choose to assure they knock their messages out of the park. No joke, choosing the right 140 characters keeps my clients in movies, at the top of the charts, on Wheaties boxes and off of TMZ.”

No offense to Topsy (which humorously sounds like a nickname for a top heavy girl) but it’s quotes like this that make us want to pack it in, rob a bank, head to a remote island in the South Pacific and live a life free of social media bullshit.

This quote comes from a release in which Topsy is touting its new Topsy Pro engagement features which allow brands to spot trends, track sentiment and identify key influencers and react…IN REAL TIME…to PR crisis and customer service issues as well as “amplify ad and marketing campaigns.”

We’re sure the product is great so don’t let the fact we have a bee in our bonnet over the state of social media get you down.

Brad Pitt would love this! Just like Brad did in the movie Moneyball, KnowledgeTree says it’s time to start taking a different approach to sales and marketing content. Every piece of collateral content that marketing produces and sales uses contains data that is influenced not only by the contents of the collateral but by the approach taken during the sales process.

Moneyball Managers, as KnowledgeTree likes to call managers, must know how match-ups play out. Do case studies generate more interest than white papers? Does an ROI calculator really have any value? Do banks respond to case studies about insurance companies? Understanding this kind of data lets sales and marketing teams match-up their best content with different customers – and get more pipeline.

This data enables the Moneyball Manager to identify what collateral works based on defined criteria and historical data. Marketing is then able to refine collateral so that it stays relevant, not only for the prospect, but for Sales.

Download this report now and learn how KnowledgeTree can help your company use and improve your collateral. Sales teams get collateral that closes deals. Managers identify what’s effective. And Marketing makes collateral that drives more sales. Win, win, right?

Black Ink, a division of Boston-based Winsper, has announced Eye On Enterprise Marketing ROI Suite, a cloud-based offering that provides brands with empirical evidence regarding marketing’s contribution to the bottom line. Eye On reports on more than 50 interdependent key performance indicators (KPIs) across Marketing ROI, Customer ROI, and Business ROI. It is said to work with any database environment including enterprise resource planning (ERP), sales force automation (SFA), marketing resource management (MRM), marketing automation (MA), and point of sale (POS).

According to a roll up of several recent studies from IBM, IDC, Forrester and others as compiled in this infographic, 75 percent of CEOs are not convinced that marketers understand ROI. On the other hand, 75 percent of CMOs understand that return on marketing investment (ROMI) will be the primary measure of their effectiveness, but only half feel sufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers.

Of the offering, Black Ink President Jeff Winsper said, “Eye On delivers the hard data that CFOs and CEOs have been asking their marketing teams for since – well, since forever. Campaign ROI is important, and Eye On measures it, but campaign measurement alone falls short of what finance or the boardroom requires to measure success. Eye On delivers the bottom line numbers about marketing’s specific contribution to the business metrics that matter most such as revenue, margin, growth, acquisition, and sales productivity. Eye On is the solution that finally gives marketers the ability to demonstrate their proof of fiscal performance.”

Winsper said, “Eye On goes beyond other analytic tools by giving marketers not only the answer to ‘What is my ROI?’ but deeper questions as well including ‘Where did the return come from, who did it come from, and when can I expect it?’ thus allowing for better marketing planning and improved performance.”

This guest post is written by Nina Brakel-Schutt, Business Development Strategist at Widen.

Establishing a system for storing, managing and distributing logos, photos, audio, video, design files and other digital assets to clients is probably the least sexy aspect of creative work.

However, agencies that fail to get the right assets to clients on time, every time, face losing accounts in a digitally driven marketplace that moves at warp speed.

For more than 20 years, I’ve been involved in brand strategy and integrated communications. In recent years, I’ve witnessed an explosion of digital assets in the creative industry as agencies continually expand the content they create for clients.

As technology improves, the types of digital assets used in concepts, pitches and campaigns are likely to increase as well. That ups the ante for creative agencies that want to attract and retain new business. All of a sudden, a system for managing the bulging assortment of digital assets starts to look sexy.

So, what is digital asset management (DAM) software?

Think of DAM software as a system for managing digital assets of all kinds and, importantly, eliminating convoluted digital folder structures, piles of job folders, stuffed file cabinets and hidden spaces that can mysteriously claim digital assets.
Good systems come equipped with tools that:

– Monitor assets that are uploaded, downloaded and shared, assign and edit tags for assets and group assets according to user governance and access.
– Allow users to quickly find and retrieve appropriate files to send to clients.
– Incorporate core features that make sense for an agency’s business, such as converting files to the necessary formats on the fly.
– Utilize a secure, always-available platform such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or cloud-based software to eliminate the need for on-site IT support.

With global competition for business at an all-time high, running a creative shop without a centralized repository for managing digital assets is a recipe for
disaster. A single campaign may involve an internal creative team with a half dozen or more individuals, each making changes on digital files as the work progresses. Retrieving the latest version of a file quickly becomes problematic absent an agreed-upon system for managing digital files.

Consider two missteps that could have been avoided had agencies relied on DAM software instead of mere recall.

– A team dashes to deliver a new business presentation unaware that is missing last-minute revisions made by a managing director. He is on a client call and out of reach. Its next task? A repeat performance with the client, a financial institution, using the correct file.
– Crafting a new campaign, an auto manufacturer requests car photos from a 2012 photo shoot. The agency rushes over photos with one glaring problem: The photos are two years old.

Think about the backpedaling required by both agencies to make things right. Not sexy.

Fortune 1000 companies differentiating themselves in a global economy can hardly afford to stumble in executing brand strategy across print, broadcast, web and social media channels. They need support from a foolproof digital asset management system that helps them bring creative content to market faster.

Let’s face it: agencies have to be nimble to survive.

Developing pitch concepts, producing client communications and winning new accounts are what matters. Spending hours searching for and retrieving files, burning CDs and tracking down the most recent files will eat up an agency’s billable time – and eventually, their business.

DAM systems can be the backbone of a smooth creative operation that manages, retrieves and distributes digital assets in a snap for internal teams and clients.
In this day and time, that’s sexy.

As a creative, you want your work to shine wherever it is seen right? But you dread all the technological hassles that go along with converting your idea to a workable online ad unit, right? Coding sucks. Flash doesn’t work on mobile. HTML5 challenges some browsers. And all those rich media technologies make your head spin. Are we right? Of course we are.

Well, perhaps, your life may get a bit easier. A company called Steelhouse has launched A2, a new tool that brings the simplicity of drag and drop and point and click to online ad creation. The company says the tool will allow for the inclusion of video, images, location-aware information, product carousels, social sharing and content derived from behavioral data.

Of the offering, Steelhouse CEO Mark Douglas said, “Whether they want to admit it or not, brands are embarrassed by the quality of their display advertising. Display ads are stuck in a static time warp surrounded by a world of video, mobile apps and social tools. The reality is that the ads brands want have been too hard and time consuming to create.”

It might be worth check out if you’re actively creating online ads but can’t stand all the complexity. Check out the intro video below. And you can see one of the ads in action here.

Download this whitepaper to find out how reading digital body language can improve your online markering efforts.

Social software provider Buddy Media has announced the launch of its YouTube social marketing solution, billed as the first global solution of its kind.