Advertising Archive

Update 16/9: MSN has now started running the campaign!

No need to Wispa about this little marketing campaign because those yummy folks at Cadbury’s have forked out £2m in chocolatey profits to buy up media space all over the country!

The idea is to go to their special message site and leave some ditty for a loved one to have it plastered on one of over 1000 poster sites around the UK!

One lucky winner will have Rolf Harris tie their kangaroo down and create a brand new original painting on a high impact billboard near London’s busy Old Street roundabout on Tuesday 15th September!

That’s tomorrow so what are you waiting for!!!???

Really pleased with this combined effort from our design/marketing/community teams at Microsoft Advertising.

We’ve just launched this Advertising Week 2009 social media hub which includes a Twitter feed of everything being talked about in relation to the event and videos of interviews we’ve done before and we’ll be doing during our time there. 

There’s a photo stream and including a very cool DeepZoom plug-in on the home page!

I’ll be in New York for the week blogging and Tweeting, so hope to catch up with a lot of you there!

If you can’t make it I hope you’ll drop by this site now and again…

Many of you in the travel space will know Kevin from his time as editor at www.Travolution.co.uk

I’ve been fortunate to have presented with the guy in Tenerife a couple of years ago, and like his style.

Well now his much anticipated venture has started emerging as I just got an invite to his new brand’s Facebook Page

Described as “a new, dynamic, global media brand for the travel industry” – they have a new site – www.Tnooz.com – where you can sign up for updates as no doubt he puts the finishing touches to the offering.

Intriguing to say the least!

Could “nooz” be related to “news”, given Kevin’s background as a journalist? 🙂

Snapshot of what’s available for FREE at Silverlight Streaming on Windows Live – you get 10GBs of free hosting which ain’t bad…

Update: You can now catch up on all the news and coverage from AdWeek on our social media hub where you’ll find videos, photos, Tweets and blog posts following all the action: Advertising Week 2009

If you follow our Microsoft Advertising Blog you know we’re going to be sponsoring Advertising Week in New York 21-25th of September. IAB MIXX and OMMA are going on at the same time!!

From a social media point of view, we’ll be building on our success at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival and have put together a madcap plan for running around the 5 or 6 venues in NY with our team, blogging, Tweeting and interviewing people on video to really try and bring the conference to life for those of you who can’t make it!

It’s great that Microsoft recognise the power of social media and invest in teams like ours to go and do this sort of thing.

More next week on what we’re doing as we unveil a very cool resource!

Picked up this canny little piece of kit from Steve Clayton.

Aaron Zinman’s philosophy with personas is:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant.

Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.

It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Luckily “online” is represented accurately and the “sport” bit must be my incessant talking about cricket.

Did I say I had tickets for the day at The Oval where we regained The Ashes from Australia but couldn’t go becaue I was on honeymoon!?

Check it our for yourself at: http://personas.media.mit.edu

Just written about this over on the Microsoft Advertising Blog.

I’m the US right now so can’t watch any shows on the MSN Video Player as it’ll only work for UK IP addresses but nevertheless if you are in Blighty, how flippin’ cool?!

As well as comedy and drama it’s got a documentary channel too with shows like The Human Face, Great British Journeys and Human Instinct!

61% of us admit to regularly surfing the web while watching TV so why not just thow open a couple of IE8 windows and watch Shameless while IMing your mates and booking your holiday all at the same time?

I’m looking forward to checking it out when I get back at the end of August.

Take a peek and let me know what you think!

Got interviewed last week by Mr PPC Fabulous David Szetela from ClixMarketing

During the show we discuss:

· The evolution of the Microsoft Advertising Community Team

· The Yahoo! deal?!

· Microsoft adCenter as the one-stop-shop for advertisers

· Microsoft Media Network

· Search and Display ROI Uplift Research

· Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

· Atlas Search

· adCenter Desktop

· adCenter ROI – “2 times to 5 times better than on Google and Yahoo!” says David!

· SES San Jose!

· Microsoft Advertising on Social Media

Check out the interview here: Microsoft Advertising Interview with Mel Carson

Ok so it’s all my fault!

When setting our wedding date Ashley and I didn’t check the conference calendar and so didn’t spot that Search Engine Strategies San Jose falls this year from 10th to the 14th August!

What were we thinking?!

It was only after paying the deposit on the caterers and the DJ, after friends had booked their exorbitant and non-refundable air fares from London, and after securing a super deal on an All American Mobile BBQ that we realised our gargantuan error.

Our wedding date is set for 15th August and as much as I tried to shoehorn a trip to California into our pre-wedding itinerary, herself was having none of it!

I tried to explain that SearchBash is a very sober affair and that I would make a Wednesday morning flight back to Seattle but to no avail………

It seems some things must take precedence over one of the happiest conferences of our lives.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy the week, that Mike Grehan & Kevin Ryan behave themselves 🙂 and that the keynote speeches are much better than my best men’s are going to be!

Do say hi to all my Microsoft colleagues who’ll be there in force, and get a 20% discount by checking out this post on Microsoft Advertising Community!

P.S. Can you believe she won’t let me TwitPic her coming down the aisle?!!!

I like this approach. Waitrose has always been seen as a more up-market brand of supermarket and some would say more expensive.

So in a recession when you’re trying to attract people that are saving their pennies, why not just stick your products and prices up on a bill board?

People are looking for value for money and this advertising of their “essential range” demonstrates that they’re not all the expensive after all!