Last week a&g completed its involvement in our first ever Advertising Apprenticeship Program. a&g partnered with Pile + Company, Timberland, and Citizen Schools to participate in an advertising program for middle school students from around the greater Boston area. This program was an exciting and meaningful experience for students and volunteers alike.

Melissa Vigdor, Paul Salafia and Matt Kiley represented a&g as teachers/mentors in this advertising apprenticeship program. They dedicated 90 minutes one afternoon per week (plus preparation time) for 10 consecutive weeks, from early fall through December, teaching the basics of advertising. A group of 10-15 students were bused to our office for each 90-minute session from Edison Middle School in Brighton.

In this advertising apprenticeship, students participated in a mock-agency review and design advertising campaigns for a Timberland product. Melissa, Paul and Matt partnered with their students to create the best ad campaign possible. At the culmination of the 10-week project, students presented their campaigns at an industry-wide event to a panel of judges including Pile + Company, Timberland executives, community leaders, media representatives and others.

Our apprentices competed against another middle school from Dorchester who partnered with Mullen. While both teams presented well, I’m proud to share that the Edison Middle School kids took home the BIG IDEA award!

Melissa, Matt and Paul, thank you for sharing your knowledge, leadership and project management skills and working to diversify our profession. Maybe one of our apprentices will end up at a&g someday!

There are actually two parts to Google Wave. The part you see and interact with on Google’s website is actually Google’s front-end version of their back-end product. Google intends to let organizations run their own Wave servers based on the federated protocol they have developed. In theory, a business could run their own Wave server which could interact with other Wave servers, much the same way email servers interact. Additionally, web-based services (like Facebook) could offer Wave capabilities to users.

One interesting aspect of Wave is that it is built around the idea of collaboration and conversation. Standard email is either one way direct messaging or conversational. So where does this leave spam and legitimate email marketing? If Amazon sends its millions of customers a Wave what would the result be? Would everyone be able to comment and edit the message freely? Remember, Google ultimately wants Wave to replace email as it’s still unclear how the open, conversational nature of Wave will impact marketing efforts.

All of the features and possibilities Wave offers may turn out to be its greatest weakness. Google Wave is complex and the user experience is much more engaging than email or IM. You have to pay attention to what’s going on and how things are connected.

The history of the Internet is clear: make it easy and they will come.

Blogging took off in the earlier part of the decade when tools were introduced to make it easy for everyone not just people who knew HTML and YouTube made video sharing very easy. Old habits die hard, and moving millions of people off email to a new platform is going to be incredibly difficult.

There is a lot to like about Google Wave and Google’s overall vision of collaboration. But it’s going to be a while before the product is ready for a wide audience and even longer before it can hope to overtake email in popularity. Until Google or another developer finds a way to seamlessly migrate users from email to Wave it might be destined to a niche product, nice for business collaboration, but not the widespread replacement for email and IM Google is hoping for.

For 25 years, Allen & Gerritsen has been redefining the traditional branding model. Always focused on what’s next, Allen & Gerritsen (a&g) strategically combines technology, creativity, media and analytics to develop digital, experiential and traditional branding experiences. With a balanced mix of business-to-business and consumer accounts, we are poised to continue our growth by building our clients’ businesses.

Google Wave has generated some of the loudest buzz on the Internet in 2009 and it’s sure to grow in the coming year as the technology evolves and the user base expands.



Google has taken email and applied the idea of “anyone can edit anything” wikis and made it all real-time similar to an instant message conversation. Google’s thinking is that email and IM are old technologies that could use a reinventing. The basic layout of Wave is an inbox like email, and various threads (called waves). Each wave contains “wavelets,” which are subsets are the larger wave history and each wavelet contains individual messages called “blips.” When you create a new wave you invite participants to join and compose your initial blip. The wave appears in the inbox of those invited and at any point they can read and edit the contents of the wave, which is instantly shared to all participants.

While the concept behind the product seems innovative, the result is a bit chaotic. In my testing with a few friends it was almost impossible to follow a coherent conversation. There is a learning curve involved when it comes to keeping things organized. Edits to waves can be made anywhere, at anytime and those changes are not clearly marked within the wave. In addition, bugs within the software can cause edits to appear in unintended places.

Besides the basics of editing text, there are a lot of other goodies built into Wave. You can attach images and other files. Gadgets can be embedded within a wave to provide additional functionality. Google provides a few samples including a polling gadget, embedding Google Maps, a Sudoku game and weather. Robots can also be added to a wave in order to provide a level of automation and pull information from outside sources. Waves can also be embedded into web pages allowing the public to participate in a Wave much like a Wikipedia page.

MITX recently gave some industry colleagues and I a chance to speak on behalf of the Agency and cite predictions for the Digital space in 2010. So I broke out the tea leaves, tarot cards, crystal ball and my old Oracle ID badge.

My predictions for 2010:

The Year of Products
The Year of Content Strategy
The Year of Productized Sites
The Year of Engagement
The Year of Instant and Buyer Led Video
The Year of Social CRM
The Year of Segmentation



Shifts in Thinking
I see some interesting evolution in the space. We heard a good deal of evangelism in 2009 around content and saw the beginnings of a convergence of static sites and dynamic communities. There was a definite eye towards more interactivity and repeatability.  One of the messages that was very loud was the idea of sites becoming products. We should be focused on keeping our brands and / or products top of line and what better way to do that than to have a site be both relevant and engaging?

This requires a different mindset in the development of content. We will see more third party / independent / freelance experts brought into organizations to build content. Content “curation” and portability will become crucial.   As technologies mature and the shine wears off and they become part of our daily lives, we go back to focusing more on our expertise, our disciplines and less on shiny objects.  Content strategists spent a great deal of the last year developing ways to repurpose meta-content across platforms and will spend a great deal of time in 2010 activating.



This means that we will see more analyst / creative convergence. Analysts and content strategists will be working more closely than ever as 2010 will be the year of engagement. Engagement metrics will become more important than ever as content strategists deal with multiple audience and platform intricacies. Every content offering now comes bundled with listening to customers and measurement of impact. Maybe an analyst and a content strategist or two will get married by 2012.

Investment
Technology will still require investment. New shiny objects will appear and fascinate and challenge us to innovate. The smart agencies will place bets on the ones that they can build compelling offerings around and that will be readily adopted. The smartest will just go ahead and eat their own dogfood, building labs and activating technology that they can use in a dog and pony show.

Given mobile adoption rates, I look for mobile applications and location based advertising to be big offerings in 2010. The challenge for mobile applications will continue to be measurement. As measurement becomes more desirable, look for the shops with measurement toolkits built into their apps to thrive. Don’t have one? Invest now.

Products
Our agency continues to build offerings around products. We currently have three measurement related products and two segmentation products. The measurement products each have three tiers related to momentum, optimization and precision. For us, 2010 is the year of precision. Precision in this case is predictive analysis which gives us the ability not only to call out what variables have the most impact, but also to forecast reasonably how they would behave in a plan. That is the sort of analytics offering that can lead or carry a story.

Video
2009 was the year of video. Every device under the sun can record video and there are plenty of places from You Tube to Vimeo to put it (I really like blip.tv). We are going to continue to see this as now even the newfangled iPods take video. 2010 is the year of instant video, led by ustream.tv, who recently released an iPhone application that allows any iPhone to stream* video live over the Internet, record it instantly and save it for posterity. Invest here. The ramifications of this are huge not only from a journalism perspective, but also from an ability to host live content, anywhere and anytime.

We are also going to see more “buyer led video”. Companies like Visible Gains make it easy to build experiential videos that are customizable to a user’s preferences and also can capture information that is fed into your CRM system. They are already integrated with SalesForce.com.

*The current version of the application is extremely buggy and has already compromised my personal privacy twice, but I am still in love with the technology and am actively trying to reach ustream.tv about its plans to fix the issues.



Location Based Social Networking
How many times have you heard a marketer say “If only I knew where they go and when they go there.” People are rapidly making Foursquare and Gowalla a part of their daily routine, checking into places where, presumably they are willing to spend time and money and give free insight into their behavior. Thanks to strong integration with micromedia platforms (twitter, Facebook), streams of consciousness in micromedia that represent consumers’ attitudes are easy to overlay. This represents the holy grail for marketers. Look for agencies to partner with technology companies to integrate these data streams and build some very compelling attitudinal / behavioral profiles that enable smart engagement targeting on both platforms.

Social CRM
Salesforce.com integration with Radian 6 is just the beginning. Social CRM involves combining the 2 way dialogues from prospects in your community and in social spaces with their touch points in your sales database. This social attitudinal layer provides a look into the things that matter with your customer and prospect base from business and personal perspectives (depending on how people use their personas). Another layer of profiling, another variable to test. This time it works though because it gives us a look at what our customers are actually thinking. Both B2B and B2C companies need this, particularly retail companies who are beginning to implement loyalty and e-commerce based CRM strategies.

Now that I’ve put this out there, do you have anything to add?  Any prediction you don’t believe will come true?

Advertising agencies are increasingly adding value for their clients as product development partners. With access to tremendous consumer research and insight, agencies may find product design to be a key service offering in the future.



Photo Credit: Boston Business Journal

From the article:

Earlier this year, Watertown-based Allen & Gerritsen was hired by the U.S. office of the Chinese toy company Toy State in Norwood to put a new gloss on the 22-year-old brand’s image. Allen & Gerritsen created an ad campaign, including television spots, that broke last month touting the company’s line of toy trucks and cars. But beyond creating advertising, the shop is also being tapped to brainstorm new product ideas for 2011.

Will Coleburn, senior vice president of Toy State’s U.S. office “has come in with gray plastic prototypes fresh off the boat from Hong Kong,” said Brian Donovan, vice president and group marketing director at Allen & Gerritsen. “He’s really pulling back the curtain and saying, ‘You’re a partner.’”

Read the entire article here.

Allen & Gerritsen Chairman, Paul Allen, shares his thoughts on Billy Mays infomercials still airing after the pitchman’s death and what that says about Mays’ legacy and the ad world’s selling tactics.

From the article:

“I was good with Billy Mays when he was the “OxiClean Guy.” OrangeGlo Corp. found a relevant, powerful personality who embodied the “tough work” ethic of OxiClean. He made the products both important and a great value. That, in my world, is great marketing. And it earned Billy Mays the unofficial title of “America’s Pitchman.” He was the guy who could sell anything. And then he did… It’s time to stop using Billy Mays to sell. And consider using him to learn how to sell.”

Read the full article at Media Post.

Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the crowd has a really good idea about what you do during a given day.  iPhone and Android’s onboard GPS has given way to location based social networks like BrightKite, Foursquare and Gowalla,  which allow you to tell your friends where you are and how often you go there. Location based applications are the next frontier, and in fact are predicted to be next year’s big thing, offering unlimited possibility for communication by geography and, of course, advertising.

My last two sessions at SXSW 2009 featured players in location based social networking. I remember being fascinated by how they approached it primarily because Gregory Ng and I concepted our own in 2007 (prior owning an iPhone and iPhone’s “reliable” GPS).

Applications

Each of the location based apps have the ability to figure out where a person is located.  The user “checks in” to locations, signifying their arrival.  In addition, the user is able to send messages to let people know what they are doing.

BrightKite allows you to post a status update and a picture.



Foursquare gives you points for creating and “checking in” to a location. It also has has a leaderboard to see how you rank against your friends and your city.



Gowalla’s check-ins are similar in that you can post a note, but the app also has quirky little items that you find and leave for others. For instance, I currently have an espresso, a silk robe and a tour bus in my inventory. I am never going to drop that tour bus. That is awesome. You can either exchange items for items left by others, or drop an item to become a “Founder” of a spot. I cannot say that I fully understand the purpose, although Gowalla says that they use the items as proxies for how important a particular place is.



Each application relies on the users to create locations at spots and rewards them for doing so.

Integrations

Each of the services works with Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to connect with friends from those networks and to post notifications. Some might call this oversharing (particularly if you are friends with people on Twitter, Facebook and the Location based network).

Foursquare has recently also announced an API that is will make it even more appealing to the community.

The secret to extension of social applications is the ability to integrate it into a grander scheme. With integration with Twitter and Facebook already functional, the API combined with its game-like addictiveness will give it an advantage over all other LBSNs. BrightKite also has an API, but adoption has been much slower because people simply do not have a lot of incentive to use the platform even though it is probably the best in terms of geo-location. BrightKite needs to evolve and add incentives for use in order to stand up against its competitors and survive.

Advertising Features

Foursquare appears to be the leader in advertising and monetization. I’ve started to see some “nearby special” bannerettes pop up when I am about to check in to a place. Foursquare allows locations to give special deals to mayors. A mayor is the person who has checked into a place the most. This creates a little bit of competition between loyal customers. There’s a great opportunity to generate social buzz and loyalty by being an early adopter.

Who Wins?

The winner is the one who makes money. There are a couple of ways for an organization to do so. One is to be acquired by another organization who is interested in your compelling technology.  The other way is to actually have a business model that makes money. Obviously it is desirable to have both going for you. The winner will also have a very compelling API which will allow them to scale and proliferate rapidly. FourSquare’s looks to be based largely on Twitter’s which has been wildly successful. Foursquare has already begun selling ads that are based on where a person is physically. I have noticed ads when I go to check into a place. They say something like Deal Nearby and offer you a click path to that location with an easy back to your original location. Brightkite has some banner ads that display after you check in to a location. I have not noticed similar features on Gowalla yet.

Behavioral Data and Analytics

The real win here is that location data can be linked to conversations on both the application’s platform and on associated Twitter (and soon perhaps Facebook) streams.  You can get a clear picture of how a person behaves by where they go, how often they go there, where their friends go, how often they meet their friends and what they talk about when they are there - or after they go there. An analytics offering segmented by demographics and interests would be very valuable to marketers.  They would also pay to see analysis of popular places so that they know where to place their ads.

We know where they go and we know what they’re thinking.

Now we just need to get them to buy something.

Given the amount of information we have, I am sure we can find something appropriate to sell.