Original article here: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3630966

Digital or Die

By Rebecca Lieb, The ClickZ Network, Sep 26, 2008

One of the most crammed, standing-room-only sessions at MIXX this week featured the media directors of top agencies, including Digitas, Mediaedge:cia, Neo@Ogilvy, and MindShare. As they talked targeting and how they were spending millions of media dollars for their respective rosters of blue-chip clients, online media trainer extraordinaire Leslie Laredo leaned over to whisper in my ear, “Not a single person on this panel is over 30.”

Whether her observation is literally true is moot. The point is these senior agency executives are young, much younger than their typical counterparts on the traditional media side of the table.

Why? Are old dogs so adverse to learning new tricks? Because certainly at MIXX, as well as at OMMA last week, bemoaning the digital talent gap was a cry that emerged early and often.

It’s not just old-timers on the traditional agency side of the equation who are stubbornly resisting the shift to digital. It’s an issue across the media landscape. Their reluctance was perhaps somewhat understandable in the go-go ’90s and in the sober, austere, bleak era around 2002.

But now?

Still, I’m seeing traditional publishers cut back on digital endeavors (and digital staff) in a desperate and futile effort to sustain their flagging, dead-tree legacy brands. I’m seeing digital executives going to senior management with requests for back-end tools, such as content management systems and social media software, only to learn their corporate overlords have no idea what all that stuff is, much less what it’s actually used for or how it can benefit the business.

And I’m seeing some of those print publications flatline. Friends who have been print journalists for decades are panicking in the face of cutbacks, early retirement, consolidation, and plain old extinction.

But they’re not learning digital skills. A critic friend stays up nights over the fact his paper is due to shutter at month’s end. When I inquired about his online skills, he replied that even the most fundamental elements of a story, such as hyperlinks, were determined and executed by the online editor. He doesn’t know how to do any of that stuff.

An entrepreneur behind an online publishing startup, meanwhile, recently posed a hypothetical question: “If you could hire a top journalist with 20 years’ traditional experience or someone fresh out of J-school who knew the Web cold, which person would you hire?”

No contest. Hands down, I’d make the kid an offer.

New media is becoming old hat. It’s a fact of life. OMMA and MIXX were packed, refreshingly, with new faces. I’m speaking next week at MIMA in Minneapolis, another sold-out interactive marketing event. Newfound interest in and support for digital advertising is heartening, yet there’s still an astonishing degree of pushback across the media industries.

Across all industries and sectors, in fact. Veteran Web consultant and publisher Larry Chase related a story this week about rescuing a neighbor’s virus-infected hard drive (they’d let their virus protection software subscription expire). The relieved and chastised owner piped up that while they didn’t know much about virus protection, they had just learned how to create an e-mail attachment.

Clinging to Luddism and deliberate blindness in the face of the digital revolution (no understatement there!) may have been cute 10 years ago. Today, it’s inexcusable.

Those glib and somewhat arrogant aphorisms, such as “everything that can be digital will be,” have come to pass. In a climate buffeted by a tumultuous economy and tenuous job security, the advertising and media industries really have reached the point of go-digital-or-die.

The question, of course, is how do you change attitudes? How can media professionals be made to understand and convinced to embrace digital media and Web literacy, e-mail accounts, and the occasional Amazon order? It’s disheartening to watch friends and colleagues lose jobs — as well as their future prospects — before they wake up to this no-longer-new reality.

So what’s the answer? Some sort of digital Peace Corps? Community college courses? Should companies undertake in-house training initiatives?

What are you doing? Because friends can no longer allow friends to remain digitally illiterate. Or is the media and advertising landscape going to have to undergo a Wall Street meltdown before people start to change?

John Roach
for National Geographic News

September 12, 2008

A multibillion-dollar atom smasher on the Franco-Swiss border may help scientists treat diseases, improve the Internet, and open the door to travel through extra dimensions, according to physicists.
On Wednesday scientists cheered and champagne flowed as the first beam of protons lapped around the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground tunnel at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, was designed to solve big mysteries in science, such as the nature of dark matter and what the universe was like just after the big bang.
The massive machine could also lead to medical and technological advances, some experts argue.
Such potential breakthroughs are often an “ancillary benefit” of big science projects like the LHC, said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and author at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Still, Krauss said, these benefits are a misguided way to justify building the atom smasher.
“It’s like trying to argue that manned space missions were useful for Tang,” he said, referring to the powdered drink mix popularized in U.S. households by NASA in the 1960s.
“Our job as scientists is to explain that these esoteric things [such as dark matter] are not completely unrelated to humanity,” he added. “Ultimately, we address the questions of how we got here and what we’re made of.”
Already Providing Benefits
In the months ahead, scientists will use the LHC to ramp up opposing proton beams to nearly light speed and smash particles together, breaking them into smaller components.
Monstrous detectors will pore through the detritus, helping scientists examine the conditions of the very early universe.
The computer network set up to process the mountains of data generated by each collision is already inspiring spin-offs, noted Andy Parker, a professor of high energy physics at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, who helped design the grid system.
Parker is also involved with a Cambridge-based company that is using the grid technology, which links together thousands of computers, to better index images on the Internet.
Such a system determines the task to be done, the processing power required, checks for availability, sends the task out, gets it done, and ships it back to the scientist—all while the person sits at a desk.
“I don’t have to do anything to achieve [all] that,” Parker said.
Technologies developed for earlier atom smashers—such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider that booted up in New York in 2000 and the Fermilab Tevatron started in 1987 in Illinois—are today ingrained in mainstream society, Parker noted.
Positron emission tomography (PET) scans, for example, are common at most major hospitals to make images of the insides of patients’ bodies, often to look for cancerous tumors.
The technique stems from general studies of antimatter and the use of particle detectors, Parker said.
And more medical professionals are turning to proton beams similar to those used in the LHC to blast away tumors deep inside bodies.
“What you can do there is send a beam of protons into the patient, which does essentially no damage at all to the tissues on the way in,” Parker explained.
“All the damage is done at the point where the protons stop. And by tuning the energy of the protons, you can make them stop inside the tumor.”
As scientists working with the LHC learn to better focus and control proton beams, the improvements will likely trickle down to the medical profession, he added.
Faster Than Light
Future spin-offs from the LHC are less certain.
“We don’t know what we’re going to find out,” Parker said.
Though admittedly far-fetched, one sexy idea is that the LHC may find extra dimensions of space/time. If so, the discovery could open the door to technologies that allow people to travel faster than the speed of light.
In a sense, Parker explained, scientists may discover an ability to move chunks of space-time from one place to another through those extra dimensions, effectively bypassing the known laws of physics.
“If you went to the 23rd century and there were people flying around faster than the speed of light, you would say, What is it you found out that enabled you to do this?” Parker said.
“And the answer might be, It all started when we discovered there were these extra dimensions.”
Krauss, of Arizona State University, said that even without such advances, curiosity-driven research is fundamental to maintaining our current standard of living for generations into the future.
“It will help create innovation and enhance the economic future of our children in ways that we don’t know,” he said, adding that the chance to work with machines such as the LHC often attracts students to the sciences.
Krauss added that the big science questions being probed with the LHC are also personally relevant and practical for all members of society.
He explained that just as people are made of stardust, the origins of those particles in stardust stretch back to the beginning of the universe.
“If it all works out, you’ll get a better understanding of what you’re doing here,” he said. “And, to me, that is the greatest benefit of science.”

We live in electrifying digital times. Events can be converged 360 degrees to involve the whole humanity simultaneously.  Add to that the fact that the internet is a great place to be an armchair activist. One can debate and interact about many issues with like minded people from around the world. With the world going digital and converging on the internet, it’s an exciting thing to take a stance and get involved.

Take the case of Pangea Day, a unique global event concept which aimed to bring the world together through film. It started at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008 in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro were linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program was broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones. Other than that there were happenings at movie theatres, parks, and other shared venues before the run up to the broadcasts.

The 24 short films were featured were selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes. They taked about issues from human rights to climate change.  Details on the Pangea Day films can be viewed here.

The program also included a number of exceptional speakers and musical performers: Queen Noor of Jordan, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, musician/activist Bob Geldof, and Iranian rock phenomena Hypernova. The event was widely publicized through social media sites like facebook, Youtube, MySpace.   

Today a wide array of such events can be conducted online. The best part about them is that they are interactive and global in nature. Pod casts, Webcasts and Online chats can be achieved quite simply and publicized through web. Issue based events gather a lot of buzz as internet can be an effective media for research and debate. Considering internet is the future, it definitely seems an ‘eventful’ one.

Originally submitted by Dabitch. Some mods added!

The advertising dictionary is useful for both adn00bs and adknowing and everyone in between.
Note: this ad dictionary was hosted in another place where you could add words before our redesign, created in 2001. I figure I’d simply repost it as a regular blog post now since submissions declined.
AstroTurf Marketing: Astroturf marketing is what you do when you post anything in a very (very!) popular blog and/or community blog simply to spread the word, like how great Pepsi Blue is, or how you like Terry Tate the office linebacker (with links) or whatever else you want to go ‘viral’.
See also Astroturf – From Disinfopedia, the encyclopedia of propaganda. :”Senator Lloyd Bentsen, himself a long-time Washington and Wall Street insider, is credited with coining the term “astroturf lobbying”.” In other words, astroturf began in the political arena and seeped out to the consumer arena…

Account Consecutive: These AE’s use the same dang plan and media mix for each and every one of their clients, no matter if they’re a small skateboard manufacturer or a national supplemental health insurance group for senior citizens. Also known as Coasters.

(an) Add: To add is what you learned in early math class, as in 2+2=5. It’s also how dyslexic copywriters and people who do not work in advertising thinks one spells “ad” as in “advert”. Well, it’s wrong, just to clear that up. Besides, in advertising we think 1+1=3, so you really shouldn’t be talking math with us.

Adland: this is common term for this website, including the subsites/subsections such as Badland, the Commercial Archive, the adforums and so on. We’ve called it that since 1996 and old habits die hard. I should know, I still smoke.

Adgrunt: I coined the expression here as a way to describe the audience that arrives, we are the sick twisted souls that use the remote control in order to find the commercials, rather than avoid them.

Borelancer: A freelance creative who spends his or her entire time talking about who they’ve worked with, what they’ve learned and how you could use it to become better at your job.

Blogaganda: Exactly what you think it is, propaganda in blogs or blogs created specifically in order to spew propaganda. Term coined here 2004

Buzzard: You know this type – uses “utilize” instead of “use,” “proactive” in every other sentence, etc. Matter of fact, this type of person is so into it that they can use “paradigm” as a noun, verb and/or adjective.

Choppywriter: A jerkwad (usually a part-owner of the agency) who spends mebbe half a minute pretending to think deeply about a client, writes down three or four random words* on a piece of paper, and hands it down for somebody else to try and flesh it out into an actual concept – and of course takes full credit for the concept if the underlings actually develop anything from it.
*examples of word chop clusters…. “peanut, breasts, green, hair,” “boxers, hat, bananas, awning,” or “mutton, gremlin, ointment, eraser.”

Copy Wanker (Courtesy I am kidding.Really.) – the writer who sneaks sexual innuendo into anything including ads for laundry detergents, prescription drugs and disposable nappies with the motto “sex sells”.

Copywronger: An account manager who insists on telling people his or her embarrassingly bad copy ideas. See also Management Copywriter.

Clue by Four: unknown origin : something you’d like to smack a certain mediabuyer – who bought Mercedes newspaper ad space in conjunction with Princess Di’s death being reported – over the head with.

Creative Departed (Courtesy mochazina): a CD who is rumored to once have been creative but these days rides firmly on the shoulders of the creative department.

Demi-production head: A senior producer who refuses to be on the set before noon

Donuts: donuts – a prefab tv shell with the same ol’ beginning and end where you plop whatever the current promo is in the middle and call it a day. Completely forgettable lazy crap.

Do a Mahir: The Mahir phenomenon, aptly described in this article [salon], immediatly spawned a million “viral” Internet campaigns trying to ride a similar wave of “pass it on” hype. “Doing a Mahir” is to in essence, build a page equally naivly funny as Mahir’s, or in other closely related traits try to harness the same morbid curiosity of internet viewers. In other words, this is now the officially oldest viral advertising tactic, on par with traditional ad cliché propositions like “for all your [roast beef] needs.”
This is not to be confused with another type of “viral” campaign , which could be anything from the “use hotmail now” link at the bottom of each one of your sent hotmails, to a site that offers elaborate Ecards that you send your friends in order for the site to get traffic, to sneaky places like Ecrush that send out “someone has a crush on you” and make you type in a large amounts of friends real emails before they reveal who it is, if it even is anybody but their own email-harvesting machine…

Dupliclaims: it’s the word Tim cheif sloganmaven (r.i.p.) from adslogans.co.uk invented to describe Badland lookalike ads. The word stuck.

Endline : see strapline.

Fart Director: A staff designer who’s managed to parlay the last 12 years of a burnt-out career shuffling from design firm to design firm doing nothing but bitch about the coffee and the bathrooms and how the clients will NEVER PAY FOR A SHOOT AROUND HERE!

Friday: It’s not casual in adland. Friday is pink slip day. [friday is also silly link day on adlist.]

Hoaz: A hoax-person purposely designed in order to get net-wide and/or pressattention.
The press [legit] attention can be it’s only goal, the more elaborate one use the pressattention to flog a product. See examples such as Netochka Nezvanova [salon article link]. Bot? Person? Artgang? Software engineer? Troll?.
Expression coined to separate an elaborate Hoax-person/entity on the net from an elaborate Troll on the net with which a Hoaz shares many traits.

Hoarse Whisperer: An executive who read the intro to one of those body language books and speed-read through the rest, who now makes an ass of himself in every meeting with overexaggerated winks, eyebrow wiggles, staredowns, hand and arm gestures, and intentional intrusion of personal zones to display how “alpha” he is.

Junior Assistant Account Coordinator Planner Executive: Gopher

Layout – never an idea: The layout itself can do most of the ideas job, where it is placed, how it looks communicates more than its given credit. But a layout is not an idea. Stating “I used blurry fonts first – they nicked my idea!“, is better said as: “I used blurry fonts first – they nicked my design style“.
If blurred out fonts are used in order to communicate the need for new glasses and a visit to the optrician, the fonts are expressing the idea, but blurry fonts on their own aren’t an idea.
Otherwise, a layout carries the idea but it is never the idea on it’s own.

Viral ad (related to Mahir, umbrella-term.): When first coined – Steve Jurvetson and Tim Draper are credited with the term Viral Marketing in 1997 – the phrase “viral” was anything from those little sigfiles at the bottom of a hotmail mail to any other “wildfire” word of mouth.
These days the term Viral is more often used in regards to actual commercials that spread like wildfire across the web, some agencies make “made for web only” commercials specifically. Anything too raunchy, sexy or anything that was “banned from TV” (has the potential of becoming a viral film. Viral sites are the best way of promoting them, a great example was the Fanta Shokata website which allowed punters to create their own films and spread them to friends – thus both allowing users to create a film and email their friends.
Famous film examples: Lee & Rubberburner leaked films on the net via “Losers.org”and for us adgrunts Truth In Advertising tickled our funnbone extra much, both in 2000. Fred & Farid’s Xbox “champagne” 2002, Monster spoof “when I grow up” 2002, Ford Ka cat decapitation in 2004, the BIG ad and suicide vw bomber ad by Lee & Dan, 2005 – just to name a few.

Master Bait: An older suit with a once notable past in a certain industry who is hired and paraded around to increase the chances of successfully wooing a client in that same industry. Unfortunately, the wooing fails, so the agency is stuck with a disinterested, expensive and grizzled grumpbucket until the contract runs out.

Plannager : An account manager who really wanted to be a planner and who is constantly trying to prove that he or she would make a good one.

Posse Galore: When an agency principal goes on a long distance trip to meet with a potential client who happens to be male, there’s usually at least two from this group, typically female, young and attractive, who find out that their experience is required to make the visitation go smoothly as well as ensure success. Oh, and they have to giggle on cue and only speak when spoken to.

ROI???: Return Of Investment. Numbers for the number chrunching guys. DM – that is, Direct Marketing – are the media fellows that have the best track record in proving their ROI – they know exactly who they mailed and how many responded after all.

Rounder: Primary responsibility is taking the edgy elements out of an ad that make the account executive and/or client and/or focus group uncomfortable.

Sarchasm: – The gulf between the author of sarcasm and the recipient who doesn’t get it. Some people reckon we’re overly hash with our opinions here, but relax, it’s only advertising….

Senior Guinea Pig: The poor soul whose first task in the morning is to test the brown office beverage and find out if the caffeinated swill is palatable.

Slogan : see Endline.

SpaSMS: expression coined here back on 2000 regarding the SMS advertising/marketing messages texted to mobile phones to more accurately describe them.

Spamvertise: Expression coined eons ago, frequently used by places such as Spamcop to describe unsolicited bulk email advertising. There is no real marketing or skill or actual “targeting” to a specific group at play when peoplespamvertise just a million pissed off people who soon desert their email addresses in the vain hope that a new one, might stay spam free. In Dabitch’s humble opinion, any marketing on the net not expressively asked for should be banned and the fuckwads responsible flogged in public. Many share it since the receiver actually pays the bill for these “ads” in form of wasted resources, wasted time, and more often that you’d think, phonebill costs or “account is over the limit” bills. As far as I know, this is the only form of advertising where the receiver pays to receive something they didn’t ask for. [So did the now illegal Fax ads, that wasted away millions of rolls of fax paper and tied up office faxes all night long, but the cost of paper is usually smaller.]

SPIM: Spam sent over instant messaging systems IM. Could be a bot that just spews a short “conversation” before telling you about a URL that you must visit – could be a cruder bot that just says “Hi” and then SPIMs you immediately. Worse, it could be a bot trying to trick you into downloading adware or a virus. In any case, it’s annoying.

Strapline: positioning statement.

SudS: Many ads around the world are simply dubbed to fit into a new market without much consideration for how different different markets actually are. Getting an “adaptation brief” usually means that you’ll be translating and dubbing a soap advert or washing powder commercial . Now you know what they mean when they say “I’m working on SudS all week.” It means they’re bored.

Tagline : see slogan.

Tart Director (courtesy caffeinegoddess): AD whose sole goal is to work with the hottest chicks possible and try to nail them too.

Wardrobe Wench: Primary duty of this stereotypically female staffer is, whenever a PLC (potentially lucrative client) is to be in the agency within the next day or two, to make sure (via email, voicemail, post-its, group meetings and one-on-ones) that every creative in the shop knows that they are supposed to wear clothes and underbritches that are clean, relatively inoffensive and in tolerably good condition (by executive standards) on that particular day. In case of failure, she has a stock of button-down shirts and pullovers embroidered with the agency name and/or logo to throw on the worst offenders at the last possible minute.

White space : White space does not communicate. But it sure is purdy.

Usage rights : Legal permission to reproduce copy, photos, logos or other intellectual property. Nobody understands this these days so everyone yells “fair use” at the top of their lungs instead.

Check out this KFC Press Release about a really innovative marketing campaign!

More Smelladvertising:

VIA (the washing powder) ran a poster campaign in Stockholm and Malmö which..er..actually smells!

Push the little spout at the bottom of the poster and you’ll sniff a sample on how the washing powder smells. Or how clean clothes smell after being washed with Via.

HOT!

So, smell some fried chicken, and if it gets too much, there is always the refreshing detergent smell to wash it off! Anyone for coffee beans?

More examples? Look at how newspapers are using smelladvertising to regain lost commercial revenues…here

In the midst of the Chrome Launch, Adage has this interesting viewpoint on Internet advertising and the implications that new browsers bring on to the table…

Latest Microsoft Browser Fuels Fear

IE8 Gives Web Surfers More Power to Block Ads and Cookies

By Beth Snyder Bulik
Published: August 28, 2008

YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) — Microsoft’s newest bro

wser is still only in beta, but it already has the advertising world in a tizzy. Its “InPrivate” set of features on Internet Explorer 8 out this week has publishers, marketers and industry advocates worried that it could block their ability to distribute, track and even monetize what the Interactive Advertising Bureau values as a $21.2 billion-plus internet-ad industry.
But Microsoft Internet Explorer general manager Dean Hachamovitch advises to remain calm. “The point isn’t to block content or ads. The point is to put users in control of what they’re sharing,” he said, adding he has read and heard many misconceptions about what InPrivate can and cannot do.
Stealth surfing
For instance, the InPrivate Browsing feature — already slang-termed “porn mode” — only allows a user to hide single browsing session activities from “over the shoulder” viewers such as family members. It does not block ads from being served to the user or from advertisers counting views or clicks.
It works, and got its nickname, by letting users surf porn sites (or any other content, for that matter) without caching any content such as a list of URLs visited, cookies or other data. That could mean no cookies on your computer — as well as no cookies for future use by marketers or publishers, although only during selected InPrivate sessions.
However, it is the InPrivate Blocking feature that seems potentially more worrisome for advertisers. InPrivate Blocking acts to inform users about sites that consistently track and collect browsing histories. In fact, when a user opts into an InPrivate session, it will automatically block third-party content if it detects that the third party has “seen” the user more than 10 times. So, for instance, if the third party is advertising.com and it is serving ads across 10 sites a user has visited during an InPrivate session, it will begin to block advertising.com tracking codes and possibly content on the 11th website.
Cause for concern
Mike Zaneis, VP-public policy for the Internet Advertising Bureau, said while he is encouraged that InPrivate is never a default option on Internet Explorer — meaning that users have to manually opt in each time — he still has concerns.
“With IE’s market share, will so many people activate that so that it could affect the revenue side of the industry?” he asked. “Any content from anywhere that appears as third parties, whether advertising or stock tickers or news feeds, all appear as third parties, and in theory their content could be blocked.
“And if you’re blocking all third parties, you’re also going to block all analytic companies,” he said. “You’d be blocking the companies that do the auditing of ad delivery.” He’s particularly concerned about the potential disruption to the entire accounting system of internet advertising.
Mr. Hachamovitch concedes that IE 8 has no way of knowing if the content is an ad, a stock tracker or a newspaper column. It can only tell if it is third-party content. So that does mean that any content, say, ads, analytics and more, can be blocked. However, he repeated that the user must select InPrivate every time. And users can create “allow” and “block” lists, so-called whitelists and blacklists, to always allow content from trusted sources. Consumers can also subscribe to lists of acceptable content created by others.
Microsoft itself has tips for publishers and advertisers on how to get third-party content and ads seen. Publishers, for instance, can serve the ads directly from their site (making them first-party content) or they can make third-party content look like first-party content, he said.
Letting consumers decide
Ultimately, the point of InPrivate is not to block anything, but instead to give consumers control of the online information they chose to share, or not, Mr. Hachamovitch said. “In a world of well-informed consumers who expect choice, we all need to be thoughtful about how we conduct business,” he said. “To me, this really starts the conversation. IE8 Beta 2 starts us thinking about the expectations people should have about what they share and how.”
Of course, Microsoft is hardly anti-advertising, and in fact, depends on ad-servicing revenue from its own sites like MSN. In May 2007 it purchased for $5.9 billion aQuantive’s three businesses — Atlas, DrivePM and Avenue A — as a means to build out a massive ad platform, and it had pursued Yahoo in a bid to gain more display-ad leverage. Microsoft, moreover, is a longstanding member of the IAB.
“From the Microsoft perspective,” said a spokeswoman, “we’re right there with the rest of the crowd in that we think there is a lot of benefit in targeted ads. We just believe consumers have the right to know it’s happening and to opt in.”
JupiterResearch analyst Emily Riley said the industry upheaval may be moot soon enough anyway, as ad targeting has come under serious scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission. She said she believes the many different industry factions will come up with — by force or free will — guidelines and standards that are acceptable to consumers and regulators.
“In the short term, though, I can understand how it could be scary for advertisers, because ad targeting is so valuable,” she said.