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Posted by Brad Berens
in Creative Best Practices, on December 16, 2008 at 10:00 AM PDT
Usability Interface Engineering's Jared Spool has brilliantly quipped that the browser's back button is "the button of death" because it signals a complete failure of a site's navigation.
I'd like to propose that Google (or insert your favorite alternate search engine here) is also a button of death. Here are two examples of what I...
Posted by Brad Berens
in Email, on December 05, 2008 at 09:00 PM PDT
Maybe it's just because at 40 I've hit middle age, have two kids and can't stay awake all night catching up on email anymore, but I was surprised to see that email is still the #1 internet activity by a longshot in data just released by Mediamark. You can see a PDF of the data here, which shows that at 74.2%email has a 28.2% advantage over the #2...
Posted by Brad Berens
in Video, on November 26, 2008 at 05:00 PM PDT
Earlier this week Sony's Crackle.com announced a new season of original-to-online video content, includng a new series called "The Hustler" starring Mark Feuerstein-- one of those "oh yeat THAT guy" actors who you have seen in a million things but can never quite place.
Over at TV Week, Daisy Whitney reports that,...
Posted by Brad Berens
in Opinions, on November 18, 2008 at 08:00 AM PDT
It's odd when the late-night media cycle infects and affects my dreams, but I slept poorly after the net burst out with the news that Jerry Yang is at last saying toodle-oo to the CEO slot at Yahoo! (See the New York Times piece if you missed this.)
Waking up, I wondered who would line up to buy Yahoo. That seems to be the only scene left in...
Posted by Brad Berens
in Media Planning & Buying, on November 14, 2008 at 10:54 AM PDT
Suzanne Vranica's Wall Street Journal article from earlier this week is worth a look by all digital media people: "Tough Times Complicate the Case for Buying Super Bowl Ads" (subscription required).
Yes, it's true: in the face of a global economic collapse that is taking down mega-corporation after mega-corporation and causing CEO's...
Posted by Brad Berens
in Opinions, on October 23, 2008 at 02:37 PM PDT
As a 40-year-old digital immigrant (I first learned to type on a typewriter, not a word processor) my life is so screen-centered that I tend to forget about printed magazines until it's time to get on a plane. This week, before I zoomed cross country to our iMedia Financial Marketing Summit at New York's Metropolitan Club, I picked up both Time...
Posted by Brad Berens
in Email, on October 13, 2008 at 06:13 PM PDT
Many press releases cross my email inbox each day, and to my everlasting sorrow many of them are so content free that I've begun to think that the vast bulk of releases exist solely for the sake of SEO.
However, today the Direct Marketing Association has upgraded its DMAChoice tool -- a "newly expanded consumer choice portal site"...
Posted by Brad Berens
in Media Planning & Buying, on October 07, 2008 at 03:02 PM PDT
The Interactive Advertising Bureau released its first half of 2008 numbers this morning, and the subject line of the email was, "IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report Shows First Half of '08 Up 15.2% From Same Period '07."
The numbers look great-- a 15.2% increase over the first half of 2007.
Unfortunately, these numbers are a...
Posted by Brad Berens
in Opinions, on September 29, 2008 at 12:00 AM PDT
Marketers should stop using the word "consumer" and train themselves to use "customer" instead. This goes double for digital marketers.
I issue this challenge to all brand marketing and advertising agency folks reading this post: get a jar, stick it on your desk, and put a dollar into it every time you use the word...