Along with 999 other people, I listened to speakers such as Philippe Starck, Murray Gell-Mann, John Doerr, Alan Kay, Edward de Bono, Daniel Goleman, JJ Abrams, Isabel Allende, Jonathan Harris (my favorite Internet artist — check out his work at Number27.org if you don’t already know it), Richard Branson and Bill Clinton (there to receive a TED prize), and mingled with a huge amount of extraordinarily interesting fellow attendees.

What TED always brings home to me (I was on my fourth visit — a mere novice compared to the many veterans who have been going for years) is how everything starts with people.

This might sound like a total truism. But one of the many differences between TED and other conferences is the emphasis TED puts on showcasing people. Yes, TED showcases brilliant thinking and big, world-changing ideas and inspirational achievements — but it does this by showcasing the extraordinary people who came up with all of those things, and enabling you to see, understand and marvel at the human spirit and the talent that drives technological, social, aesthetic, artistic, environmental, global change.

One of the speakers, lexicographer Erin McKean — a highly engaging woman with a penchant for wearing striking dresses (and blogging about them at www.dressaday.com) — had what I thought was a great comment. She said, ‘The Internet is made up of words and enthusiasm.’ She was talking in the context of her own work (she describes herself as a ‘dictionary evangelist’) but I thought that that was a great expression of what drives everything happening online today. Because enthusiasm — human enthusiasm – carries you a very long way. One of my own favorite quotes (unattributed, as it wasn’t said by someone well-known and I have sadly forgotten his name) is, ‘The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.’

But if it’s all about the people – where do you find those souls predisposed to ignite, and how do you ignite them?

I ask this because one of the biggest issues being highlighted in the marketing and communications industry today, in every arena, from brand marketers through ad agencies to interactive and digital companies, is ‘Where do we find the forward-thinking, future-focused talent that we need to operate powerfully and effectively across the holistic media and communications landscape of the future?’

The March issue of Creativity magazine tackles this question in an article headed, ‘Star Search: Where Will The Next Generation of Creative Talent Be Found?’, by asking a sample spectrum of creative directors, who variously talk about how they relentlessly monitor the best young talent coming out of the top design and interactive schools, study award show winners, keep track of the top talent at their competitors, and are now hiring out of the movie business, TV, game development, product design and architecture fields.

Inherent in what they say, however, is the implicit assumption that a lot of the people already working for them, or in the industry in general, just don’t hack it in this brave new world.

At this point I realized, we are still not sharing ad space and we should be. Being part of an ad agency, I believe in utilizing all types of media and combining them. After all, there is one main goal all clients want…MONEY! The client wants the money to come in at least one of three ways: Leads, visitors and sales.

Below is a list of all the different types of separate media (sorry if I miss a few) a client can choose from and it’s our job to show them how to make good use of their money and ad space:

- Television- commercials, infomercials
- Radio — online and traditional
- Print- magazines, newspapers, flyers, circulars, direct mail
- Outdoor advertising — billboards, mobile billboards
- Online ads — banners, rich media
- Email marketing
- Search words-Pay Per Click
- Pay-Per-Call
- Mobile — Cell phones, Ipods
- Podcasts
- Blogs
- Websites
- Affiliate Networks

To start, having a website is a must; if a client has something to sell then they definitely hear “Do you have a website?” The answer should always be “Yes.”

Once the website is in place, they are ready to move forward. If your client says I only want magazine ads, then by all means set them up with magazine ads and make sure to make enough room to add the website, it doesn’t take much room and won’t take away from the ad itself. This way the client gets two ways to achieve their goal, Money!

I know this seems a little obvious to the bigger agencies reading this, but to other readers this may be something they have not realized they can do with their ads.

If you are a traditional media ad agency, and don’t want to spend the time hiring, then find a few online ad agencies to outsource your online work; be sure to include the online agency in client meetings and reassure the creative teams, that their creativity will not be over-powered by adding a url to the ads. Same goes for online agencies, make an effort to reach out to traditional media agencies, let them know you are out there to help them and work with them if your online client wants direct mail, billboards, etc.

Several professionals have pitched in to provide some insight into what these figures mean and why it may be perceived that the future of web advertising really is, or is not, in the UK’s hands. The supposed domination of the Web by Britain, and the differences that may attribute to any type of U.S. and U.K. online advertising comparative, must be taken into consideration when analyzing both countries’ online marketing efforts.

No doubt, there are differences between the U.S. and the U.K. online advertising methods, but it may also be a bit premature to call Britain a leader in online advertising just yet. Yes, the NYT article quoted Yahoo chief Terry S. Semel as saying “the US is so behind…it’s certainly lagging the UK by at least a year or two.” But whether that is true is up for questioning and with two industry leaders from the UK and the US, informed comments on who is leading the market and by what standards can possibly be formulated.

Surprisingly, all interviewees were in somewhat of an agreement to disagree with the findings, including Dave Smith, Managing Director for London-based agency New Media Maze, who couldn’t see how the UK could lead the world in online advertising but embraced the possibility. Former head of the IAB, Greg Stuart, couldn’t continue our interview without solid proof and Ian Schafer of Deep Focus, an interactive agency that services the business and entertainment areas, had trouble agreeing with this as well. So what is the difference between the UK and the US within online advertising practices and why do some professionals believe that the US can learn a lesson or two from Britain?

Let’s begin by comparing the ongoing trends in the UK and the US. According to Dave Smith, “The main trend is towards a greater degree of interaction. Ad units are getting a lot cleverer and a little heavier as well. So that’s the main trend, that you’re able to do more within an ad unit.” On the U.S end, Ian Schafer points out that the trend within the United States is veering towards the social media area. “Everyone’s become smitten and for good reason with social media, you know the whole ‘Web 2.0′ cliché. It’s led to sharing, to linking and even in some cases, shows just how visible the spread of a creation can happen.”

As the United States consumes itself with social networking, Britain is focused on a different type of medium and that is mobile marketing. According to Dave Smith, “it’s huge” in the U.K., as is the use of Skype, while Americans continue with traditional cellular service and have only begun to see the mobile expansion with phones that have online/interactive capabilities. But mobile marketing strides alone couldn’t make the U.K. a leader in online advertising. As Greg Stuart bluntly stated, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” which is why our interview stopped there, and potentially for good reason.

But with the advent of the online space and more recent channels including mobile, the interactive agencies themselves have cultivated their own star power and notoriety beyond the brand, giving face to a name not seen since the days of David Ogilvy.

And while we are well-aware of the CP+Bs, Starcoms and R/GAs making headlines today, lesser-knows firms are trying to stake their claim as viable outlets for your branding solutions. One such firm is New York-based Levelwing Media, an interactive agency that bills itself as “the new agency of record.” The clientele for its campaigns range from education to automotive care to healthcare, and with ’07 well underway, Levelwing is ready to position itself as a more recognizable and desirable agency in the interactive space.

Recently, ADOTAS engaged in a conversation with the company’s two co-founders, Jeff Adelson-Yan (above) and Steve Parker (right), to discuss the history and strategy behind their brainchild, their promotional game plan, as well as the trends that will impact the interactive industry for the coming year.

Hi Guys. So how did Levelwing get started?

Steve: Jeff and I have both been involved in online advertising for essentially the better part of ten years each. I started in the online industry in 1995, and Jeff in 1996. We both have worked for a number of different publishers, sales organizations, and business development organizations in the online marketplace during that entire time including iVillage, Medscape (now part of WebMd), Q Interactive, among others.

We just started talking about doing our own thing and decided that we really wanted to start a media agency. As the online marketplace moved away from just straight CPM-type advertising to other models that were more performance-driven, that allowed us to enter the marketplace. We started doing some things that, at the time, people weren’t really paying a whole lot of attention to across the board. Specifically, [it was] really targeted and focused, qualified lead generation and search marketing. We started our business 4 ½ years ago around the time those things were just starting to take off essentially.

How has the company evolved since then? You now call yourself the “new agency of record”.

Steve: Media for a long time has been done in a very specific way—when you look at offline media, especially. The traditional agency model, for the most part, has good components and some that are very bad for clients.

But overall, in calling ourselves the “new agency of record”, it’s really looking at media from the standpoint of…for example, there are two types of pilots, you have pilots that can fly by line of sight, and you have pilots that are instrument-rated pilots. So, if you’re on a plane and you’re flying in bad weather, which one are you going to choose? You want an instrument-rated pilot. As this marketplace evolves and changes, there is a lot of clutter and “bad weather” so to speak.

Everything that we’re doing is heavily instrument-rated across the board. As an agency, everything we do has a specific goal and return of asset based on that goal, whether that be brand media, direct response, search, it doesn’t matter. It’s driving everything back to a very specific metric. All of this is very traceable and trackable, so we measure things based on instruments essentially.

That’s why we’re saying we’re “the new agency of record” because this new model is going to take hold. We’re not going to be the only ones doing it; there are others that obviously are as well. But that’s the way we’re positioning ourselves and that’s our mantra.

Speaking of going forward, you guys told me you want to put yourselves out there more in terms of publicizing Levelwing. What is the game plan for ’07 in how you present yourselves, and what is the value proposition to potential clients?

Steve: In terms of moving forward, one of the things that we’re going to do is focus on letting people know who we are and what we do. As we talked [before], we’ve been very quiet and on the backburners, just making sure we built a smart foundation and had really good clients that we worked with who get it when it comes to the Internet.

We could have grown a lot faster, but Jeff and I both started this company with our own money and we wanted to run it in a way that we thought made sense for us and makes sense for our clients. For many of our clients, we’re the only Internet-based ad agency they work with. We are going to announce those relationships, which include Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire and College Loan Corporation. We want people to know here are the clients we have and here is why they work with us.

Jeff: We’ve actually allocated a marketing and PR budget, which is something we had not done in years previously. We still are in the shadows, but we’re trying to showcase the clients that we do work with, and the expertise that we bring to the table.

“As Tribeca expands its year-round activities, creating a 365 day-a-year destination website will be a top priority,” said Jon Patricof, Chief Operating Officer of Tribeca Enterprises, in a statement “We look forward to creating a media experience centered around the spirit and ethos of the Tribeca Film Festival and the Tribeca brand.”

With experience in indie and mainstream cinema, Special Ops Media is a full service agency that offers online marketing & strategy, online media (planning and buying), creative services and online publicity. The agency counts Universal Pictures, Focus Features, Lionsgate Entertainment and 20th Century Fox among its past and present clients.

As for Tribeca, Special Ops will specifically tackle Website Marketing/ Partnership Expansion, Website Redesign Consulting and Advertising Strategy in order to support the brand’s efforts.

Special Ops co-founder and president,Jason Klein added, “Special Ops has deep roots in the New York City film community, so we are particularly pleased to be working with Tribeca Enterprises. We look forward to making the Tribeca website synonymous with the best of independent film—not just annually, but on a year-round basis.”

Behind every good brand, of course, is an agency willing to sell it—though not all in our exploding interactive era are created equal. With technologies, strategies and content reaching confluence in the digital space, agency roles are rapidly changing. So within the clutter, chaos and opportunity presented by this paradigm shift, the timing couldn’t be better for an agency like Special Ops Media to emerge from the shadows.

But this is no startup, hotshot or flash-in-the-pan operation. Since 2002, founders Jason Klein (left) and Christian Anthony have carefully turned Special Ops into a successful, full-scale company that melds creative, media planning and strategy under one roof. With roots firmly planted in entertainment—though it has expanded into more corporate verticals as of late—, the agency has designed and implemented unique campaigns for studios including Focus Features and Lions Gate, as well as MTV and other major brands.

So with a need to delve further into the ins and outs of a successful entertainment marketing firm, ADOTAS recently sat down with Anthony (right) and Klein at Special Ops’ New York City headquarters. Accommodating, opinionated and insightful, Klein and Anthony reveal how two guys from atypical, divergent career paths ended up becoming unlikely marketing powerhouses. Along the way, the pair shared plenty of thoughts on how the integrated agency approach has made their outfit a hot commodity, what the current and burgeoning trends in online/interactive marketing are, and what changes are afoot regarding agency roles in 2007 and beyond.

Hi guys, so let’s start with the obligatory background question. How did you guys initially sync up?

Christian: Jason and I had known each other through college, and had been four years apart in college. I had started another company, and Jason had come over a year out of med school, which we still kid about. I came from investment banking and Jay came from med school.

It totally makes sense then that you ended up in advertising.

C: (Laughs) Yeah, it was just natural. But I think it brought a different perspective to the industry. We weren’t traditional ad guys. I think if you look at a lot of the companies and some of the mistakes they’ve made, it was trying to retrain traditional ad people as interactive people. Not to say that that can’t happen, it certainly can. But we were coming to this not from an advertising paradigm, and I think that in the beginning and continues to serves us very well. You’re not bound by the way you did things. I think there are certainly parallels between new and old media, of course. But in a lot of ways, new media is different. We really benefited from not coming from traditional advertising backgrounds and continue to benefit from that.

As an owner of an ad agency, this question comes up quite often. Clients hear how awesome MySpace, Googtube (my acronym for Google and YouTube), and the millions of blogs that are out there. Clients want to know how to have their product featured on these sites and how much will it cost.

They want to know what a social network is. I say it is the new age of socializing. It rarely takes place in person and is mostly done online. People create “friends” online, exchange pictures and thoughts about various things from should I dye my hair blue to political opinions. This is the new age way to find a date, find others to chat with in similar life situations, and blow off steam in a somewhat anonymous environment.

As an ad agency you need to be very to extremely savvy in this arena, because you can get torched and the cost ends up losing you and your client way more than money.

Below are a list of reasons I give clients for why they can advertise on such sites and why they should think carefully before moving forward:

Reasons to advertise:
- No matter your target audience you can find them on most social networks
- Social networks have taken on an older audience, for instance it has been reported that MySpace is no longer just teens and 20 somethings, now there is an overwhelming amount of 30-54 year olds socializing on places like Myspace.

- Good for branding or announcing a new addition to your product line
- Good possibility of partnering your product with some other big names out there
- There are social networks for about any age range you can think of; college social networks, business social networks, ethnic social networks, kid social networks, baby boomer social networks, music social networks, pet lover social networks, etc.

Blogs: I’ve highly promoted blogs and rockin’ syndication feeds, and I have yet to find a subject that has not been covered out there. When promoting a product in a friendly non-press release way, stick to respectable blogs.

Agencies specializing in the use of technology to create one-to-one consumer connections, data-driven relationships and permission-based engagements are bursting into the marketing arena and beating conventional ad agencies with new and—most important—measurable techniques.

The direct marketing methods of the past, with all their negative connotations and their one- or two-percent returns, have been transformed by technology into relevant, personalized, and highly effective campaigns. For example, interactive games and contests that deliver messages directly to individual consumers—consumers who actually have something to gain by viewing, listening and participating in the marketing effort—are being embraced by the most savvy marketers. Instead of spewing mass messaging to a mass market on a massive scale entailing massive budgets, the world’s major brands now are using permission-based marketing to invite consumers to enjoy rich interactive experiences built around the brand.

Interactive promotions allow a consumer to drive a virtual race car or ski down an online hill while being exposed to signs, symbols and products that communicate a brand and its message. Alternatively, the consumer can enter a sweepstakes or other contest online as often as he or she desires, each time providing a new piece of demographic information that allows the brand marketer to better focus the messages it displays to that individual.

Traditional ad agencies have been more than reluctant to adopt interactive technology. The 30-second spot, however, just is not doing the job today, with competition for viewers’ time generated by laptops, portable music players, SMS and an array of other technology clipped on their belts. Most ad agencies haven’t yet restructured their economics to figure out how to shift away from TV spots and on to the Web; and, to preserve their revenue flow, they have been slow to embrace change.

2006, however, is the tipping point. This year, with evidence of the success of several thousand interactive promotional campaigns around the world, large brands are demanding campaigns that consumers want to be a part of and that can offer measurable results. The interactive promotion does both, and its results orientation will propel its popularity as a key marketing strategy.

The top talent in the industry is shifting as well, to reflect the sea change from traditional one-way broadcast marketing, to interactive, data-driven campaigns. In the past, the best and brightest creative minds found a home producing TV spots. Today’s top talent is flocking to interactive shops that are pushing the envelope with new thinking and technologies.

For brand marketing, technology not only is proving its worth, but it’s showing how brands for the first time can collect, analyze and employ data about the individuals who are exposed to their messages. Goodbye to the faceless, anonymous consumer. Hello to one-to-one, permission-based relationships.

The shift isn’t about to happen, or even “happening”. It has happened. We have entered the next generation of advertising.

But your boss wasn’t always a complete nincompoop. Back in the old days (1980s) when your boss was “cutting his teeth” (whatever that means — sounds painful), there was still one fail-safe way to get people to your product — TV, and that’s all your boss knew. Radio worked, but it was way too splintered to do anything on a national scale easily and worse, people only listened to it in the car on their way to their most hated place or most loved place, not exactly the right times to get them to buy your stuff; billboards sorta worked, but there’s never been a consensus that’s influenced your boss on OOHs real effectiveness; print worked, but the masses didn’t really read, so it really couldn’t be relied on to sell to anyone but those with the highest of brows. If your boss wanted to get numbers, TV never let him down.

And everything was so much simpler for him to understand, too. No TiVo, no satellite, no Treos; in fact, one or two phone calls and a great meal later with his good buddies over at the network, and he’d have accomplished his objective for the week (defined innocently as just “getting the message out”). Everyone was his age, but they were never thought of as “too young”, and branding and research into consumer attitudes were still pretty useless because your boss always “went with his gut” (he calls it “experience” today). Ah yes, those were the days. Too bad you were still in grammar school then. Or not even born yet.

You’ve finally come to terms with how truly clueless your boss really is in today’s marketing environment and how utterly futile it is for him to pretend to be doing his homework to catch up to your expertise. Yessir, it’s a different world and what your boss doesn’t quite get is that traffic ain’t just sitting around waiting to buy your company’s stuff. You actually have to work for their attention: come up with really interesting creative which supports a brand, not a sale; plan an actual media mix that encompasses no less than millions of choices; remember to invest in new fangled research, which you then actually have to use. And you have to do it all for the same budget your boss used in the 80s.

You’re not scared of what’s happened and have fully embraced it all. But your boss is scared and he’s absolutely lost. In the desert. At night. It’s because he’s the boss that he can’t afford to appear incompetent. He may get “Freston’d”. So, to prove that he’s on top of it and still useful, he orders up a viral campaign one day. But the next day he’s not sure about the results, so puts the brakes on it.

Of course he’s not sure about the results! In his heyday, “viral” was something you contracted or an excuse to take a sick day. He has no clue what to measure because all he wants, all he needs, all he knows, is traffic. And he doesn’t just want any type of traffic; he wants “sexy” traffic. This is the unfortunate extent of his familiarity with this new marketing environment, familiarity that directs you to toss money at search engines for their traffic, disregarding all of the other media choices, and what you get from these choices, because if your boss wants traffic, you’re going to give it to him. You’re almost positive he wet his pants from excitement when a certain former-search-engine-turned-online-portal recently purchased an auction-based “exchange to help buyers and sellers trade digital media more efficiently”.

Today’s creative firms that focus on creating viral campaigns have no such complaint (or scapegoat). With viral marketing, the fear of wasted media expense is eliminated, the media being replaced by the person-to-person spread of the campaign. Faced with an ever raising bar of what’s new, interesting, exciting and compelling online, creatives are tasked with the opposite challenge from clients: take a bigger leap, let’s do “something outrageous.” The worry that the creative has gone too far has been replaced with the fear, “is this going far enough.”

It’s an interesting and anxiety-ridden challenge to continually be asked to create “the next new thing.” It can’t be bought with a bigger budget, achieved through the mere use of cutting-edge code or technology. It comes from the most unpredictable and intangible assets that a creative team can possess: instinct and intuition.

The reality is that good instinct is not a vague sixth sense, but rather informed by a distillation of research, observation, and experience. There is a lot less mumbo jumbo, luck or randomness to it than meets the eye. But since the creative process is almost impossible to document, at the end of the day you might still find yourself saying to the client, “trust me.” This is the Catch-22 of selling a idea that is risky or new to client: you can’t point to something similar to help sell the idea if it doesn’t exist, and if you can point to something similar to prove that audiences will respond, it means that it’s already been done.

Getting a client to sign off on something that has not been seen or done before requires a two-way leap of faith: A leap of faith on the part of the client that you know what the hell you’re talking about, and a leap of faith on your part that the client is not going to crucify you if things don’t work out exactly the way that you had hoped.

And when the client finally does take that leap, and sign off? As the saying goes, it’s like being given enough rope to hang yourself. The first thought that might occur to you after the initial euphoria of selling an outrageous idea on the premise that it will be wildly popular, is many times (and I am paraphrasing here) “oh s***, now what?”