Organic, a digital communications agency, released the results of its ROI study of Microsoft search engine, Bing. Using its Return on Marketing Investment model (ROMI) and Spend Plan Optimization Tool (SPOT), Organic compared the performance of Bing to Microsoft’s previous search engine, Live Search, over a two week period and found a nearly 23 percent lift in ROI in terms of marketing value for some of their top clients

Katz 360 Sales, the digital sales arm of the Katz Media Group, is delivering national and local advertisers a way to reach audiences across premium websites in addition to its extensive Radio and Television publishers. By using the Rubicon Project’s Internet advertising infrastructure, Katz 360 is now able to sell premium display ad inventory, and deliver targeted audiences to advertisers across the Web’s largest sites.

Spot Runner, a technology company developing the next generation of advertising services, and Yodle, an local online ad network, have agreed to a partnership that makes Yodle the local online advertising partner for Spot Runner. As part of the partnership, Yodle will assume responsibility for providing local online advertising services for Spot Runner’s local online clients, including several noteworthy franchise accounts, and collaborate with Spot Runner on future opportunities.

The Performance Marketing Alliance, a not-for-profit trade association for the performance marketing industry, announced the election of its board of directors by its charter members: Chris Henger, head of Google Affiliate Network; Scott Jangro, co-founder and CEO of MechMedia; Will Martin-Gill, director of internet marketing at eBay, Inc.; Kim Riedell, vice president of client development for Commission Junction; Brook Schaaf, founder and partner of Schaaf Consulting; Steve Schaffer, founder and CEO of Offers.com; Jason Spievak, co-founder and CEO of RingRevenue;
Tim Storm, CEO of FatWallet; and Brad Waller, vice president of business and affiliate development at ePage, Inc.

But he also is looking to gather the smaller local markets as well. I asked Guy Schuller, who oversees media strategy for Chrysler and other clients of interactive ad agency Organic Inc, what he sees for smaller marketers. 

Schuller said that online display marketplace has traditionally not been easily accessible to small marketers. Launching a local campaign required specific media expertise, appropriate creative and the implementation of tracking. Local newspaper and television sites had some success with a packaged media + creative approach but ultimately targeting was a challenge and these buys tended to be inefficient, quantifying ROI was difficult. On the flip side, search was naturally set up to be extremely targeted and performance driven which made it an easy sell for local businesses.

“This has improved over the last few years with the resurgence of the Ad Networks and their targeting capabilities. The adoption of these advance targeting features and different buying models (Cost Per Acquisition) have helped to reduce waste and have provided ROI focused small marketers with an efficient way to use display. The only issue is that while these buys are geographically targeted (IP Address) they may not be contextually relevant from a local perspective which can affect the impact.

AOL seems to be trying to address this local display opportunity by investigating an auction based display sales approach, similar to search, and by acquiring content (Patch) and tools (Going) that can reach local audiences and deliver on relevancy. If they can be the leaders of the local space by making it as accessible and contextually relevant as possible, they can tap into a sizable, and potentially lucrative, marketplace.”

I also asked him about concerns that while there are billions of advertising moving from traditional advertising to online that companies will spend the money, or a smaller portion than they used to, on their own sites and marketing rather than on display, banner, etc. of third-parties.

“The continued shift in consumer behavior requires all marketers to communicate, at some level, within the digital environment. In turn marketers, large and small, are recognizing this change and investing in their own offerings and sites to keep up. Ultimately they still need to drive awareness and traffic to prove out that investment which results in more online marketing.

“This shift in turn puts pressure on publishers to figure out a way to service and monetize thousands of small buys in addition to catering to large national advertisers. The search vendors, especially Google, have adapted well and have reaped the benefits of selling to both national and local marketers.”

NetShelter Technology Media:

Michele Sweeney was hired to the newly created position of Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. She will be based in NetShelter’s San Francisco office and oversee all aspects of company’s sales, marketing and client services operations reporting to Peyman Nilforoush, NetShelter’s Co-Founder and CEO.

Ms. Sweeney comes to NetShelter from Nimblefish Technologies in San Francisco where she was the Executive Vice President of Marketing Solutions managing sales to Fortune 500 companies and ad agencies who were looking to improve their relationship marketing programs. Clients included AT&T, Nike, and Best Buy among others. She hired and trained new sales staff and developed market position, presentations and go to market strategy for all products while working closely with Account Management to ensure client satisfaction and sales growth in Nimblefish’s client base. Under her leadership sales revenue grew 300 percent to $35mm and included new client additions such as Sears, Nike, and Marriott.

Prior to Nimblefish Ms. Sweeney served as Vice President, Business Strategy at interactive agency Kadium in San Francisco where she created strategies for such world-class brands as Genentech, Adobe, and, Sony leverage interactive marketing to create sales growth and engage customers. Prior to Kadium, Ms. Sweeney was Managing Director of CMP Media’s Games Group and entertainment division and Vice President of Business Development at the B2B portal SmartAge. She also spent 15 years at Ziff-Davis Publishing, where she worked in various senior management roles across PC Week, Family PC, and Corporate Computing. Ms. Sweeney was also with Chilmark Group in San Francisco where was she was a Principal helping venture-backed online companies in go to market strategy and sales department infrastructure.

Teracent Corporation:

Chip Scovic has been hired as vice president of sales. In this role, he is responsible for the development of Teracent’s advertiser and agency partnerships, bringing a decade of expertise in the digital media sales field to driving the company’s revenue goals.

Scovic is based at the company’s San Mateo headquarters and will report to SVP of sales and marketing Chip Hall.
Scovic comes to Teracent from Yahoo!, where he led several technology solutions sales teams and was instrumental in launching the flagship Smart Ads program. Previously, Scovic spent five years at DoubleClick where he oversaw sales of marketing automation and data management solutions, including ad serving, email, site analytics and campaign management, for a diverse set of Fortune 500 customers

Catalyst:SF:

Has been named the digital agency of record for San Francisco-based Del Monte Foods. Catalyst:SF will manage the digital strategy and digital-media planning and buying for all Del Monte Foods brand

Organic:

Kimberly-Clark Corporation has chosen Organic as its digital AOR to lead several key initiatives. Through this partnership, Organic will help Kimberly-Clark develop exceptional experiences for their customers that inspire belief, influence decisions, motivate them to engage and share and promote the values and services of Kimberly-Clark.

Separately, Intel has selected Organic to support its online global and retail content syndication efforts. Organic is translating online content and syndicating it to 28 countries in 16 languages. Through this partnership, Organic will help Intel’s retailers and OEMs up-sell and target customers at the point of consideration.

Manu Thapar joins as SVP of engineering at MySpace (he hails from Yahoo where he was VP of engineering); Angela Courtin joins as SVP marketing, entertainment and content (she was VP, integrated marketing for MTV Networks); Tish Whitcraft joins as SVP of customer care (previously, she was VP of global customer experience and operations at ooma); Jason Oberfest joins as VP of business development (he hails Los Angeles Times Interactive where he was managing director of business development and product management) and finally, Abe Thomas, who joins as VP of online marketing (Abe has held leadership posts at eBay and PayPal).

Time Inc. is giving almost the entire staff at Fortune Small Business its walking papers. Fourteen of its 17 editorial staffers have been axed, including top editor Dan Goodgame, who has been with Time for 10 years. In the future, FSB will essentially be an ad vehicle in Time’s Content Solutions division.

Conor Brady has been promoted to VP of creative at Organic, Omnicom’s digital marketing arm. Previously, Brady was executive creative director.

We will happily provide relocation reimbursement for candidates interested in moving to any of our locations.

To learn more about our company, see our website and our blog.

Our hot positions include:

• Creative Director
• Associate Creative Director
• Engagement Manager
• Sr. Project Manager
• Manager, Strategy

To apply, visit our careers page at careers.organic.com

We canvassed industry experts, talked to salespeople in department stores, filled a war room with shots from beauty magazines, and ran intercept interviews at makeup counters. But for me, the ‘a-ha’ moment came from talking directly to a customer in her natural environment. I was out at the home of a retired school teacher, getting a tour of her apartment and asking almost as an aside about the brands she cared about. She was on a budget, and she talked with pride about various bargains in her kitchen and living room. When we got to the bathroom, her sink was filled with Clinique and Prescriptives products- all bought at full price from a department store. “These are essentials,” she said. “I would never skimp on any of this.” I understood in an instant why cosmetics are an $8 billion-a-year business.

It’s moments like this that help explain why Organic, an interactive agency, has made empathetic customer research an integral part of our process. We use ethnography and personas to help our clients uncover hidden insights that lead to groundbreaking ideas.

How can you bring more empathy into your own work? It doesn’t necessarily require a team of experts or weeks of preparation. Here are a few of the different techniques that we use to gather insights and aid our understanding of what matters to customers:

Stakeholder Interviews.
Why not start with the people who (hopefully) know their customers’ best- your clients. But don’t limit yourself to your immediate contacts. Reach out to anyone in the organization for interacts directly with customers. Call centers are a particularly rich trove of people who know what’s on customers’ minds.

Secondary Research.
In addition to professional resources, including this publication, the Internet has created an explosion of user-generated content. There’s a nice synergy between our desire to better understand consumer behavior and motivations and the explosion of sites that allow regular people to catalog their lives online. I love combing through Flickr photo pools and sites like Grocery Lists or Squirl, a social catalogue.

Quantitative Research
Clients are usually most comfortable and familiar with this kind of traditional market research. We usually offer closed-end surveys to random samples of site visitors, and more directed questions to panels. Online surveys are less expensive than phone surveys, and are particularly useful for web-only brands.

Qualitative Research
This is a broad category that includes conversational discussions with customers, in-depth interviews, intercept surveys, and focus groups. These are typical methods used in advertising to find the voice of the customer. Customers can say what they want to if they are asked to make choices within a familiar product category, for example, how seat leather should smell. You run into limitations when you ask customers about the unknown. Nobody ever asked for an iPod in a focus group.

While it bears no relation to the movie “The Ring”, Organic’s recently launched online campaign for Sony Ericsson’s new line of Walkman phones does dispel its own sense of mystery and adventure.

Playing off the concept of community-centric “Web rings”, Organic marked its first marketing endeavor with Sony Ericsson by implementing what it dubs an “ad ring”, wherein users experience a chain of interconnected conversations that take place in video ads on 18 different sites.

“This really came about very naturally,” Matt Rosenberg, Engagement Director at Organic, tells ADOTAS. “We were approached about building a face site to promote the Walkman phones. Starting with the existing tagline “Where Will it Take You?”, the thinking that we [did was] around how the cell phones are really the connective tissue of our current social existence. So when we started to actually sketch it out, it became clear that this did not need to just have a life as a media site, this could be the ad campaign.”

Within the ad ring, users are led to 20 different individual ad units, or “episodes”, showing a chain of conversations and connections of twenty characters using their Walkman music phones while slyly demonstrating their features—each episode serving as a building block to a larger story line. When users click-through the ad unit on one site after watching the video, they are whisked away to a conversation on a different site.

“The tagline, “Where Will it Take You?”, allowed us to envision a story that takes the user not only on a tour of the phone, but also on a tour of the Internet,” Rosenberg explains. “Each individual episode would drive [users], not necessarily back to the website but also to the website, but to the next surprise destination. It was a little difficult to convey that through media because sites are very used to driving traffic back to an advertiser site, but they’re not completely used to driving from their property to another advertiser’s property.

He continues, “So we had to do a lot of analysis around who would be willing to drive to another site, and we had to take out a few potential competitive issues—this is not one of them, but you can imagine that Yahoo would not want to drive to an AOL.”

Instead, Organic provides the example whereby users clicking on the ad unit on Maxim.com are lead to another ad unit on ComedyCentral.com. Included among the other 18 websites in the “ring” are TheOnion.com and Backpacker.com. Additionally, Organic states that to ensure the user finds the next video in the sequence, Sony Ericsson owns a 100% share of voice on the destination pages, in addition to run-of-site and targeted advertising.

Initially launched on October 12th, Organic’s “ad ring” promoting Sony Ericsson’s W810i and W300 Walkman phones will continue leading Web users in circles through the end of the year. For Rosenberg and the Organic crew, paving the pathway wasn’t easy, but it’s paid off in the end. “We had to use pretty careful plotting of the route our tour would take,” he says. “It is a complete ring right now. If you start at episode 1, and you get through episode 20, it will go back to episode 1. It is a long train that you can ride, and we think it is really exciting.”

And to make it easy on the more time-pressed Web surfer, Organic has also created a one-stop microsite that features all 20 videos…but then again, that defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

Take a trip around the ad ring, beginning at Wherewillittakeyou.com

According to Chris Portella, Organic’s media manager, they’re out there but there’s still room for advertisers to get creative and targeted. “From a media perspective, we see a lot sites offering cookie-cutter skin sponsorships. The majority of them are based on wrapping a brand around a media player, or the border of a page,” Portella explains.

“Successful sponsorships are subtle in design, but effective with their presence. They give users the choice to use their skin and offer bonus features; the goal being to provide a richer experience that doesn’t interfere with the user’s primary purpose for being there. Yahoo’s IMV sponsorships do a good job of delivering on these principles. They offer 5 tiers of sponsorships; the most basic is a standard template-ized layout and the most advanced is a fully customizable experience with major functionality integrations, including the ability to host a game. [But] regarding un-skinned opportunities, I think that contextually relevant functional skin sponsorships is uncharted territory.”

And while page takeovers are present, at least on some bigger name sites, the growth potential in this medium is being taken on by the consumer, not the advertiser via user generated content.

Take MySpace, for example. Kids, teens and adults have taken it upon themselves to create skins for their profiles using anything from pictures of their dogs to landscapes to…gasp…their favorite brands. Free MySpace tweak pages like Whateverlife.com, among hundreds of others, offer all sorts of codes for the News Corp. company’s addicts to have their fill and make their profile unique and representative of themselves. Type in “free MySpace codes” and a world of HTML layouts, graphics and cursors (not to mention Fastclick and Casale pop ups) are at your disposal. Whateverlife even has a brand layout page where users have submitted their homemade layouts of their favorite brands like Roxy and Abercrombie & Fitch.

The point: these were made by users, not advertisers, and are being used for free by anyone and everyone. Talk about an untapped viral opportunity for user generated content. You can’t pay for this kind of branding, and you don’t necessarily have to. So why aren’t advertisers offering skins instead of banners for the sites they run on? Similar to the recent MSN.com beta home page where users can chose which color scheme they want (MSN brand related colors like blue, orange, and green, etc.), why not offer free branded schemes instead?

One reason, as Organic’s group director Tim Armitage asks, “Why don’t more brands offer skinning to make customers feel a stronger connection to the brand, as well as a stronger connection to their own experience with the brand? Perhaps most companies consider it too much of a hassle, while others may think that the graphical translations of their brand’s identity might risk brand dilution or fragmentation.”

Armitage continues, “I think that some brands are better suited to reinventing and re-interpreting themselves than others. Target would be a perfect brand to offer skinning. However, I think there are a lot of blue chip brands that would initially resist it, but might be surprised by how well skinning would be received by their customers.”

It’s no secret that the automotive industry’s shifted into high gear with its interactive marketing strategies in the last few years. From Flash-heavy microsites to banners and viral messaging, marketers have pushed the pedal to the floor in creating brand awareness online.

For the upcoming launch of its Spyder ’07 convertible sports car, Mitsubishi is now also throwing its keys in the ring, combining many of the above elements as part of a multimedia national advertising campaign celebrating the new Spyder as well as “25 years in America.” While BBDO took on the print and television components, Organic handled the creative for the Spyder microsite, as well as the upcoming summer online ad blitz.

The site flaunting the Spyder, though, doesn’t conform to the normal layout that some other agencies use to peddle cars. Organic went the extra mile, so to speak, to take the aesthetically unpleasing car specs and assorted info, and give them an interactive, firsthand twist. “A lot of vehicle sites focus on deep information, and a lot of vehicle sites focus on lifestyle and experience,” Guthrie Dolin, Group Creative Director at Organic, tells ADOTAS. “Essentially, the overarching creative concept behind both this microsite and the online advertising creative that we’re developing now is to really highlight these key features that the Spyder has by balancing the experience versus the information in a really elegant way.”

“Elegant” is one appropriate label to stick on the site, but engaging might be even more so. Divided up into sections including “Gallery”, “Inside”, and “Outside”, the Spyder site offers various rich media experiences with a simple mouseover. “What we did specific to the microsite is create a really simple and easy-to-navigate site that again pulls in and engages people. There were really three key points there that we really wanted to drive home, and each point we wanted to demonstrate in different ways.”

The gallery section, for instance, features slivers of images that expand with a mouseover, and from clicking on these, the viewer is shown the full image—which varies from inside to outside shots. “With the gallery, we didn’t want it to be just a bunch of little thumbnails and then you click on it,” Dolin explains. “We wanted just exploring the gallery to be a fun and fluid experience, so we came up with this idea where we would show them this little mosaic of slivers.”

But perhaps the niftiest subsection is found once you nestle inside the automobile. Not only is there an option to click and drag to give you a rotating, 360 view of the Spyder’s interior, you can also toggle between “day” and “night” views thanks to the car’s “ice-blue LED illumination” (below). “You get this sex appeal and almost nightclub feel,” Dolin says, “…It’s really cool and we wanted to play that up.”

While the creative for the actual ad campaign is still being tinkered with in the Organic labs, the microsite—which also includes viral, send-to-a-friend options—was developed firsthand with the Spyder’s actual architects to give it that added authenticity.

“To hear those guys talk about the features, we knew right away what was going to translate online,” Dolin says. “We were brainstorming real-time after we left that meeting [where] we were first getting briefed on doing this campaign and the overarching program online. We definitely got a good dose of the Kool-Aid direct from the designers, and that really informed the features and even the way we were going to present those features online.”

The Kool-Aid sure must’ve tasted sweet judging by how this site turned out.

While the underlying intentions were to drive traffic to Mitsubishi’s OEM site, Organic created a solid, interactive environment in itself that effectively pushes the Spyder’s stellar features (heated seats, romantic blue lighting) and whets appetites for the upcoming ad campaign. “When it comes down to selling vehicles online like this, you have a very short amount of time to get information across,” Dolin says. “If you do it in a bullet-point format, people are not ready to read online. They want to do a little something and learn a little about it. So if you give them this kind of feature to engage them, they’re much more likely to say ‘hey, what’s this about? Oh great, it’s got these heated seats, this illumination.’ We wanted to create these little things that gave an engaging way to illustrate these top-line bullet points.”

Consider us sold…at least to the site, that is.

Take the Spyder out for a spin at http://www.mitsubishicars.com/07spyder/

A quick look at what differentiates so called “new media” and “traditional” advertising from one another in advertiser’s minds offers a few clues as to where the industry now stands. According to an eMarketer report last year, “84% of US advertising professionals told the American Advertising Federation, what makes the Internet different from traditional media is that it encompasses both classic targeting methods, such as demographic and psychographic profiling, and interactive ones, such as behavioral targeting and paid search.” But what the study also found is that most advertisers (95%) view the Internet and new media as an “enhancement” or a “compliment” to their traditional advertising buys.

So, by and large, advertisers like the Internet as an “enhancement” option—but they aren’t exactly jumping overboard to replace their traditional spending with interactive buys. This, of course, raises some interesting questions for media planners trying to nudge their clients in the direction of interactive buys. Given this particular landscape, we wondered: What’s the best way for a media planner to go about introducing new media to those who still only view it as a compliment and not a place for a larger investment?

To find an answer to that question we approached Lisa Seward, Media Director of Fallon. For Seward, the key is to assume nothing. The initial thinking when planning a campaign has more to do with “What’s the business problem?” and creating a strategy around that—rather than going into a planning strategy with media buys, including new media, already laid out.

“I like to stay really, really neutral in the earlier phases of plan development,” Seward tells me in our conversation. “You don’t want to go into a media plan assuming it’s magazine or assuming it’s television. You want to go in open to absolutely everything including skywriting. Once you figure out your overarching strategy and sort out how much is enough in terms of pressure and weight, you start thinking about which channel.”