For the 2010 launch of his autobiography Decoded, hip-hop mogul Jay-Z ran a teaser campaign with Bing that released one page of the book per day on out-of-home signage; people across the US tried to decode the pages from buildings, pools, and clothing racks. Jay-Z is one of many marketers giving the once-stagnant out-of-home channel an infusion of digital and creative innovation. Place-based networks, digital signage, digital billboards, and hybrid installations offer an array of options for marketing leaders to consider as they try to reach on-the-go consumers. This reinvigorated medium offers marketers greater relevance, engagement, and interaction. It grabs consumers with content at the right time in the right place — when they are about to make a purchase decision — and offers the immediacy of instant gratification or information through smartphone-enabled technology.  

To get a picture of this new media landscape and to find out more about how leading marketers have begun to use digital out-of-home, check out my new report, “Digital Remakes Out-Of-Home Advertising."

What do you see in the future for digital out-of-home? Are you ready to get outside?    

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Twitter watchers have long awaited (and some feared) this moment: Ads are coming to your Twitter timeline.  Twitterers thus far have supported and shown little concern over Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program, so long as those paid tweets were easily differentiated from unpaid tweets and stayed within search results or at the top of the Trends list.  But now Twitter is taking the next step that many expected and inserting promoted tweets into users’ Twitter streams (see image below), and that means comingling authentic, unpaid tweets with paid, advertising tweets.

This is the riskiest move Twitter has ever made.  There is a big difference between displaying paid tweets at the top of search results and inserting them into the timeline — just ask search engines, which for a while in the early days of the Web struggled with their own monetization models. Search engines experimented with comingling paid search ads with organic search results, but the backlash from consumer advocates and users was sufficient to force a different model. Today, paid search ads are not just differentiated with words, colors and fonts but are substantially and consistently separated from organic results into special portions of the screen.

I don’t know if it was the Great Recession, the emergence of social media, or the result of new decision-makers coming on the scene, but marketers have been on a shopping spree for new agency partners. Over the past 18 months, we’ve witnessed everything from Zappo's RFP gone wild to the sudden agency changes at Chevrolet and Cadillac. In my latest report "When To Outsource Your Agency Search," I found that:

• Agency reviews have been rampant. According to the 4A's list of publicly known accounts in review, there have been more agency reviews over the past 18 months (1,006) than in the prior three years combined (917).
• Yet interestingly, search consultants haven’t been called to the table as frequently. Using the same 4A's list of accounts in review, search consultants were involved in approximately 23% of agency reviews, compared with 34% in 2008 and 40% in 2007.

Marketers Need To Know When To Outsource The Agency Search Process

Considering the importance of the decision and the commitment required to conduct a search, it’s surprising that more marketers have been handling the agency review process internally. Especially when CMOs and marketing leaders are saddled with more responsibility than ever. That's why Forrester believes there are four cases when marketers would be better off using a third-party advisor for their agency search process.

Our little baby is all grown up.  Just 30 months ago, Twitter was flying under the radar and people interested in microblogging might very well have joined Identica, Pounce, Plurk or other lookalike services.   By early 2010, Twitter handled 50 million tweets per day and had become crucial to hundreds of brands and tens of millions of people, but it still had just one visible (and arguably modest) means of support—search engine deals with Microsoft and Yahoo.  As of today, Twitter is getting a job and earning its keep with the rollout of an ad platform. 

As it grew and became a more important communications channel, Twitter found its business model the focus of intense scrutiny; for example, when Ev Williams failed to announce an ad platform at SXSW, there was palpable disappointment among bloggers and other observers.  This week, Twitter is addressing that disappointment with the rollout of its new Promoted Tweet program, which offers some benefits to brands.  What are those benefits and what are the limitations for marketers?