Is This the Future of Advertising?

It hasn't caught on yet in the U.S., but a global ad campaign for Unilever's army of laundry detergents -- sold in Asia as Omo, in France as Skip, and by other names around the planet -- hailing that "Dirt is Good," is considered by experts to be a perfect example of a new path for marketing in the 21st century. The marketing push merges memorable images of children splashing in mud with a customer-engaging social message -- "every child has a right to play and explore." Some claim the ad helped push Singapore to increase recess time at its academics-heavy, stress-inducing schools. The early success of Unilever's advertising strategy is exactly the type of information that company marketing executives and ad agencies need to discuss as they struggle to develop new ideas to handle the cataclysmic changes in technology and communications -- from Tivo to Twitter

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Trusting Google and Yahoo: Search Engines & Information Literacy

We pride ourselves on thinking critically. But how do our critical thinking skills apply to what we find in our searches? Because the results seem to appear like magic, many of us tend to think of search results as being “unbiased.” But in actual fact, there are many individuals and companies working hard every day to try to push their information to the top of the page in your Google search.

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Source: Change This

Best Practices: Developing Sources to Break Stories

One of the questions reporters and multimedia journalists ask the most is “How can I find story ideas to break stories so I don’t have to take the ‘crumbs’ from the assignment desk?” You can do it by developing sources. Here are best practices:

Sean Carton - Do we really need advertising agencies anymore?

Do we really need advertising agencies anymore? Are we witnessing the great "reboot" of the advertising industry hastened (but not caused) by the current recession? It's pretty obvious to any reasonable person watching the tens of thousands of layoffs in the industry along with the simultaneous implosion of the newspaper industry that the ad biz as we know it is in serious trouble. Couple that with the ongoing decrease in advertising spending along with new studies (such as this one from Microsoft that predict that the Internet will overtake TV in 2010, and it's clear that advertising as we've all grown to know it is on the way out.

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Hyper-Local Hero

Ten years ago, Rob Curley was covering city hall for the Topeka daily paper. Now he's lighting up the entire industry. How a "nerd from Kansas" discovered the web, and hit the big time. On a Saturday afternoon in August, Rob Curley is holed up in a video-production studio in Naples, Florida, with a couple of sleep-deprived colleagues. Between yawns and sodas, they're editing high-school football footage that's scheduled to air tonight on the Web (and on iPods and PlayStation Portables), as well as on local cable. These are only preseason games, but this being football country and all, Curley, the head of new media at the Naples Daily News, wants PrepZone Playbook, his team's newest creation, to rock. Pulsing music, action-packed highlights, slick animation--the works. So he keeps nitpicking. When a reporter appears on-screen, unnamed, to offer postgame analysis, Curley interrupts: "Okay, we have to say who that is right away." The rest, though, looks "fricking awesome, like something on ESPN!"

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