Barack Obama is the clear leader – in television advertising spend, at least. MarketingCharts reports that the Obama campaign is putting its money where the viewers are in Ohio and Texas: on TV. 

Although his television spots ran only in February, Obama’s advertising
far outpaced Clinton’s and McCain’s in both Ohio and Texas: His spots
account for 63% of the 6,499 presidential campaign advertisements that
have aired on television in Ohio since the start of the new year.

And in the mags: check out this story from the Advocate about Obama’s gay media buys, reaching out to communities in the  four largest LGBT markets of the upcoming primary states
– Columbus, Cleveland, Dallas, and Houston. Eric Stern, a member of the campaign’s LGBTsteering committee, calls it the "icing on the cake" of the campaign’s gay outreach, trying to head Hillary off at the pass in gaining this important segment’s support.

And last but not least: you’ve got to take note of the latest Obama video Hope Changes Everything on YouTube. It’s not sponsored officially by the campaign itself but rather the personal project (not unlike the "Yes We Can" video) of Obama supporters – user-generated content that is making the rounds among the enthusiastic, bright-eyed & bushy-tailed Barack-obsessed. (No, I’m not quite the latter, but those first ones are spot on. What can I say? I fit the demographic of his most adamant supporters. And, I think he’s fabulous.)

But here’s the big difference: the creators are not a bunch of teenagers, the "I’ve Got a Crush" Obama Girl, nor are they Madison-Avenue agencies with a big budget or even A-list celebrities like Will.I.Am and Scarlet Johansson. They’re creative professionals with talent, skills, and belief in a cause. Music video director Jesse Dylan and Deutsch LA’s Eric Hirshberg and Tom Dunlap.

Watch it. Love it.   Pass it on.
 

Cat’s out of the bag: online ad revenues for 2007 rounded out at around $21.1 billion, up 25.0% from 2006, reports
B2B on some seepage of data from the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers study.

Fourth quarter Internet ad revenue was about $5.9
billion, up 24.0% over the same period in 2006, they say. These guys were not so lucky. (Look who else is hitting some sort of plateau.)

Ah, but is it luck? Can we get some long, rambling, press release worthy quote from a CEO about this? Randall Rothenberg of the IAB does not concede to my needs: “Interactive media continue their unabated growth,” he stated, most likely with a straight face. [Quote does not continue.]

So I’ll continue for him.

Here’s a slight spin on the Tale of the Ever-Increasing Revenues. Enter Diversification. For the first time in 4 years, big portals lost share of ad
dollars year over year, according to the Digital Outlook report from Avenue A/Razorfish. Ad networks, blogs, and smaller sites are some of causes of this fragmentation.

Will they break the ad-dollar consolidation completely? That remains to be seen, but with such a high pricing-growth disparity between vertical content properties (up an average of 30%) and portals (up only 7%), the numbers are in their favor…for now. Not satisfied with that vague comment? You can read more on this here.

Want to leave on the same nice note you came in on? How about this: Interactive ad revenues are expected to reach $147 Billion globally by 2012. Now that is a nice number.

New York’s Hard Rock Cafe, I’m sure, has seen a few things in its (hey)day. But I’ll be it has never seen quite an Engagement Debate (Standing Room Only!) like the one last week. Source: Adweek

Here, in the spirit of the Oscars, are the awards.

Best Suggestion for Marketers to Create an Engaging Experience: to "build lots of little things constantly."
From: AKQA New York Executive Creative Director Lars Bastholm  Why: sheer vagueness. "…maybe not every single thing we use will become a massive hit, but
certainly something will down the line."  Thanks, Lars.

Most Elusive Goal: "to have a big idea that will engage the brand and consumers at a deeper level."
From: Ogilvy Chief Digital Officer J.P. Maheu
Example: Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.

Sweetest Idea Since Sliced Ramen: Making compensation levels based on engagement with content, therefore making publishers more accountable. This would allow advertisers [to] … push risk back onto publishers."
How? "There will be a measurable component," said Videoegg CMO Troy Young.

What does this mean for us? As the debate rages on how best to define an engagement metric, and how to trade on that unit, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) has it’s work cut out for it. And marketers are going to have fun arguing.

Next fun New York battle: Ziff Davis’s Digital Life, September 2008.

See you there.

From Cathy Taylor (formerly of Adweek and presently of Adverganza and Mediapost’s Social Media Insider):

In ways that I haven’t learned to articulate yet, social networking has enhanced
my virtual world of professional contacts in ways even previous digital
communications revolutions, like IMing and emailing, have not.

What it hasn’t
done — yet — is come even close to mirroring my offline life as I assume it
does for people who are, well, younger than me and in a different phase of life.
They are not fortysomething suburban soccer Moms.

That’s where my skepticism
comes in: is the lack of interest in social networking from my non-digerati
friends a sign that it just hasn’t reached certain demographics yet, or is it
that it’s of limited utility beyond certain demographics?

The former, the former. Groups that have not yet been "hit" (or should I say, smacked across the head, several times consecutively) by the Facebook craze, or the MySpace or The Biz or [insert name of new social networking site here] obsession are simply biding their time. It’s not that people are unreachable, they just can’t be bothered – not yet.

Here’s the thing about online social networking: it’s candy. Kids like candy, teens like candy, and even as a twentysomething with no kids or car (and therefore responsibility) I totally dig candy. Yes, the tangible kind, like Mike-n-Ikes, but also the brain candy  that we (necessarily?) ingest everyday.

I used to wonder why my brother, a lawyer in NYC, often preferred The Post instead of The New Yorker, The Hills instead of The Trap, especially on weekdays. But yo, it’s because he’s just tired. He wants a quick laugh, easy entertainment, some R&R for the head. And that’s what Facebook is – at least now. It’s candy. Yes, it’s a ‘waste of time’ – but whoever said that all time was meant to be spent doing worthwhile things? We’re only human. (Right?)

So, actually, it is a limited utility – but it’s not a use it or lose it scenario. Professional networking is best done on LinkedIn (where everyone is 40 and makes six figures, apparently), because there’s no messing around – it IS a tool. Facebook, on the other hand, treads that shaky ground where personal and professional worlds might try to overlap, and that can get messy.

To get myself to stop talking, I’ll just point you in a direction –> GigaOm has a few posts on the future of social networking: as features, and as a way to organize and put existing communities online. They make some good points about "where is it all going" and "what does it all mean" that are just too big to tackle here. (Besides, there’s a Britney documentary on VH-1…)

Friday’s commentary with Jack Trout got picked up by Forbes.com itself this morning. (so did our picture)  We haven’t heard anyone else suggest that Microsoft do what we’ve suggested (for no charge we might add.)  But think about it. Putting a bunch of engineers who got MSN wrong in charge of fixing Yahoo isn’t likely to come up with any better results than they did the first time around.  Kill Live. Blow up the Yahoo building in Burbank. Dump hotmail into Yahoo.  Fire all the content people in Redmond — and get some good engineers working on upgrading Yahoo!’s search product.  Done deal.  Value achieved for Microsoft and Yahoo! investors.  Now Microsoft can play in closed system operating systems and in a more open source world.

The first time I heard an Italian refer to a very important person as a "vip" — showing no respect for the acronymous nature of the word — I was rather taken aback. I thought it was Very Important to emphasize the individual parts of the phrase. "V. I. P." Which just goes to show you how much I know about the essentials of international communication: Very Little.

What I do know is that VIPs in the interactive advertising world, though not chased by paparazzi or making Martini commercials, are the ones that really fuel the industry, and yes, pay our salaries. Check out TNS Media Intelligence (via ClickZ)’s Top 50 Advertisers by Media Value.

Financial services still dominate the top of the list, with University of Phoenix Online representing Education at no.5, and some Auto & Retail  spattered here and there. Some tech companies like Verizon, Philips, Dell, and BlackBerry are on the list, which makes sense. And I do like a list that makes sense.

At the bottom of the top lay the lonely Wall Street Journal; I wish Rupert would just make up his mind already. I also wish there wasn’t a recession on the horizon, but hey, what can you do. Looking on the Bright Side of Life, we’re thinking that internet ad spend won’t decrease too much, even as consumer dependent tech companies get a little "roughed up". Because when worse comes to worse, there’s always E-Trade Financial to come to the rescue and pay your kid’s college fees.
 

Why us, of course