Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

I had the chance tonight to attend a screening of the recently released Art & Copy documentary presented by BCAIM as part of Advertising Week. This is at times a humorous yet down to earth look inside the advertising business, from the perspectives of some of the biggest names in the agency world.

The film provides the context for advertising as we know it today, touching upon the space that the craft fills in modern culture. Some of the familiar subjects include industry icons including the blunt and animated George Lois, the man behind the idea of ‘The Big Idea’, Dan Wieden & David Kennedy of Just Do It fame, Jeff Goodby & Rich Silverstein, creators of the Got Milk? campaign, Hal Riney the creator of the classic american dream styled television spot, and Lee Clow, who’s work includes the much lauded 1984 spot for Apple and pretty much every campaign for that brand ever since Steve Jobs returned to steer the ship.

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We started 2010 off with a little thank-you to a few our clients in the form of cupcakes. These tasty treats are the handy work of Lyndsay at Coco Cake – a local cupcakery (is that a real word?!), and are our way of saying, ‘clients, you sure helped to make 2009 a swell year!’

Interestingly, we’ve learnt that cupcakes do not ship well. One batch only barely made it to its destination in Saskatchewan.

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The Internet, no longer just a series of tubes, continues to expand and attract a broader, more global audience.

Server uptime and performance monitoring service, Pingdom, has pulled together a list of Internet statistics. These are hefty numbers that indicate just where things (or more specifically, the general public) are headed. Some of the more impressive figures that caught our eye include:

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.
• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009) – An 18% Increase over the previous year.
• Internet users per region: 42.6% Asia (Yup, they’re leading), 24.1% Europe, 14.6% North America, 10.3% Latin America / Caribbean, 3.9% Africa, 3.3% Middle East, 1.2% Oceania / Australia. Imagine that, we’re 3rd!
• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook. – Yuh, Billion!
• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).

Get the report after the jump…

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SoDA 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook – released today!

The Society of Digital Agencies released their 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook today and it’s packed full of great survey data from hundreds of executives from major global brands, traditional and digital agencies, and vendor / service providers. Some key stats and points of view that have caught my eye so far:

• 81% of brand execs expect an increase in digital projects for 2010
• “The most effective digital platforms have shifted from ‘disruptive’ to ‘productive’ by providing a service or utility…[they] fundamentally change the approach from “how we reach our customers” to ‘how we make their lives better.’” K. Blitz
• 59% of respondants say that cost-per-click, conversion, and ROI are the digital marketing metric they’re least interested in
• Most important technical skill sets to hire / contract in 2010 (in order): Flash, ActionScript, CSS, PHP, iPhone SDK – showing that the microsite is indeed still alive and kicking

Get the report after the jump…

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Whenever one of the big tech co’s does something even remotely of interest, and even more often when it’s under the radar, the tech blogs light up with speculation and criticism instantly. Even when it’s as insubstantial as the Microsoft Bing.com team’s recent internal use of their new Binged.It URL shortener.

Microsoft seems far less
concerned with an extra
character in their URL
shortener, or even the
prospect of using a truly
short URL than they are
about building a solid and
recognizable brand around
the Bing product.

The service isn’t yet public, and for all we know, it may never be. But with URL shortening becoming commonplace and creating some interesting business opportunities – tracking audience interest for example – it would be surprising if the Google’s, YouTube’s, and Microsoft’s weren’t exploring the space with some level of interest.

Microsoft’s Binged.It URL shortener caught some heat recently on TechCrunch.com, with the blog and most of the commenters jumping all over the fact that Bing’s short URL (Binged.It – 8 characters) is longer than the service’s main URL (Bing.com – 7 characters). Fair point, considering a URL shortener should, er, shorten a URL, right?!

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