Author: Peter Gerritsen

Taan welcomes new member – Ciceron

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We are pleased to announce that the digital agency, Ciceron, has been elected to membership of Taan Worldwide.

About Ciceron — a full service digital marketing, insights, and brand advocacy firm based in Minneapolis, MN. Our clients hire us to connect everyone together — customers, employees, leaders, and the marketplace — through elegant and helpful digital experiences, valuable content, and real human relationships.

Welcome to Andrew Eklund, Kraig Larson, and the entire team at Ciceron. The addition of the firm’s digital leadership to the Taan Worldwide membership continues the network’s growth in breadth of expertise in key areas of the communications marketing solutions for our clients around the world.

OFyt and Bletchley Park to merge

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5th March 2015

It is with a great deal of anticipation and excitement that OFyt and Bletchley Park announce the merger of their respective companies.

 

“We’ve known each other as friends and been fans of each other as agencies for a long time,” says OFyt co-founder Gary Leih, “and after a few chats it became really obvious that we complimented each other incredibly well, and that merging would give clients a formidable and unmatched creative and strategic offering.”

 

The merger strengthens both the above- and below-the-line creative capability of both teams, and strengthens their Public Relations, Event and Activation capability.

 

We’re at very similar stages of our growth journey,” says Bletchley Park Strategy Director, Jonty Fisher, “but where we really fit hand-in-glove, is the desire to affect great change in the businesses and brands we work on. Our shared passion are the problems that often sit behind the brief. With the unmatched experience of our new partners and our love of Beautiful Problems, we believe OFyt is perfectly suited to sit higher up on our client’s value chain.”

 

With a team of 70 people between its Cape Town and Johannesburg offices, the agency will operate under the OFyt brand and the ‘Beautiful Problems, Indelible Truths’ ethos. The partners are Greg Burke, Jonty Fisher, Gary Leih, Paul Newman, Kelly Putter and Jono Shubitz.

 

OFyt is committed to the development and transformation of the South African advertising industry, as is evident by their unique internship program funded by the OFyt Trust, and their level 1 BEE rating which is unmatched in the industry.

 

The combined agency boasts an impressive client list, which includes adidas Originals, ADT, Afrocentric Health (Medscheme, Pharmacy Direct, etc), Bidvest Car Rental, The Crazy Store, Lindt & Sprüngli, Kia Motors SA, Lancewood Cheese & Dairy, Nampak (All divisions), Pam Golding Properties, RGBC (Jack Daniel’s, Hennessy, Moët & Chandon, etc), and Rhodes Food Group (Bull Brand, etc).

 

Congratulations to our Taan Worldwide members in South Africa!

The Glenn Group Launches Sister Agency Focused on Gaming Clients: Wide Awake, Modern Marketing for Gaming Properties

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Our Taan Worldwide member in Nevada is taking advantage of their vast experience in the gaming industry. Congratulations to The Glenn Group. Wide Awake should be a winning combination of their talents, insights, and capabilities that will deliver results for their clients.
Here is the press release:

Las Vegas – After 45 years of working with more than 50 gaming clients around the country, The Glenn Group, with offices in Las Vegas and Reno, is launching a sister agency called Wide Awake with the sole purpose of helping gaming properties innovate, differentiate and master the modern marketing landscape.

Wide Awake will bring all the history, experience, talent and creativity of The Glenn Group, with an added depth of expertise and knowledge in gaming.

The name Wide Awake pays homage to Nevada, where the company cut its teeth on gaming and where gaming was born. During the gold and silver rushes, well before gaming was legal, Nevada frontier towns that were open to gambling were referred to as “Wide Awake.” Wide Awake is not only a way of paying tribute to Nevada’s pioneering spirit and its deep gaming roots, but also focuses on the challenges of marketing casino properties within a modern marketing landscape and highly competitive gaming environment.

Wide Awake will share offices with The Glenn Group in Las Vegas and Reno under the leadership of B.C. LeDoux, president and partner.

“Since we have decades of experience in the gaming industry, we know players, know the trends and we’ve seen the evolution,” said B.C. LeDoux, Wide Awake president and principal. “We’ve seen the industry become commoditized and a little formulaic, and since it’s faced with the immense pressure of hyper-competition and oversaturation, we want to help properties think differently, stand out and blaze trails during the next evolution. We don’t see anyone else doing that.”

The Glenn Group will continue to operate in Nevada as a creative marketing communications agency, providing strategic marketing solutions like brand positioning, identity design, advertising content creation, media strategy and placement, public relations and website development for a variety of clients in different industries, something the company has successfully done throughout its 45-year history. Valerie Glenn, chief executive officer and principal, will continue to lead The Glenn Group.

“We are very excited to launch Wide Awake as part of our parent entity The Glenn Group Companies,” said Valerie Glenn, CEO and principal. “After nearly half of a century of working with gaming companies around the country, we have developed a particular expertise in gaming and are able to bring that experience to casino properties as they navigate a fiercely competitive market.”

To find out more about Wide Awake and modern marketing for gaming properties, read a Q&A with LeDoux here. Visit the Wide Awake website at WideAwakeNV.com.

Media Buy Transparency – mind the gap

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Here is a very interesting article in Ad Age
http://adage.com/article/news/ana-concern-grows-media-transparency/293259/
     It looks like some clients are going to start looking to review details of contracts, relationships, and usage of programmatic buying, and digital media trading desks to better understand how and where their media budgets are being spent.
     They probably should look. I know some of the big agencies created “deals” with some of the programmatic trading desk firms. Also know that a few firms in that space were willing to “rebate” budgets back to agencies. Some even offered Taan rebates for spending by Taan members on behalf your clients. There seems to be a big hole in tracking the media allocation of funds. Some estimates are showing as much as 40% difference between the budget expenditure and the actual media buy.
     We should all know more, and be prepared to answer questions when asked.
     Just my opinion.
     To get some additional expert perspective, I reached out to our member, NorBella, for their opinion on this situation. Here is the response from Stephanie and Nate:
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Transparency is one of the leading issues in the programmatic space. Not having any insight as to where an advertiser’s messaging is ending up can be unnerving for both advertisers and the agencies working on their behalf, both of whom want to make sure that the ad dollars are working as hard and efficiently as possible. We are pleased that the industry, through the IAB, is addressing these issues by certifying media companies through the Quality Assurance Guidelines on transparency and brand safety, however there is still work to be done. With no exact science to determine how the budget is allocated between the vendor, data providers and actual media, NorBella is doing all that we can to battle the issue of transparency and ease advertiser uncertainty. We work with trusted leaders in the programmatic space who incorporate preventative software, such as Integral Ad Science, Trust Metrics, or Double Verify, on their back end to monitor bot activity and eliminate any sites that show fraudulent activity or pirated content.  We also incorporate Integral Ad Science for all programmatic campaigns on our end to make sure that all impressions are running in a brand safe environment. Additionally, we have started having discussions with all non-site direct vendors about incorporating viewability standards or benchmarks prior to campaign launch.

Our industry needs more Curmudgeons…

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…not egotists, gurus, and blowhards — we have plenty of those.

Maybe curmudgeon is the wrong descriptor (I think old person that whines all the time). Perhaps “Skeptic” is the appropriate word to describe two people that are worth time time investment. I follow these two industry veterans because they both do a fantastic job of poking the aforementioned self-promoting “gurus” with sharp sticks of logic.

Andrew Smith is not really a “skeptic” as much as he a “realist” when it comes to separating the facts from the hype in digital media. Andrew ( http://www.escherman.com and @andismit ) presented “Using analytics to drive more effective social, PR and advertising campaigns” to our members at our recent meeting in Barcelona. It was eye-opening. Andrew did a stellar job of separating key numbers away from the nonsense in analyzing digital metrics. 90 minutes filled with valuable perspective and practical tools to align data with common sense.

His post on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140508164127-143109-is-social-media-and-digital-advertising-drowning-in-a-sea-of-fakery ) will give you an excellent overview of his perspective of what is happening in the data analysis part of our industry. It is just small part of his on-going efforts to bring some reality to the process of seeing value to the digital marketplace.

His post starts with two significant statistics:

61.5% of web traffic is not human.

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I’ve seen both these industry statics in other articles. Scary numbers, indeed. Especially when so many rely heavily on inflated datapoints to sell their success, and therefore convincing the industry to buy solutions based on un-reality. A huge waste of media budgets. If you are looking for ways to make better sense of what works, and where to spend your time and budgets, I recommend including Andrew’s thinking as part of your education.
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The other person that keeps me appropriately skeptical is Bob Hoffman (@AdContrarian). He pushes back on so much of the hyped data we are bombarded with every day in the digital space . He is considered by some to be a curmudgeon, but his self-described “Contrarian” label is a much better fit. In fact, and it is in the title of his poplar blog (http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com ) and best-selling book ( 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising
http://www.amazon.com/101-Contrarian-Ideas-About-Advertising/dp/097968854X ).
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Bob’s work is part industry satire, and part rant in his unique perspective of the over-reaching declarations presented throughout the our industry. He enjoys calling out the supposed expert by comparing their “profound statements” with the facts. To me, his mission is to get us all to not believe everything we hear and read, until we verify.  Agree with him, or not,  but he is very entertaining.
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Here are my two recommendations for you.
1.  If you have a few minutes, read Andrew Smith’s post: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140508164127-143109-is-social-media-and-digital-advertising-drowning-in-a-sea-of-fakery
2.  If you can find another 40+ minutes, I highly recommend you watch the embedded video of a recent presentation by Bob Hoffman:  Bob Hoffman – The Golden Age of Bullshit – Advertising Week Europe 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyTn_DgfcFE)
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Both of these will instill a healthy dose of skepticism in all the data flying around our industry about the successes of digital marketing. We all need to be aware of the balance between hype and reality in evaluating the power of all these fabulous tools for connecting people for the sake of selling something. There are some fantastic tools and resources available to all of us. We just need to be better at understanding what really works, versus what doesn’t deliver as promised.
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There is value in Andrew Smith’s insights and read Bob Hoffman’s rants. Both of them help keep the gurus and blowhards from taking over our profession.
– Peter Gerritsen