The Morrison Agency. Atlanta Advertising + Digital Agency

This week fashion designers all over the world congregated at the annual New York Fashion Week. What we found interesting was not the hemlines but the overwhelming change in advertising and media.

Start-up fashion site StyleCaster aimed high to receive and report coveted media coverage that out shown the old guard of Vogue and the like. Ralph Lauren bought all available digital ad space in the New York Times’ iPad App to provide a month-long highly interactive experience.

With high fashion finally taking the digital plunge head on, could digital inadvertently kill their luxury exclusivity?

Some other links of note this week:

• Computer-generated articles increase online
• Amazon poking a stick at a “Netflix for Books“
• Diet Coke’s new brand is ready for it’s close up
• Infographic of the Week: The Psychology of Addiction (of Angry Birds)
• Google adds flight search, comparison and shopping

You’ve no doubt interacted with a QR code at some point in the last few months. While they’ve been fairly common in Japan for nearly two decades, QR codes seem to have only taken hold in the US within the past year or so.

Readable by mobile apps using the phone’s camera and Internet connection, QR codes are typically used due to their ability to improve calls-to-action in all types of marketing.

Here are just a few successful & inspiring implementations:

Starbucks and Lady Gaga built an elaborate interactive digital scavenger hunt with QR Codes at various Starbucks locations as one of many promotions leading up to the release of her current album.
Source: Mashable.com

Tissot printed a variety of QR Codes on trade show displays and models that linked viewers to exclusive videos and music that could be viewed and purchased.
Source: TappIn YouTube Channel

Delta Airlines use QR Codes for their eBoarding pass allowing customers to receive a code on their smart phones to board their flight.
Source: Delta Marketing Group

Orville Redenbacher and other companies include them in their direct mail pieces providing coupons and other promotions.
Source: Blurring Edges

QR codes have rapidly changed how people socially interact with marketing – and we seem to just be seeing the beginning of it. How are you using or going to use them in your marketing? What’s your take on the QR craze?

A recent article published on The Economist’s website, details projected trends in advertising for 2011 – and makes some interesting observations.

• Global ad spending will increase 4.5% (this is double the growth rate of 2010)
• Online advertising leads the pack, with a projected growth rate of 16%
• Television and online advertising are set to outpace their 2007 projections, while newspaper, magazine, and radio are all set to take a step backward

Online advertising continues to be a growing area of opportunity within the digital universe. And we’re not talking about your traditional banner ad type of work either. When considering your online advertising options, keep in mind the potential of mobile, paid search, social media (advertising and utilization), rich media – in addition to banner ads, and email campaigns.

Being willing to jump in head-first, and utilize the tools at our disposal is key to taking advantage of all that the web has to offer. With 28.7% of the world’s population (or 1,966,514,816 people) currently online, I can’t help but feel like there are some stones left unturned.

The other day, I was on the phone with a client, and the question was asked: “we get that social media is important, however we can’t figure out how you actually go about monetizing it!”

Good question. Tricky answer.

I tend to follow the belief that social media works in three forms:

1. Socially – friend to friend
2. Promotionally -as a tool, in conjunction with an overarching promotional campaign
3. Proactively – a way to reach out, and build your brand

Let’s take a minute and go through each one of these, albeit at a high level.
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As you might assume, I spend a good bit of my time developing, managing, and reviewing internet marketing and advertising campaigns for our clients. In most cases, these clients have a solid grasp on the world – and metrics – of these programs. You know the ones I’m talking about, the one’s with cool abbreviations like: CPC, CTR, Conv, Impr, and others. We talk about the performance of these ads or programs, based on the number of users who click our add, complete our predefined goals, the total number of visitors to the campaign site, or whether or not they flow through the funnel we set up for them. 

Or maybe we’re talking about social media campaigns, and worrying about the number of friends, or followers of our associated Twitter profiles, Facebook Fan pages, etc. We get so caught up in these numbers, that we forget one simple thing…

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