The inaugural CIMA Interactive Marketing Certificate Program kicked off last week at DePaul University. This was week 1 of a six-week program for marketing professionals to improve their knowledge and application regarding the theory and practice of interactive marketing. And it was a great class!

In our first session, Chris Kenellakes introduced SEO and Paid Search. Chris has over ten years of experience in search marketing and currently works as a Senior Account Manager at Kenshoo. He covered a wide variety of topics – What is SEO, how search engines work, ranking, how to identify good SEO, basic SEO principles and tactics, how Paid Search works, paid search account structures, benchmarks and optimization, reporting, technologies and tools.

The classroom was full and students were very engaged throughout. Students come from diverse backgrounds (agency, client, sales – digital, radio, print, out of home). I was very excited about student participation and questions, as there’s clearly a demand for this information.

Over the next 5 weeks, instructors - all industry experts - will cover Mobile Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Analytics and Digital Display. The class will also participate in a project to create an interactive strategy for Direct Effect Charities (http://www.directeffectcharities.org/), an organization providing support for children in families well below the poverty level through Chicago's public schools.

Many thanks to Dr. Steve Kelly for his help in launching this successful program! I look forward to the great information shared in this course and in our upcoming summer session (June 6 – July 18, 2012).

Ali Jensen is a Midwest sales director with more than 8 years of digital experience and 16 years in media sales. Ali's professional background includes DailyCandy LLC, Novus Media (a division of Omnicom), Tribune Company and Midwest Suburban Publishing. She is a graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has volunteered on CIMA's Events and Education committees for the past 5 years and currently serves and the Director of Academic Affairs.

As Jones proves in MiB, the things he knows and does only he can do–and these things ultimately hold the key to winning the fight against galactic crime-lords. The same essentially holds true in digital marketing. Ad networks are lambasted nowadays by agencies, sales people, conference moderators and “Sh*t Digital Marketers Say” videos for being old, stuck in their data/targeting/optimization ways, taking too much margin for what they deliver, among other transgressions. In contrast, exchanges, DSPs, and trading desks are considered innovative, data-driven, and efficient.

That is all true – to a degree.

Ad networks certainly have faded to the background, mainly because universal access to exchange inventory allowed companies to focus on data, targeting and technology instead of inventory acquisition and management. This trend has been the main driver of digital display innovation for the last 18-24 months and there have certainly been innovative, with many clever and very effective things to come out of this trend.

But here’s where my opinion diverges from the pack. Ad Networks have one main advantage over the new hotness–inventory relationships. While DSPs and trading desks passively acquire inventory from exchanges, matching advertisers to cookies with little regard to site placement, Ad Networks still proactively forge and maintain relationships with their inventory sources. This means that Ad Networks can contractually negotiate specific advantages, like first right of refusal on specific content, cookies or placements, and a guaranteed yield for their publishers. Exchanges cannot offer these benefits. By incentivizing inventory suppliers the Ad Networks get the things that drive success before competitors. Not to mention these things can be done (and have been done for years) on a real-time, not pre-bought, basis.

Combining these benefits is powerful, as they bring stability that can offer advertisers direct primary access to users on specific content and placements. Ad networks are then able to optimize to cookies and content while exchanges and DSPs (mostly) do not, or cannot. Often DSPs have to overbid for lower-value cookies just to deliver campaigns, as many high-value cookies have already been scooped up by the time the DSPs get there. Ad Networks also avoid bidding environments and inventory competitions due to their contractual agreements with the publishers, keeping their prices and inventory stable.

It is important to note, however, that as the climax of “Men In Black II” comes and goes, teamwork is the most important thing to finding success, as it took the unique skills of both Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones together to be successful, and it is the same in the distributed inventory market. Using the new hotness is fine and encouraged–DSPs can be very successful despite my points above–but I guarantee that forgetting about the old and (not) busted is a mistake. Unless you want your digital display campaigns to be obliterated by Vogons. (But that’s a topic for another post.)

*While the actual term DSP (demand side platform) has a narrow technical definition, is has come to colloquially encompass any company that accesses display inventory from exchanges and applies rigorous data and targeting to that inventory.

Over Joel’s now 7-year tenure in digital media, he has led digital media teams at Agency.com, Media Contacts/MPG, Charlotte’s Web Marketing and now Critical Mass, serving clients too numerous to list in a two-sentence bio.  Any success he’s had probably comes from shaving with Occam’s Razor every morning.

Yesterday I attended CIMA’s first educational event of 2012, a panel lunch titled “How Social Media is Disrupting Marketing Norms.” What a way to kick off the year! The client-only panel made up of socia
l media and digital marketing leads from State Farm, American Family Insurance, MillerCoors, Sears, and Motorola was diverse, interesting and spoke in both strategic and tactical terms. So often I attend panels and the speakers are addressing their businesses in such big picture, even lofty terms that you can literally see the bubbles above the audiences’ heads asking, “How can I apply this to my day-to-day? What does all of this mean to me?”  Yesterday, this was definitely not the case!

Some of the content highlights included the validity and importance of context around a Klout score and which brands are leveraging Pinterest to address marketing objectives.

Blagica Bottigliero, Global Director of Social Media at Motorola Mobility, encourages her colleagues to really dig into the media recommendations that they are provided with. She asked, “Have you read that blog? Have you spent time actually digging into the type of content being provided?” She made the very smart point that while someone’s Klout Score is a very interesting metric to look at, it cannot be looked at in isolation. Blagica mentioned an instance where in a past role she had a client looking to market plastic bags. The blogger that was recommended for the program had a great following but had been writing for the last three months about their plans to go Green.  Klout Score +Context!

I personally enjoyed the comments from Steve Mura, Director of Digital Marketing at MillerCoors on his belief that brands should have one social media profile. While Miller and Coors are both brands that have deep sports affiliations, at the end of day, the communication from a social media perspective needs to live under the official brand profile so as not to provide a fragmented consumer experience. I also loved that he gave a shout out to Sam Wehrs, on his team at MillerCoors, on the growth and success Sam has brought to their efforts; very cool to have your boss do that in front of a room of your peers!

Our moderator, Chris O’Brien’s ability to provide a quick and witty commentary kept the audience laughing and the conversation flowing along at a productive pace.  The opening from our President, Cary Goss, frankly almost brought me to tears. Yes, I am a sap but everything he said was so from the heart regarding CIMA’s goals and plans for growth and evolution this year.  Every single thing he said is not only a goal but tangibly in the works to be delivered within the next 9-10 months. It’s an amazing time to be a part of CIMA and I couldn’t be more proud of the quality of the experience that was delivered across the board yesterday.

But let’s face it, the single best part of yesterday was the turn out and enthusiasm from over 350 attendees! Oh and did I mention that it was 75 degrees and sunny yesterday? Thank you to everyone for being there supporting our efforts. To sum up yesterday best, from @n0heres via Twitter, yesterday right after the event:

 

@n0her0es: Pretty sure everyone in Chicago advertising is now involved in @chicagoIMA. Are there any offline holdouts? #thingschange

 

A sincere thank you to yesterday’s exclusive sponsor and long-time friend of CIMA, Rocketfuel!

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Written by: Elizabeth Bleser, VP of Marketing for CIMA and Emerging & Integrated Media Specialist at AT&T. You can follow Elizabeth at @ebleser

Attribution….is it a “new” buzz word in the digital marketing industry? It seems like it but it has been around for some time now.  It is finally generating popularity and awareness as both brand and direct response advertisers are striving to measure all of their media cohesively regardless of their ad serving platform, agency or Analytics Company. The answer to this implementing a full funnel attribution solution from one of the 20 plus vendors that is out there. Just ask Econsultancy who put together a 184 page Attribution Vendor Buyer’s Guide. The report is $400 unless you find a company to send it you. I was lucky enough to receive a copy from one of the vendors that was reviewed.

I’ve been talking about attribution with my clients for the past year and put together an exhaustive search for the best partner. I didn’t realize that it would be such an undertaking. The project itself took about 2 months. I never knew how hard it would be to get a company to call you back. Usually, publishers are stalking you as an agency person but I found this to be much different. Once I finally got them on the phone and peeled back their offerings, I learned that a number of the companies listed in the buyer’s guide really weren’t attribution companies and didn’t offer a great solution.