I just received my copy of the 2009 One Show Interactive Annual. It has some great stuff of current interactive campaigns from the top creatives in the advertising industry. An example is the Axion Banner Concerts that combined the traditonal banner ad on the web and mashed it up with a live concert.
The intro has some great insights about how digital and interactive advertising is consistently changing making it hard to categorize the variety of applications. This is interesting because trying to categorize digital media forces advertisers to think in boxes rather then thinking of how to best communicate with audiences. Michael Lebowitz, the jury chair, says it best “the focus shouldn’t be on which channels we use or how many of them we fill. It’s about how people interpret and interact with them.” In my opinion this is what is exciting about interactive advertising, the idea of a more inclusive model of communication as opposed to talking at audiences. The 2009 One Show annual showcases great examples that do just that, engage audiences with exciting interactive campaigns.
Over the holiday break I have finally had some time to get some reading done. One of them was Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. It is a very cool book and a super fast read. The text gives a good overview of what’s happening with inbound marketing and is ideal for beginners to intermediate folks in the industry or who want to get started. The book begins by setting up the current environment then moves into basic overviews of using blogs, search engines and social media in your marketing efforts. Next it moves into to capturing customers and capitalizing on your marketing efforts.
I think this book gives a great overview about how and what new media can do for your marketing efforts. It is pretty basic and very prescriptive in its approach in that it gives a “do this, do this, and then do this.” Me personally I enjoy a descriptive approach with more case studies, but since it is a general overview most of the advice is right on. For me as a instructor at a university and teaching in this area I think this might make a wonderful book for students. The book offers great information and definitely worth checking out.
I teach a couple advertising classes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and am constantly looking for better textbooks. When I review desk copies of books I always ask about digital versions or other options for students besides hard copies. Many academic texts are very expensive and are consistently replaced with newer versions. In journalism and mass communications it is necessary for our students to have access to current information. Web site, blogs, and newsletters from trade pubs are great but lack the structure for students. There are many print-on-demand, publish your own, and build your own text books, but one has a great model for future textbooks.
So I read about Flat World Knowledge which offers its text books for free that you can read online. They sell print-on-demand copies of their texts as well as mp3s of the text that you can buy per chapter or the entire book. The print books can be bought in black and white or full color. They also offer a variety of supplemental materials as well. This is cool because students can customize how they would like to interact with the text making the classroom a good place for discussion, interaction and application.
The flexibility of this service is wonderful, but on downside that I see so far is the size of the library. Currently, there are only a select few texts, but as it expands it will become quite the resource for both instructors and students.
I have been reading an excellent book by Chris Anderson, FREE: The future of radical pricing. The book describes how companies like Google can offer so much for free and the business models that are emerging from prices progressively moving closer to zero. I am not anywhere near being an economist, but the ideas create an interesting discussion. I teach in a college of journalism where this topic has become more of and issue because of the current situation with newspapers going out of business and moving online. This book fittingly is available free as an audio book.
An interesting section of FREE is the piracy chapter where Anderson tells about China and Brazil’s take on copyright. I think China has an interesting model for the music industry with 95% of the music on the market being free copies, but labels become event planners. The classic example in the US now a days is Radiohead’s In Rainbows where you buy the album online and give what you like. This in turn drives interest in the band making concerts and merchandise.
Along these lines there have been some great videos online about piracy and copyright law that I think are opening the conversation about this topic.
A documentary by Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor RiP: A remix manifesto looks at issues of piracy and mash-ups. Watch it online or download it for what you think its worth!
I am not dead yet, but I do have a Master’s degree now so 2009 is just starting to exist outside of work and school.
Anyway, recently I have been reading this great book by Rebecca Lieb called “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization.” Nice quick read but jam packed with practical information about SEO. I teach a New Media Design class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and will definitely be referencing this book and recommending it to students. It is easy to understand but also clears ups some gray areas I had about the topic. It is broken down into short sections making it a great reference book that is a great addition to any advertiser, marketer, web designer/developer, graphic design or anyone else involved with working online.
More info here, they also offer it as a PDF download which I am always excited about for classes I teach.
Now that I am teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the Advertising Sequence I have started to receive “desk copies” of books. It is alway awesome to get new information and currently I have four books to look though at my leisure.
I should say I am going to be teaching a new course, New Media Design, at UNL. The title is pretty vague and covers a huge area of study, we will be focusing on web designs and development and how it fits into IMC. Also, get into other applications such as blogs, rss feeds, and social networking sites. I will post more as we get started, but I plan on using a class blog if you interested in following along. I am using a couple other books for the Spring semester, “Naked Conversations” and “Don’t Make Me Think” but I am looking at some different options, here’s my initial thoughts.
“New Media Design” by Tricia Austin & Richard Doust — Great color photos and looks like a nice overview of all the facets of New Media Design, will be a nice resource starting out.
“Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, Style Sheets, and Web Graphics” by Jennifer Niederst Robbins and Aaron Gustafson — This book is wonderful so far, a great overview of what it takes to make a website from start to finish. It begins with the basics and works up to more advanced subjects. It is published by O’Reilly which I am a fan of but will also be a great resource for this class and for students who don’t have any web background.
“Street-Smart Advertising: How to Win the Battle of the Buzz” by Margo Berman — Haven’t had much time to look through this one but looks like decent design book starting with typography, design elements, and campaign strategies. It also gets into self-promotion which I think is good for college students who are beginning to think about a career after school. It is black and white so fits nicely into a student’s budget.
“Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process: Strategies for print and new media designers (VOICES) ” by Curt Cloninger — At first glance this book looks great. It goes into the workflow for desginers with concepts and history as well as interviews with professionals. Visually stimulating, which should be obvious given the title. I look forward to looking at this book further in depth.
