Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

Marketing

At 4A’s Presenting About Ad Agency Websites

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imagesI am speaking at a CEO conference today at the 4A’s (American Association of Advertising Agencies.) My presentation is on the Good, Bad and Ugly of how agencies use their websites, social media and other digital tools for business development. Should be interesting as agency websites are a great window into how they think and position themselves.

To give you a couple of examples of what I am taking about:

Good: Maybe the best social agency (certainly in terms of self promotion) Likeable Media 

Really bad: Insane ad agency website home pages

If you are an ad agency and would like to see the presentation give me a shout.

Ad Agencies See The Growth In Online Video

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youtuve-300x225Opened up my computer this morning to get ready for a call with a potential agency client in Milan and saw two advertising news items that clearly point to the direction that ad agencies must head.

First was a quote from Italy’s Publicita Italia (think AdAge) that said that Publicis thinks that 75% of their revenues will come from digital by 2018. Not surprising but clearly directional.

The second is an article from eMarketer that states…

Ad execs think online video ads are equally or more effective than television ads at reaching audiences.

And…

The popularity of digital video viewing is helping drive the expansion of the online video ad market. eMarketer estimates that video ad spending in the US will grow 41.4% this year, to reach $4.1 billion. BrightRoll found that the greatest percentage of advertising professionals—one-quarter—expected online video ads to see the highest growth rate of any ad category, with mobile video a close second.

Here is the supporting chart. The trend is obvious and the trajectory for agencies and what skills they should be building should be crystal clear. One idea is to become the Six Second Vine Agency.

online video growth

 

Does Your Advertising Agency Know Google’s Matt Cutts?

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matt cuttsChances are, and this is the interesting part, if you work in advertising or digital design or mobile marketing there is a good chance that you do not know who Google’s Matt Cutts is. You should because he is one of the most powerful people in global marketing and advertising.

Matt is the head of the webspam team at Goggle. That means that he controls some of the more important methods that Google uses to rank web pages. He and his team can make or break your SEO plans and strategies via updates like Panda and Penguin to Google’s search algorithms (here is some history from SEOMOZ.)  Is this really that important? Is it important that your agency is listed high in a Google search for your keywords (i.e., “advertising agency Atlanta” or “storytelling social media agency”)?

Sorry for this Duh but I want to make a point… Is the SEO work you are doing for your clients well rewarded and wouldn’t be if they were served up on page 4? While I understand that you may leave SEO up to an expert, I think that it’s wise to actually have some understanding about the Google team that decides how Google ranks web pages.

Here is a video from Matt on what is coming up. Yes it is way esoteric. But so are many of the elements of digital marketing.

If you’d like a quick take on Matt’s video pointers, visit The Short Cutts for, well, short cuts.

Since early 2009 Google’s Matt Cutts has recorded a superhuman number of videos to help struggling site owners understand their site in search. While the videos are great, sometimes the guy just needs to get to the point. With that in mind we’ve done the hard work and watched every Matt Cutts video to pull out simple, concise versions of his answers: The Short Cutts!

I may not be a SEO specialist but I have been building websites that rank high and drive organic traffic for 18 years. If you need some high level strategic insights into how to integrate your business development strategy with smart SEO…. well, give me a shout.