Blogads, Wieden+Kennedy, and ABC have been presented with the Internet Advertising Competition’s “Best Advertising Online Ad” award for 2013.

The award was given for a series of interstitial ads on PerezHilton.com that responded to reader behavior and tied into the theme of ABC’s “GCB,” which features former nemeses who hide their disdain behind the veil of Southern charm. The show starred Kristen Chenoweth and was produced by Darren Star (of “Sex and the City” fame).

If a reader wanted to tweet a PerezHilton.com story, a pop up reminded them “Thou Shalt Not Tweet More Than 140 Characters.” Other behavior on the site prompted similar commandments, such as “Thou shalt not look at sexy photos” or “Thou shalt not covet another man’s wife” when viewing stories about attractive married celebs.

A big congratulations to our sales, programming, design and project management teams for their work. Thank you IAC!

Blogads joins other IAC prize winners in other categories including The Coca-Cola Company, Target, Huge, and CNN.

[Image via reactiongifs.com]

Dave was amazingly prescient in foretelling the exponential wave of people-powered publishing that started with blogging and rolled on through Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram et al. This post from early 1995, titled “Billions of websites,” included this passage: “Every writer can participate in the web. Someday, very soon, I believe, every writer will. That’s the next big opportunity in the online world.”

I was watching TV at my sister’s house when another commercial for another NEW Android phone aired. “Which one do you have?” she asked me.

“Uh… Droid.. um…” I had to take apart my giant case to remember which HOT NEW model I had gotten just a few months back. And then it hit me. “iPhone users don’t have this problem.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Android platform, but just like Windows in the 90’s and 00’s, Android is at the mercy of the device manufacturers who run its OS to make and brand great devices that people love — and can remember.

Since the first iPhone was released in 2007, Apple has released a total of 5 different models, all called the iPhone. We counted every Android-based phone we could find since T-Mobile’s G1 was released in 2008, and we found 126 distinct models. At that rate, Android OS may lead Apple iOS in total market share, but no single Android phone can ever have the brand cachet of the iPhone.

Check out this comprehensive timeline of every iPhone and Android phone released in the US since 2007.

John Cleese argues that taking your time and tolerating the anxiety of not having a solution are crucial to exceptional creativity.

I was always intrigued that one of my Monty Python colleagues, who seemed to be more talented than I was, never produced scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem and fairly soon saw a solution, he was inclined to take it. Even though I think he knew the solution was not very original.

Whereas if I was in the same situation, although I was sorely tempted to take the easy way out and finish by 5, I just couldn’t. I’d sit there with the problem for another one and a quarter hours and by sticking at it, I would in the end almost always come up with something more original. It was that simple. My work was more original than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer.

So imagine my excitement when I found that this is exactly what [academic Donald] Mckinnon found in his research. He discovered that the most creative professionals always played with the problem for much longer before they tried to resolve it. Because they were prepared to tolerate that slight discomfort and anxiety that we all experience when we have’t solved the problem. You know what I mean, if we have a problem, until we’ve solved it, and we need to solve it, until we do, we feel inside us a kind of internal agitation or tension or uncertainty that makes us just plain uncomfortable. And we want to get rid of that discomfort.

And so in order to do so, we take a decision, not because we’re sure it’s the best but because taking it will make us feel better. Well the most creative people have learned to tolerate that discomfort for longer. And so just because they’ve put in that much more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.

Now the people who I find hardest to be creative with are the people who need, all the time, to project an image of themselves as decisive and who feel that to create this image they need to decide everything very quickly and with a great show of confidence. Well this behavior, I suggest sincerely, is the most effective way to strangle creativity at birth.

But please note that I’m not arguing against real decisiveness. I’m 100% in favor of taking a decisions when it has to be taken and then sticking to it while it is being implemented. What I’m suggesting is that before you take a decision, you should always ask yourself, when does this decision have to be taken? And, having answered that, you defer the decision until then in order to give yourself maximum pondering time. Which will lead you to the most creative decision.

Watch the whole video… many brilliant nuggets in here.

And some light bulb jokes.

Q: How many Cleeses does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Two. One to turn the bulb and the other to inflate the whoopy cushion.

Deeplocal’s LikeBelt in action

You’ve probably heard this question a dozen times in the last year: “Should an agency act like a startup?” Essentially, agencies share key ingredients of agile software companies, like designers, programmers and project managers, but do they have the patience to iterate and persist throughout a profitable product’s lifespan? And is coding products in-house just a great exercise, or is a viable new business model emerging?

Google’s Allison Mooney and Ben Malbon tackled the subject with a panel of agency innovators at last year’s SXSW. Industry pubs like AdWeek, AdPulp and Fast Company pondered the question from all angles, and by June, the question had been asked so many times that Edelman’s David Armano reversed course and suggested that agencies act more like blue chips.

So is this the year that agencies start to answer the question? Digiday’s Brian Morrissey dug into the topic at Social Media Week with agency innovators who aren’t just talking shit, they’re making shit. The panel, called “AgencyWare: Agency as Maker,” featured folks from independent agencies Deeplocal and Breakfast, as well as bigger houses that support their own innovation groups, Weber Shandwick, BBH Labs and Mr. Youth.

Andrew Zolty of Breakfast, the agency behind Conan O’Brien’s check-in-able Blimp, said the key to the startup approach for agencies is experimentation. “The path to innovation is not linear,” he said, “it’s really messy.”

BBH Labs, an innovation unit of a larger agency, takes the same, agile approach to “getting shit done.” The most successful groups are able to “learn from failure on your own dime,” said BBH Lab’s Tim Nolan, “Not at the expense of the clients.”

To stay profitable and productive between client projects, these agencies pump out their own successful products. See Breakfast’s Instaprint, an Instagram-based printer whose Kickstarter has already raised $30k in 4 days. And profit isn’t the only motivator for the maker-agency. Said Mr. Youth’s Matt Britton, “Build your own cool shit to retain talent and keep your people stimulated.”

Other agency innovations represented at the panel were:

• Weber Shandwick’s FireBell, a social media crisis simulator for PR firms
• Deeplocal’s Chalkbot, a twitter-driven robot that printed encouraging messages alongside the roads of the Tour De France
• CrowdTap, a marketing platform that was started at Mr. Youth and has since spun-off into its own company

If you’re interested in this topic, and you’re headed to SXSW, be sure to catch these panels:

• Why Ad Agencies Should Act More Like Tech Startups
• We Made This, and It’s Not an Ad
• It’s Alive: Interactive Machines That Captivate

Is your agency making its own cool shit? Give us a shout.

Book publishers vary widely in their use of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest, according to research Blogads assembled in advance of its February 15 Social Media Week panel, “Innovative ways to build community around books.”

Many publishers have adopted Twitter and Facebook, with Randomhouse dominating the former and Scholastic big on the latter. Only a small handful of publishers have started using the other growing social platforms of the moment, with three publishers Pinterest, the photo curation service popular with women, and five using Tumblr.

UPDATE 2/6:

Since we originally published this post, we’ve heard from several publishers about social media efforts we hadn’t reported on in the initial blog post. We apologize for the oversight. We’ve added these great publisher tumblrs, and other new data, to our charts.

• A. A. Knopf: The intersection of books and borzoi.
• Harper Perennial: The most exciting Big Six imprint in the game right now.
• Farrar, Straus & Giroux: Welcome aboard, newcomers! Way to get off on the right foot.
• Scribner: Bookish miscellany from the Simon & Schuster imprint.
• Doubleday: One of the more stereotypically Tumblr-like publishing Tumblrs.
• Vintage & Anchor: Great stuff from Random House’s paperback wizards.
• Pantheon Books: Image-heavy in a great way.
• Classic Penguin: It’s about time the Penguin folks joined the Tumblr crowd.
• Viking Penguin: Updates from the Viking & Penguin publicity team.
• Riverhead Books: Penguin’s got the most imprints on Tumblr, bar-none.
• W. W. Norton & Co.: Plus ten points for their GZA post
• NYRB Classics: The inimitable publisher of overlooked classics.
• Fantagraphics: The premier publishers of alternative comics in the U.S.
• New Directions: Come back, guys! You were great while you lasted.
• OR Books: Small, politically-minded indie publisher.
• Ugly Duckling Presse: Photos from one of the best book designers in the U.S.
• Bloomsbury Publishing: The U.S. office of London’s reputable house.
• Verso Books: Very #OWS-heavy of late.
• Nouvella Books: The most Downton Abbey-obsessed publishers around.

Here’s the full report:

The State of Book Publishers’ Social Media (An overview from January 2012)

There is a noticeable correlation between the number of tweets per day or per month and the number of followers (correlation coefficient is about ~0.62). Publishers who tweet a lot have more followers than publishers who are less active which makes sense!

Please join us in NYC for our book panel: Innovative ways to build community around books! Sign up here.

Hosted by Blogads.com at The Gershwin Hotel Wednesday, February 15 at 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM

Publishers and authors are increasingly connecting to their audiences in innovative ways through new social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and book-based social networks. Join four publishing industry marketers as they discuss specific ways social media is helping them promote books — and what the changes may mean for publishers, authors and readers.

Speakers:
Miriam Parker, Little, Brown, and Company
Emily Lyman, Crown Publishing
Ryan Chapman, FSG
Guinevere de la Mare, Chronicle Books
Henry Copeland, Blogads

Augmented reality has an advantage over the QR code when it comes to branding. Rather than directing customers to a URL or video, they allow a brand to interact with the customer’s own world as seen through the viewfinders of mobile devices.

While the QR code will always need to rely on incentive to get people to scan (“free gift!” “uncensored video!”), watching cool stuff interact with your coffee cup or magazine is incentive enough for AR interaction. For now.

Here are 11 campaigns that make the customer’s world a little more CG. And a few that actually provide something useful.

1. National Geographic / UPC:

Agency: Appshaker, London, UK
Creative Directors: Alex Poulson, Kevin Jackson
Art Director: Barnabas Nanay
3D: Vertigo Digital
Production Directors: Adam Trost, Szabolcs Turányi-Vadnay

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2. Volkswagon Beetle

Agency: Red Urban, Canada
Creative Director: Christina Yu
Writers: Matt Syberg-Olsen, Jon Taylor
Art Directors: Damian Simev, Liam Johnstone
Producers: Andrea Hull, Sam Benson
Account Director: Nicole Milette
Tech Consultant: Joe Dee
Production: Pixel Pusher
Animation / Design: Bully! Entertainment
Video Director / Editor: Tyler Williams

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3. Starbucks

Agency: Blast Radius

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4. Marmite

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5. Dunhill

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6. Waitrose

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7. Nivea

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8. Tesco

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9. Beck’s

Agency: Outside Line

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10. Wired / Showtime

Agency: OMD

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11. Public Ad Campaign

Agency: The Heavy Projects

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