I’ve enjoyed a terrific career making advertising but three years ago, when my prior agency’s fortunes changed suddenly and radically, I looked up and realized the world had changed while I was busy making TV campaigns. I had largely ignored the biggest revolution in marketing: the pervasiveness of digital screens, the stunningly-swift adoption of social networks and the increasing presence of mobile marketing.

I started blogging everyday to force myself to explore all these emerging platforms and immerse myself in the new reality. As Facebook continued to work it’s way every deeper into our lives, I started to recognize how social networks can provide savvy brands with crowdsourced PR. I was amazed how transparent and public people had become, sharing remarkable details of their personal lives. I learned about search and geo-tagging and the seamy creepiness behind unchecked online tracking. And I probably saw more than my fair share of virals and flashmobs and public self-destruction at the hand of Twitter.

I learned a lot, both by actively searching for subjects to discuss and happily, by reading comments posted and emailed from smart people offering their own points of view.  It’s been wonderful catching up.

But I gotta cut back. We’re doing lots of interesting things up here in Minneapolis, expanding the agency as we build and activate all sorts of brand communities for a wide range of clients. And I need to dedicate more time to that process.

So thanks for reading, thanks for your attention, thanks for your help. Going forward, I’ll post every now and then–habits can be tough to break–but my pace is definitely gonna slow.

Because advertising’s pace certainly isn’t.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Olson

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The national press knows all of these points implicitly. Consider this post a purging of sorts. All the following images and headlines were pulled off the web in one twenty-minute span. Hopefully, this collection can serve to expunge the puns and return ‘weiner’ to the good folks of Oscar Mayer.

You’re welcome. Or I’m sorry. Whatever.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Olson

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But despite her charm and obvious leadership position in the industry, her comments tread well trod ground: the key to everything is engagement, blogging and Wiki editing has taken off because self expression is the new entertainment. And trust is the new black, with a reference to the hysteria around Balloon Boy.

She added some facts: we send 140 million tweets and watch two million YouTube videos everyday, and every month, we spend a staggering 700 billion minutes on Facebook.

All true, but all rather familiar.  And from someone who introduced a whole new media platform based on curating the latest and best content, oddly ironic.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Olson

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An article posted to Ad Age yesterday might gladden Robert’s heart…somewhat. Despite DVR’s, the declines in live TV viewership over the past few years are reversing.  Appointment TV has made a resurgence as Facebook, Twitter and cell phone based social media outlets now drive live tune-ins.

Apparently, we still like to watch alone, but we link up as part of a larger social group through talking, texting, posting and commenting. As we watch, e like to gripe about the White Sox bullpen, seek explanations for the Bull’s careless ball handling and whine about the Blackhawks disappearing offense. Okay, maybe that’s just me but the point is we form very active, regularly scheduled communities around live television viewing.

Robin Sloan, who works with Twitter’s media-partnership groups says “If you look at the tweets about a TV show, a huge proportion come from when the show is airing live, not an hour later.” Tweets and status updates have a shelf life shorter than shredded cheese in a warm refrigerator; it’s all about commenting in the now.

We may be alone physically, but not socially. A whopping 86% of mobile net users watch TV with their mobile devices. Further, the communities that form range from the very broad, like for the Super Bowl, to the very, very engaged, like the people who tweet and text about “Glee.”  ”Glee” earned the Number 2 spot on Trendrr.TV which measures TV chatter across various social media, which sounds awesome for ratings.  Unfortunately, the show itself ranked 77th on Nielsen’s prime-time list.

So a cheesy show about awkward high school types inspires awkward types to tweet cheesily just like high school…  Hmm, that figures.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Olson

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These posters are part of a series called “Historically Hardcore” by Jenny Burrows (AD) and Matt Kappler (CW) who created it as a spec campaign when they were ad students at Creative Circus.

The fact that so many of us have enjoyedt Matt and Jenny’s old classwork these past two weeks speaks to one of the web’s peculiarities: the ability to confer a certain type of immortality on ideas.

Despite being well over a year old, these posters have captured public attention through the type of key blog and twitter mentions that drive an idea viral. If you go to Jenny’s Behance page, she writes about how the phenomenon caught her by surprise.

But there’s another side to all this attention. Despite creating the precise sort of message any museum should crave–that history is cool, relevant and real–the august group at the Smithsonian, under advice of counsel no doubt, sent Jenny a warning to remove their name from her work. They have a logomark to protect–if they don’t, what’s to stop some unscrupulous upstart from naming their paperclip collection “The Smithsonian”? And so Jenny changed the layouts.

But again, the web bestows a certain immortality. So despite the best efforts of the Smithsonian’s lawyers, I was able to find the original above. And if you Google “viral Smithsonian posters,” you’ll find a URL that reads: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Smithsonian/376305/. Of course, if you follow the link, you’ll find a blank page with this message: “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.”

But even the attorney’s have to admit that’s not entirely right. It should read “Sorry, no posts match your criteria anymore.”

.OLSON, OLSON, OLSON, OLSON, OLSNO, OLSON, OLSON..

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, OLSON

.OLSON, OLSON, OLSON, OLSON, OLSNO, OLSON, OLSON..

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“Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.”

That particular message is no longer up on his stream, but a sequence of responses remain that document his increasing alarm at the response he generated.  Thanks to their time stamps, the path of Mr. Rosen’s rapidly unravelling day is all too easy to reconstruct.

Apparently, someone named  Joshus Foust was first to take umbrage with the crass joke.  Mr. Rosen responded to him with a few tweets:

@joshuafoust look, she was probably groped like thousands of other women, which is still wrong, but if it was worse than i’m sorry

When that didn’t work, he got a bit huffy.

@joshuafoust my wife didnt dedicate her career to promoting america’s wars

After that, it’s obvious that the direct messages must have really picked up. Fully on the defensive, Mr. Rosen felt compelled to clarify his position–clarifications he hoped would cool down the response to an insensitive crack he forgot to remember he said, not to a few like-minded friends, but to any of the 106 million US Twitter accounts.

jesus christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger

ah fuck it, i apologize for being insensitive, its always wrong, thats obvious, but i’m rolling my eyes at all the attention she will get

and as a result of that i hope people remember her role glorifying war and condemning rolling stone’s hastings while defending mcchrystal

All too soon, he must have felt the unbearable scale of the world wide web’s disdain. And all of it must have felt squarely focused on him. Within fifteen minutes, he was in full fall-back mode, and the apologies started in earnest.

i apologize and take it back. joking with friends got out of line when i didnt want to back down. forgot twitter is not exactly private

As someone who’s devoted his career to defending victims and supporting justice, I’m very ashamed for my insensitive and offensive comments

Oddly, his new found fame led to a rash of new found followers, and one apology clearly wouldn’t do.  He went on to post five or six more, ultimately giving up any defense of his initial joke.  He posted this last one at what must have been a bleary-eyed and deeply depressing 2:45 AM this morning.

but there is no point following me, i am done tweeting. too ashamed of how i have hurt others and the false impression i gave of who i am

He was up, not four hours later and posted this:

I feel I should make one last statement. I offer my deepest apologies to Ms. Logan, her friends and her family. I never meant to hurt anyone

I love comedy. I even enjoy off-color, inappropriate comedy. I can’t pretend to have excised all the insensitive references from my synapses and still find myself occasionally laughing at something that in mixed company would horrify me.

But I do that in small, familiar groups or the privacy of my own home.  Mr. Rosen didn’t.  He has since resigned NYU. When I screw up and make an offensive comment, it echoes in my mind for years. I can’t imagine the repercussions this extraordinarily public mistake will have in his mind. Still, it’s hard to feel sorry for him.

When everyone’s connected, everyone’s listening.  Your online self must represent your better self.  Unless you’re ready to become the latest pariah.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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You need to expand your viewing audience beyond the three people currently watching, two of whom are your aunts. What do you do?

Apparently their social media director Riyaad Minty is leveraging the opportunity presented by their unprecedented coverage of and access to the Egyptian unrest via promoted tweets on Twitter. Using the handle @AJEnglish, he and his team send out news updates and notices about broadcasts to anyone searching topics like #Egypt, #Mubarak, or #Jan25. Like any tweet, these promoted tweets can be both replied to and retweeted , but since Al Jezeera bought those search topics, their tweets appears at the top of search results.

According to a blog post by writer/Twitter employee Robin Sloan, Twitter is now a top referrer to a site that the New York Times reports as seeing a 2,500% jump in traffic since January 25.

Just another reminder that there are a lot more tools in the workshop these days…

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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Today, it’s also critical to every advertiser’s development.  Our biggest new challenge is understanding how we can encourage our market to share the video and promotional content we create.  How can we shape our ideas to encourage our audiences to pass them along?  That’s a radically different challenge for video messages created for broadcast on social networks as opposed to television networks.  More critically, it’s one where our success or failure  is easily measured.

For years, the challenge of brand video production was creating something that would make your audience feel “Wow, that was cool/real/hilarious.”  In today’s socially networked world, that challenge is now a compound phrase: “Wow, that was cool/real/hilarious, and I have to pass that on to my friends ____ and ____.”  The true power of new media like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter lies in it’s ability to leverage low cost, highly effective recommendation, to activate crowdsourced PR.  Today, the best online video content becomes curated by key consumers to engage other key consumers.  So broadcasting these videos is not merely cheap, it’s highly selective and effective.

So what triggers a consumer to take your brand content and pass it on to other pre-qualified audiences?  In an entry on MediaPost yesterday, David Murdico, ECD of the rather hubristically-named Supercool Creative, takes a shot at defining what drives people to pass along video.  He lists seven ideas, but ultimately, the image that sticks in my head is of that kid back in grade school with the comedy record.  You know, the one who played cuts from Cheech and Chong/Steve Martin/Richard Pryor/Sam Kinison/Chris Rock/Dane Cook for his friends and somehow, through a mysterious bit of entertainment osmosis, accrued cred for his find.  These kids were never the entertainer, but they were the presenter, bringing their discoveries to a group of like-minded people sure to enjoy them.

That’s who we have to try to reach today.  And it will be a hill of fun to watch and see how different brands do it.

Because right now, it’s pretty much all fresh powder in front of us.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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However, as a number of news sources point out, in the movies ranking, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” ranks as #3.  And yet, this Michael Cera film was far from a box office sensation, earning a total of $31.5 million despite a production budget of $60 million.  In other words, it  bombed.

Yet there it sits at #3.  Why?  Because “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”, much like Twitter’s #4 ranking “Despicable Me” was a ‘promoted’ trend.  The studio invested in Twitter as a media partner, leveraging the microblogging sites word of mouth audience reach, much like the #1 top trending Television show, the MTV Video Music Awards.

Much like the competitor’s outcry this past weekend over Google’s purported favoritism in what is positioned as their organic search results, this kind of blatant advertiser influence further pushes any attempt at editorial neutrality further and further into irrelevancy.  In a world where we pick our news organizations based on their clearly expressed editorial viewpoints, this kind of incremental subjectivity doesn’t come as any scandalous surprise but still, it strips another veneer of at least attempted objectivity from our culture.

And slaps it on a Top Ten list.  Apparently in a culture war, shame dies first…

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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So Billboard’s announcement yesterday that they were introducing the Social 50, a ranking of contemporary music artists based on their dominance of social network channels, is an innovation totally inline with the modern pop music experience.  MTV stopped airing videos long ago but YouTube more than filled in that gap.  Every band has a MySpace page, every artist has a website, every recognizable music personality Tweets, some perhaps more than they ought to (yes, that’s directed at you Pete Wentz).  Musicians and their work speak to deeply personal parts of our souls and these media further that sense of intimacy and connection.

Billboard is just the first to do the math.  This new chart should be a lot of fun to visit for a quick glimpse at who’s trending up or down.  But only after a few months.

Because as of now, it’s only week one.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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