Five Types of Hires Organizations Claim They Crave
By Abbey Klaassen Published: November 12, 2007 - AdAge
It used to be so simple.
Back in the day, agencies and marketers seeking great creatives and account and brand managers had a pretty straightforward sense of what they were looking for. Likewise, job seekers could safely ensure they had the key skills with which to populate their résumés for maximum effect.
But now, as new technology has spawned unprecedented complexity in the advertising, marketing and media landscape, so too has it forced the need for greater complexity in new hires. The digital skills that job seekers must have and that hiring organizations demand are varied, nuanced and cutting-edge. And they're required assets if digital professionals want to get ahead in this industry.
Here are the five types of hires organizations claim they crave:
1. HACKERS Not the law-breaking kind, said Organic CEO Mark Kingdon, but "Web 2.0 junkies who live on Del.icio.us, TechCrunch and Digg and peruse ProgrammableWeb.com looking for the latest mashup. ... These people signed up early as Facebook developers, trade the latest apps and regularly hack around on Organic's own social network (called Organism) to add new functionality, change their template, hide Easter eggs and leave us special 'surprises.'" While technology has always been important to firms such as Organic, those companies are no longer just looking for people who know how to build sophisticated and complicated content-management systems but people who like to tinker, who understand how to build on top of application programming interfaces, creating Google Maps mashups and Facebook apps. And passion for these kinds of tools is a must, said Jenny Wall, president-interactive at Crew Creative.
2. TECHNOLOGICALLY CURIOUS OK, it's not necessary for everyone to be able to build the next great Facebook app, but everybody needs to be curious about and aware of what kinds of digital innovations are cropping up and where marketers might fit into them. Crew's Ms. Wall said her account team "needs to be on top of the Facebook open application program or the new [Apple] Leopard blogging software."
3. ONLINE EAVESDROPPERS Conversations are going on all over the web about brands and products -- and agencies and marketers are increasingly looking for people who can help mine those insights, which can be used to help identify emerging problems. That chatter can also be a source of campaign ideas. For example, Mr. Kingdon said, look at the community groups that have formed on Facebook because of their affinity for Jeep. He called it a "great source of inspiration."
4. DATAHEADS "Most marketers aren't quants," said Steve Rubel, a senior VP in Edelman's Me2Revolution who's chronicled industry changes for the past decade. He said the companies that are able to use data to their advantage, building relationships and unearthing trends, will be the big winners. "Marketers need to at least have a good grounding in how to use new kinds of data, even if they leave the crunching to others," he said.
5. TRAILBLAZERS A trailblazing attitude is less a digital skill and more of an inherent quality that the digital age requires. And it was this quality that Greg Schwartz, VP-sales at Zillow.com, was seeking as he built his staff. "I was looking not just for folks with a talent for internet advertising but those that flourish in a non-structured start-up environment," he said. Start-ups often can't compete on dollars -- but they can compete by having environments that foster and require innovative thinking and challenges to conventional wisdom. Start-ups also require a little extra acumen because they often don't have the scale of the giants.
Trailblazers are, however, fairly easy to pry out of large media companies, said Mr. Schwartz: "Slinging banner ads leaves a lot of people uninspired."
Monday, November 19, 2007
Land Grab for Women Online
Warner Bros and Lifetime launch female focused digital networks
By Andrew Hampp - Publich 13th November in Adage
Look out, iVillage. The women's digital-entertainment market officially got more crowded this week with the arrival of two female-targeted community sites with established brands and broad reach on their side.
First up is MyLifetime.com, the new online destination for Lifetime. The women's cable network is taking an ambitious stab at aggregating female entertainment online by partnering with the Glam Media network, along with RealArcade for games, Revolution Health for health content, About for how-to content and Hearst Digital for shared broadband-video and lifestyle channels.
Warner Bros. Television also is looking to expand its reach in the women's-entertainment category online. It launched MomLogic.com today to serve moms advice, short-form video and ads from charter sponsor Unilever.
Extending online reach
An increasing number of traditional players are eyeing digital networks as a smart way to extend their online reach. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia recently unveiled Martha's Circle, an ad-sales network composed of shelter- and lifestyle-related sites, such as Apartment Therapy, 101 Cookbooks and Style Me Pretty. MSLO estimates the network will generate almost 20 million ad views per month.
Like NBC's alliance with iVillage, Lifetime's partnership with Glam Media gives the cable channel something few TV brands can claim online: scale. Dan Suratt, Lifetime's exec VP-digital media, was hired by former Lifetime CEO Betty Cohen last year to expand the network's reach online, starting with a revamp of its old domain, LifetimeTV.com, in April.
The goal is to associate the Lifetime brand with lifestyle content online for the "woman who's dealing with the daily rigors of life in general and looking for an escape -- even if it's just for 20 minutes," Mr. Suratt said.
Women on the web
There's a land grab for the audience and market share NBC and iVillage have failed to dominate. The Glam portfolio of sites recently became the most trafficked women's network online (25.5 million visits in October 2007 vs. 18.5 million for iVillage), and Lifetime's site was head and shoulders above those of its cable competitors, Oxygen and We, in terms of traffic last month. With 2.3 million registered users on LifetimeTV.com (compared with 333,000 for Oxygen and 82,000 for We), MyLifetime.com has a good head start toward becoming a scaleable media community for women online.
Lifetime's online audience skews a good decade or so older than Glam's median age of 33. It's the boomer side of Lifetime's target demo that the two companies hope will drive the next wave of digital growth and social networking, according to Glam CEO Samir Arara. "They're extremely valuable. ... From a brand perspective, having a strong audience of 20s and 30s and adding to it 40s and 50s is a very normal continuation of the focus we've had."
To be successful, My Lifetime will need to build a robust ad network for the multitasking online woman. Glam has an extensive portfolio of fashion and beauty sites with advertisers such as P&G, Chevy Malibu and Neiman Marcus onboard, while Lifetime brings package-goods and food marketers Stouffer's, Dunkin' Donuts and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
My Lifetime plans to expand into social networking with profile pages and message boards in first-quarter 2008. This past summer, Lifetime scored a hit with "Army Wives," which had an even larger life online through its community of fans and real-life army wives. As a result, traffic to LifetimeTV.com in July surged to 3.7 million unique visits, nearly double the 1.97 million in January.
Strong TV brands
Like Lifetime, Warner Bros. has strong TV brands in its stable to lure its audience online: "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "The Tyra Banks Show." But syndicating content to other key mom blogs will play just as important a role in essentially building a new site from scratch, much in the same way the WB's TMZ.com was able to build buzz and scale before becoming a syndicated TV show this season.
Michael Teicher, exec VP-media sales for Warner Bros. Television Group, said the goal is for lightning to strike twice for the digital-to-TV model, with the help of daytime TV and the marketing team at Unilever to pitch in from the content side.
Unilever, the first sponsor of Warner Bros.' Mom Logic, knows a thing or two about the demo from its brands Dove and Suave, which launched its own branded web entertainment for the maternal set earlier this year with MSN and Sprint called In the Motherhood.
"There are sites out there that really serve the same target audience, whether it's selecting the best school for your children or finding the best coupons," Mr. Teicher said. "We will create affiliation agreements with them and that will allow us to cross-promote and drive our traffic."
Time will tell
While time will tell if the increased investment in women's digital entertainment will pay off in page views and digital dollars, buyers are still going to put their dollars where their worn-out marketing phrases are.
"It's kind of boring to say, but we really think content's king in this category," said Jeff Marshall, senior VP-digital managing director at Starcom/Pixel.
"It's a two-way street: You have a built-in understanding of the audience from the NBCs and Lifetimes of the world, but your audience are looking to them to produce that content as well. It makes sense, and with the tried-and-true women's-content creators, they don't necessarily have a firm understanding [of the ad component]," he said. "Creating ad space and filling that ad space more holistically by creating programs and ways to incorporate brands in more meaningful ways is where we need to go in the future."
~ ~ ~
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly noted that the Glam portfolio of sites received 25.5 million impressions in October 2007 vs. 18.5 million for iVillage. In fact, the 25.5 million represents visits. Also, the last name of Glam CEO Samir Arora was misspelled as Orara.
By Andrew Hampp - Publich 13th November in Adage
Look out, iVillage. The women's digital-entertainment market officially got more crowded this week with the arrival of two female-targeted community sites with established brands and broad reach on their side.
First up is MyLifetime.com, the new online destination for Lifetime. The women's cable network is taking an ambitious stab at aggregating female entertainment online by partnering with the Glam Media network, along with RealArcade for games, Revolution Health for health content, About for how-to content and Hearst Digital for shared broadband-video and lifestyle channels.
Warner Bros. Television also is looking to expand its reach in the women's-entertainment category online. It launched MomLogic.com today to serve moms advice, short-form video and ads from charter sponsor Unilever.
Extending online reach
An increasing number of traditional players are eyeing digital networks as a smart way to extend their online reach. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia recently unveiled Martha's Circle, an ad-sales network composed of shelter- and lifestyle-related sites, such as Apartment Therapy, 101 Cookbooks and Style Me Pretty. MSLO estimates the network will generate almost 20 million ad views per month.
Like NBC's alliance with iVillage, Lifetime's partnership with Glam Media gives the cable channel something few TV brands can claim online: scale. Dan Suratt, Lifetime's exec VP-digital media, was hired by former Lifetime CEO Betty Cohen last year to expand the network's reach online, starting with a revamp of its old domain, LifetimeTV.com, in April.
The goal is to associate the Lifetime brand with lifestyle content online for the "woman who's dealing with the daily rigors of life in general and looking for an escape -- even if it's just for 20 minutes," Mr. Suratt said.
Women on the web
There's a land grab for the audience and market share NBC and iVillage have failed to dominate. The Glam portfolio of sites recently became the most trafficked women's network online (25.5 million visits in October 2007 vs. 18.5 million for iVillage), and Lifetime's site was head and shoulders above those of its cable competitors, Oxygen and We, in terms of traffic last month. With 2.3 million registered users on LifetimeTV.com (compared with 333,000 for Oxygen and 82,000 for We), MyLifetime.com has a good head start toward becoming a scaleable media community for women online.
Lifetime's online audience skews a good decade or so older than Glam's median age of 33. It's the boomer side of Lifetime's target demo that the two companies hope will drive the next wave of digital growth and social networking, according to Glam CEO Samir Arara. "They're extremely valuable. ... From a brand perspective, having a strong audience of 20s and 30s and adding to it 40s and 50s is a very normal continuation of the focus we've had."
To be successful, My Lifetime will need to build a robust ad network for the multitasking online woman. Glam has an extensive portfolio of fashion and beauty sites with advertisers such as P&G, Chevy Malibu and Neiman Marcus onboard, while Lifetime brings package-goods and food marketers Stouffer's, Dunkin' Donuts and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
My Lifetime plans to expand into social networking with profile pages and message boards in first-quarter 2008. This past summer, Lifetime scored a hit with "Army Wives," which had an even larger life online through its community of fans and real-life army wives. As a result, traffic to LifetimeTV.com in July surged to 3.7 million unique visits, nearly double the 1.97 million in January.
Strong TV brands
Like Lifetime, Warner Bros. has strong TV brands in its stable to lure its audience online: "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "The Tyra Banks Show." But syndicating content to other key mom blogs will play just as important a role in essentially building a new site from scratch, much in the same way the WB's TMZ.com was able to build buzz and scale before becoming a syndicated TV show this season.
Michael Teicher, exec VP-media sales for Warner Bros. Television Group, said the goal is for lightning to strike twice for the digital-to-TV model, with the help of daytime TV and the marketing team at Unilever to pitch in from the content side.
Unilever, the first sponsor of Warner Bros.' Mom Logic, knows a thing or two about the demo from its brands Dove and Suave, which launched its own branded web entertainment for the maternal set earlier this year with MSN and Sprint called In the Motherhood.
"There are sites out there that really serve the same target audience, whether it's selecting the best school for your children or finding the best coupons," Mr. Teicher said. "We will create affiliation agreements with them and that will allow us to cross-promote and drive our traffic."
Time will tell
While time will tell if the increased investment in women's digital entertainment will pay off in page views and digital dollars, buyers are still going to put their dollars where their worn-out marketing phrases are.
"It's kind of boring to say, but we really think content's king in this category," said Jeff Marshall, senior VP-digital managing director at Starcom/Pixel.
"It's a two-way street: You have a built-in understanding of the audience from the NBCs and Lifetimes of the world, but your audience are looking to them to produce that content as well. It makes sense, and with the tried-and-true women's-content creators, they don't necessarily have a firm understanding [of the ad component]," he said. "Creating ad space and filling that ad space more holistically by creating programs and ways to incorporate brands in more meaningful ways is where we need to go in the future."
~ ~ ~
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly noted that the Glam portfolio of sites received 25.5 million impressions in October 2007 vs. 18.5 million for iVillage. In fact, the 25.5 million represents visits. Also, the last name of Glam CEO Samir Arora was misspelled as Orara.
FW: Generation V (apparently)
From: Melissa Bolling
Conversation: Generation V (apparently)
News
Forget Generations X and Y: Here comes Generation V
Companies must overhaul their marketing plans to target the latest group,
Gartner says
Heather Havenstein (Computerworld) 15 November, 2007 08:00:02
Much has been made of the stereotypical characteristics of the generations
that followed the Baby Boomer era. The same can be said of the latest
generation, but Gartner warns marketers to define them by their online
actions rather than their birth dates. In a report released this week,
Gartner said that traditional marketing methods won't work with this new
group of consumers.
The latest group, dubbed Generation Virtual, or V, is made up of people from
multiple demographic age groups who make social connections online - through
virtual worlds, in video games, as bloggers, in social networks or through
posting and reading user-generated content at e-commerce sites like
Amazon.com, said Adam Sarner, senior analyst at Gartner.
The V generation is made up of people who are drawn to the Internet's "flat
meritocracy" where people can gain status and acknowledgement through ways -
like providing advice or recommendations or excelling at a video game - not
generally available in the physical world. Basically, Generation V is made
up of people who replace physical experience with an online experience,
Sarner added.
The online distinction is important, he noted, because companies looking to
sell products and services to this generation of consumers can no longer
rely on traditional demographic data like name, age and address to tailor
marketing messages. Generation V is more likely to interact with marketers
anonymously - through an online persona made up of all their online
behaviors, Sarner said.
"We have to start dealing with this idea of anonymous, multiple personas
interacting with our businesses and how to do that," Sarner said.
"[Businesses] are creating a world with processes to get them to purchase
things. Virtual environments will be a way to orchestrate customer
exploration, [but] underneath is the reality that they are providing goods
and services."
Over time, gathering details about the online personas of consumers will
become far more important than the mining of demographic data, he added. By
2015, Gartner asserts, more money will be spent marketing and selling to
multiple online personas than money spent marketing to off-line consumers.
For companies to prepare to market to Generation V, Gartner recommends:
* Organizing products and services around multiple online personas;
* Selling to the persona not the person;
* Creating virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer
exploration toward purchases;
* Shifting investments from known customers to unknown ones; and
* Developing and retaining new employee skills to attract, connect,
contribute and gain insight from generation V and their virtual
environments.
Conversation: Generation V (apparently)
News
Forget Generations X and Y: Here comes Generation V
Companies must overhaul their marketing plans to target the latest group,
Gartner says
Heather Havenstein (Computerworld) 15 November, 2007 08:00:02
Much has been made of the stereotypical characteristics of the generations
that followed the Baby Boomer era. The same can be said of the latest
generation, but Gartner warns marketers to define them by their online
actions rather than their birth dates. In a report released this week,
Gartner said that traditional marketing methods won't work with this new
group of consumers.
The latest group, dubbed Generation Virtual, or V, is made up of people from
multiple demographic age groups who make social connections online - through
virtual worlds, in video games, as bloggers, in social networks or through
posting and reading user-generated content at e-commerce sites like
Amazon.com, said Adam Sarner, senior analyst at Gartner.
The V generation is made up of people who are drawn to the Internet's "flat
meritocracy" where people can gain status and acknowledgement through ways -
like providing advice or recommendations or excelling at a video game - not
generally available in the physical world. Basically, Generation V is made
up of people who replace physical experience with an online experience,
Sarner added.
The online distinction is important, he noted, because companies looking to
sell products and services to this generation of consumers can no longer
rely on traditional demographic data like name, age and address to tailor
marketing messages. Generation V is more likely to interact with marketers
anonymously - through an online persona made up of all their online
behaviors, Sarner said.
"We have to start dealing with this idea of anonymous, multiple personas
interacting with our businesses and how to do that," Sarner said.
"[Businesses] are creating a world with processes to get them to purchase
things. Virtual environments will be a way to orchestrate customer
exploration, [but] underneath is the reality that they are providing goods
and services."
Over time, gathering details about the online personas of consumers will
become far more important than the mining of demographic data, he added. By
2015, Gartner asserts, more money will be spent marketing and selling to
multiple online personas than money spent marketing to off-line consumers.
For companies to prepare to market to Generation V, Gartner recommends:
* Organizing products and services around multiple online personas;
* Selling to the persona not the person;
* Creating virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer
exploration toward purchases;
* Shifting investments from known customers to unknown ones; and
* Developing and retaining new employee skills to attract, connect,
contribute and gain insight from generation V and their virtual
environments.
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