Posted: February 19th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Online | Tags: interactive, planning, presentations, research, resources, tools | 2 Comments »

Best Resources for Desk Research using online sites, tools and applications:
- Professional Insight - the big “traditional” resources that cost a *lot* of money
Mintel – Big, hefty market intelligence reports
TGI – Market Research surveys and analysis
Forrester – More editorial reports on specific pertinent topics
WARC – the bible of marketing and advertising specific insight
Datamonitor - business specific insight and intelligence
LexisNexis – news aggregation service
Nielsen – the mecca of insight. Tools, papers, resources, everything
eConsultancy – digital marketing specific insight
- If your agency does not have access to these expensive resources, you can access them via:
RoyalMail Infobank – A great resource in Holborn where you can use these resources for FREE
IPA Information Centre – the lovely people here can do searches for you if you are an IPA affiliated agency
- Industry Information - the “obvious” trade rags and blogs and their wealth of news, articles and commentary
BrandRepublic – Central news resource for advertising and media
AdAge – Global news resource
Creativity – creative led news and opinion
Adverblog – great aggregator of great ads
Adrants – more advertising stuff from around the World
This is an ad – blatant plug for mine and Toby’s “alternative” advertising aggregator
Planners Blogs – the Plannersphere wiki of all the planner’s blogs (not all are active anymore)
- Ideas Conferences - source of inspirational presentations
TED – the ultimate video resource of truly inspirational speakers
GEL Conference – more brilliant presentations from the Good Experience Live Conferences
Interesting – Tons of stuff from Russell’s Interesting conferences from around the world is online
- Business Insight - the kind of planning resource that makes you credible to the big cheeses
Economist – don’t underestimate the amount of cleverness hidden here. CEO’s and Marketing Directors adore it when planners quote economist articles.
- Digital Marketing Insight - for when you have to justify that increasing digital spend
IAB – Brilliant resource for internet stats and case studies
User Experience Insight - understanding the experience of your brand as well as the message
Boxes and Arrows – great Information Architecture insight
Good Experience – Mark Hurst’s brilliant user experience resources
- Marketing Trends - seeing where the market, consumer and brands are heading
Springwise – new business ideas from around the world
Trendwatching – consumer trends, with brilliant monthly trend briefings
PSFK – daily news, ideas and trends aggregator from the lovely Piers Fawkes
Contagious – Quarterly intelligence briefing
- Advertising resources - when you need to look at what the competitors are up to
Visit4info – quite cheap and thorough resource for ATL ads
Lurzer’s Archive – global ad resource
Nielsen AdRelevance – advertising aggregator and analyser
Xtreme Information - competitor media monitoring
- Web trends - getting a wider view of activity on the web
Google Trends – track any online trends you fancy and plot them on pretty graphs
Google Alerts – push delivery via email of every new piece of content around a specified keyword
Alexa – slightly flaky competitor website traffic monitoring
- Professional Buzz tracking - the essential paid-for tools for any social activity
Buzzmetrics – The daddy of buzz metrics tools from Neilsen
Onalytica – a tasty alternative
Integrasco – more “grown up” tracker
- Free Buzz tracking – the free but slightly dodgy suite of buzz trackers. Good for indicative measures.
Trendrr – comprehensive real-time buzz tracking tools
Serph – realtime buzz tracking
Omgili - Find out what people are saying
Trendpedia – buzz tracking powered by Attentio
How Sociable? – understanding how well a brand fares in social media
Addict-o-matic – brilliant visual social buzz aggregator, using an automated NetVibes-type interface
- Search Insight - researching keywords to see what people are searching for
Google AdWords – understand search terms around your product and brand
- Social Bookmarks research - see what people think is important content around a brand or product as opposed to an “engine”
Del.icio.us – The daddy of social bookmarks
StumbleUpon – recommendation driven bookmarking
Digg – news and content with a tech leaning
- Facebook analysis - Seeing how people act on Facebook
Adonomics – bespoke Facebook application tracking (see how crap most of them are)
- Blog research - for understanding what real people are saying specifically on their blogs
Technorati – the Google of Blogs
- Board Trackers - see what the topics for discussion on forums is around key words
BoardReader – Message Board and Forum reader
Board Tracker – and another one
Google Groups – searching groups with Google
- Twitter Research - getting under the skin of what’s happening on Twitter
Twitter Analyzer – A bunch of insightful ways to look at a Twitter account
Tweitgeist – Twitter Zeitgeist
#hashtags – real time monitoring and analysis of topics on Twitter
Twitt(url)y – tracking URLs inserted into Tweets
Twitrratr – automated Twitter analysis tool that sorts Tweets around a term into positive, negative and neutral
Twilert – Like Google Alerts, but for Twitter…
Tweetbeep – …as is this
Xefer – Pretty way to represent Twitter account usage stats
- Researching Video content - understanding what people are watching online
Truveo – online video content aggregator (with great top 10’s)
Viral Video Chart – keeping track of what’s hot, with great trend graphs and tools
Many thanks an please add this great (re)source to the list above!
Posted: November 16th, 2009 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Online | Tags: banners, campaigns, eyeblaster, interactive, Online, video | 4 Comments »
Click for execution
Features:
1. Heaviest banner ever in Romania served on .RO websites, from Eyeblaster. It is weighting a little over 26MB (compared to a standard banner in Romania which is 100Kb – or 200-300 Kb at most for video)
2. The first video interactive banner. By this interactivity it means that the user is questioned and he can answer directly in the banner. Depending on the answers, a different video will be shown.
3.Polling/ Voting- the banner has a polling function which allows the user to choose between different options.
4. Conversion-in-Banner; The first conversion in banner project, that can collect the users` data without taking them to the landing page/separate website. User are encouraged to type in their data directly into the banner, on any website. The data is then redircted to Client’s database.
5. Mouse Tracker; in order to the users` attention the banner has a mouse tracker features which enables the characters to move after the mouse; generally speaking, the content of the banner is changed depending on the mouse position on the screeen.
The campaign data is monitored & analyzed in real time due to the state-of-the-art ad-serving technology from Eyeblaster. A complete set of actionable analytics tools, including 17 standard reports plus 5 other custom reports, will help optimize the performance and efficiency of the budget spending of the online media campaign.
Brand: Doamna Ghica Plaza
Client: Romfelt Real Estate
Online Creative Agency: Friends Advertising
Online Media Partner: thinkdigital
Ad Serving/ Campaign Monitoring: eyeblaster
Via ThinkDigital
Posted: October 6th, 2009 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Online | Tags: Advertising, awards, golden drum, interactive, Online, winners | 1 Comment »
Gold went to:
Deus – Link

Agency: Mccanndigital Israel
Group: Interactive
Award: Golden Drum
Volkswagen Web Special “Volkswagen 2028″ – Link
Agency: argonauten G2 GmbH – a member of Grey | G2 Group (City: Berlin, Germany)
Group: Interactive
Award: Golden Drum
And Silver:
4th april international day for mine awareness – Link
Agency: Draftfcbi Direktmarketing & Interactive Ges.m.b.H, Vienna
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum
Messages – www.placeforyourmessage.sk
Agency: MUW Saatchi & Saatchi, Bratislava
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum
New Grand Scenic and the Raving Rabbits Tests – Link
Agency: Publicis Net (Paris), Publicis Conseil (Paris)
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum
Nokia sms race – Link
Agency: Mccanndigital Israel
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum
Promosite Sovietsky boutique – www.sovbut.ru
Agency: Red Keds, Moscow
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum
Volvo Ocean Race – Rush: An Interactve Adventure – Link
Agency: Euro RSCG 4D (Amsterdam)
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum
Check-out all the Golden Drum 2009 Winners here