If you are targeting teens it isn’t too much of a surprise to see 70% of spending going online.  But other clients are doing blanket statements about “no TV, no Print” — only interactive marketing efforts.    Not tracking reach and frequency, but buzz and engagement. 

 Nice to see but always makes you nervous.  The press is reporting the YouTube guys managed to make $1 billion in 18 months.  Random people with backgrounds in accountancy are back to pitching their favourite internet ideas like movies — “Its Linked In meets GeoCities.  Should have Facebook virality and Google revenues.”  Really.    Old time Wall Street brokers used to say you knew it was the top of the market when doormen starting giving you stock tips.  Is this the revolution here at last, or the top of the market?

HP Targets Teens With ‘Mind Control’
July 25, 2007
By Brian Morrissey

McCann’s new work for HP boasts a ‘mind control’ theme.

NEW YORK Hewlett-Packard is launching a back-to-school campaign with a twist: 70 percent of the spending will support online efforts.The shift reverses HP’s ’06 back-to-school spending strategy, when the company earmarked 70 percent of the media outlay for traditional channels. The company is making the change largely because it has broadened its target audience this year from parents buying computers to include teenagers who often drive purchase decisions.

Jeffrey Rayport is a HBS professor and was a board member of Organic back in 1999-2000. He has been both active in the industry and influential.

No question as he states here that there is a “Marketing Confidence Gap” as we call it Ogilvy — basically that interactive media is under weighted in media plans. The difference between 6% and 30% is too great.

But has it been proven that it needs to be 1:1?

Print has historically be a higher percentage of budgets then its media consumption time. Is that simply because it works — or is because it is easy to buy and do creative for? Are the big 4 dominant because they work or is it because they are the easiest to buy and run?

Advertising is not an efficient market and as long as interactive marketing wraps itself in complexity it will be held back.

OUTSIDE THE BOX

Advertising’s death is greatly exaggerated

Commentary: But marketers are losing touch with customers

By Jeffrey F. Rayport

Last Update: 12:10 AM ET Jun 8, 2007

BOSTON (MarketWatch) — No one could have missed the mad rush in recent weeks among advertising and technology players in their high-stakes game of musical chairs over online advertising assets.

read more | digg story

Clearly we have to hope so.  It shouldn’t be that Google is the only success story in the online media game.

Can’t say that it is true — but who knows?  Perhaps I’ll be suprised.

 Just because I couldn’t resist the fact it was published by Mr. Steve Bowbrick.  The man who did Internet before people did Internet.  A definition of Widget:

http://www.bowblog.com/archives/001851.html#trackback

Isn’t WordPress simply amazing.  And so the excuses start to dissipate.  Now I just need to get a few 10 years of random history and a bit of personal fun up here and it should all be quite something in no time.  Or not.

Everyone remembers their first real pitch at a new agency.  At Ogilvy it was BP’s Target Neutral.  Amazing project, amazing creative and even more amazingly, it launched pretty close to what was proposed!

For this project we did the brand mark, site design, online advertising and e-mails.  Great work from Bo and his team.

Here is the final homepage:

And some of the functional banners we built to get people to start their carbon calculation in the banner to increase conversion rate: