2010 is a milestone for online advertising.  For the first time ever, online advertising surpassed newspaper advertising (including both online and print editions).  I remember the days when online advertising was so far behind newspapers…early/mid 2000’s.  Now it seems obvious that online would surpass newspapers.  Here are the charts and article from emarketer.  In the article, you can see yearly growth rate since 2005 for each medium.

One note:  Emarketer is a tool I’ve used since 2004.  Great product Geoff Ramsey!

There’s a free site – compete.com – that let’s you see the trend of monthly traffic to a website. It’s as easy as entering in a few urls and getting the results.  I use this all this time to show clients:

- what’s possible – what kind of traffic does a site like theirs get?  What could they aim for?

- what is the competition’s traffic?

- What sites would be great partners? Think link juice for SEO or shared content.

3 compete

Here’s an example:  One of my clients, Harvard Varsity Club, is a booster organization for Harvard Athletics.  Last year we improved their website (harvardvarsityclub.org) and they grew membership 20+% and the endowment +80%.  Their site has fewer than 5,000 visitors a month.  A great partner for them would be gocrimson.com, the Harvard Athletic site, with over 4X the traffic.  Of course, what about harvard.edu, the main University site that has 2 million visitors a month, or hbs.edu, with 250,000 visitors.   Many potential HVC members visit these sites.  Links between these sites would increase traffic and drive major improvements in search engine results!

A free tool to gain insights on your competition or partners.  Just another idea for your brands!

Julie

Over six weeks in the summer of 2010, I worked with a small team at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd to update their positioning, logo and web presence. With the blessing of Pastors Samuelson and Rudi, we had amazing collaboration between groups I’ve trusted for years –  Inizio Creative and May Advertising and Design – to create a major turnaround in the church’s image and communications.  The key transformations were:

- Message: After several key workshops, we determined the most important message to communicate: Together…Seeing a new way….Reaching with hope.

- Logo: working with May Advertising, we kept a past element (the shepherd head outline) while updating the logo to communicate the new message.  The result is a logo that reflects the community’s vibrancy and history!

- Website: We worked at rapid speed to change the www.goodshepherdmpls.org with the objective of to energizing the community to come and participate. We aimed at two targets: those new to the community, making the website an invitation where they would want to clickthrough to learn more. To current community members, we wanted them to see themselves at the church and use the site as a valuable tool.

More to come: We’re close to capture streaming video, we’re adding SEO (search engine optimization) and adding group and calendaring tools.  Lots more to come to make this the invaluable tool the community needs!

The results: In just three weeks, Good Shepherd has had over 1100 visits and nearly 7000 pageviews. Time on site is over four minutes! And the community members have felt the change:

Stay tuned for more breakthroughs to come!

The next frontier in product development is the complete integration of physical goods with “virtual” features. I mean pushing it to the limit with features we’ve never seen or imagined possible. Here’s an example:

4Food has fast-food favorites that are “infinitely customizable” and “measurably healthier”. Their W(hole)burger sounds so healthy it could be an option for our health-minded, weight-watcher family. And the social media product features are unique and meaningful (ex. dynamic menuboard and cents off if your flavor is selected by others.) As they say: “We’re revolutionizing counter culture, in real-time.”

They open Sept. 7th at 7am at 40th Street and Madison Avenue,, NYC. I’m hoping I have a east-coast trip this fall and can try my first w(hole)burger!

And thank you to brandchannel.com for sharing their story!