Archive for December 18th, 2008

Ads that drove people to the Web

Today Ad Age has a slide show featuring the 10 print ads that were most effective in driving readers to the Web. The ads are for everything from Acura to Career Builder and don’t seem to have much in common as far as the creative goes. It makes you wonder what it is that drives those magazine readers to the Web. The captions that accompany the slides make some guesses (i.e. a lot of survey respondents found green pleasing the eye), but nothing concrete.

It leads one to believe that it’s still just a crapshoot and that the audience for some ads are just more apt to head to the Web after reading something in print. MRI Starch supports this assumption by saying they’ve found that readers of car magazines are more likely to visit company Web sites than readers of any other type of magazine.

p.s. if you have trouble finding out how to launch the slide show like I did, just click the picture of the car.

Profiles in Nerdery: Adam Gedde, bridging the gap between sales people and nerds

1. Astrological Sign: Scorpio.
2. Time at the Nerdery: Nearly 1 lunar cycle.
3. Area of expertise: Interactive marketing, search engine marketing, and a bit of programming. I’m also vocally endowed.
4. When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I tell them I’m the bridge between the nerds and the sales people. I need to be able to understand the technology surrounding the solutions we provide for our clients, but I also have the opportunity to keep my digital consultant skills sharp.
5. Favorite kinds of projects to work on: I like mash-ups – taking a bunch of existing, cool things….slapping them together….and building something completely new. That exercise used to be very difficult, but thanks to things like APIs, REST, and the maturation of digital development tools it’s much easier to do.
6. What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That we have this many nerds in one spot. I think there’s a law against that somewhere.
7. Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1) Search Marketing Jargon; 2) Great Tenor Arias; 3) Beavers and Ducks – Quotable Movies; 4) Save the Cheerleader; 5) Save the World; 6) Farley-isms; and 7) History of Mountain Dew
8. Favorite Fictional Nerd: MacGuyver, followed closely by Chuck Bartowski
9. According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: That’s a trick question, isn’t it?