Mad Men Marketing to Participate in Park(ing) Day!
We plan to convert one of the metered parking space in front of our 111 E. Bay Street location in Downtown Jacksonville into a living room area in order to play a DVD series marathon of the AMC Drama Mad Men, and invite the passing public to take a seat and enjoy. We are excited to take part in this national movement to transform regular parking spots, even if only for one day, into public spaces, so that anyone can come by and relax in a formerly hectic environment, for free.
Park(ing) Day will be held in Downtown Jacksonville on Friday, September 21st from 10am – 5pm.
For those of you who don't know much about Park(ing) Day, here's a brief description taken directly from the website parkingday.org:
Providing temporary public open space . . . one parking spot at time.
PARK(ing) Day is a annual open-source global event where citizens, artists and activists collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spaces into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public places. The project began in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco art and design studio, converted a single metered parking space into a temporary public park in downtown San Francisco. Since 2005, PARK(ing) Day has evolved into a global movement, with organizations and individuals (operating independently of Rebar but following an established set of guidelines) creating new forms of temporary public space in urban contexts around the world.
The mission of PARK(ing) Day is to call attention to the need for more open urban space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat … at least until the meter runs out!
So, come join us, take the load off and spend your lunch hour, break time, or walk about… watching a great TV program in the privacy of your very own public parking space living room!
Mad Men Marketing Making Moves to Downtown
We could not be happier to make this announcement, as it has been our goal since we started this company to end up downtown – and after outgrowing our current offices back in January, the time is finally upon us! We will inhabit a portion of the Holmes Building which faces E. Bay Street, which is significantly larger than our current offices. This move was very strategic to the expansion efforts of our company and acquiring a larger space will ensure our future growth and success.
What makes this opportunity even more exciting, is the fact that the revitalization of downtown is a personal goal of mine, so not only will we now be down there, but we are also now able to directly contribute to bringing commerce back downtown. Hopefully through our excitement and involvement in downtown activities, we can help continue the trend and bring more businesses to the area!
We truly couldn't be happier and look forward to seeing you all – Downtown!
“Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city… Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty… How can you lose..? The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares, and go Downtown! ” 😉
Mobile Advertising is Taking Over
Where do you spend your ad dollars? With online usage jumping through the roof the past couple years, advertisers now have to consider this as a means of advertising. After reading an article by Richard Ting on theAtlantic.com I thought about these changes to the advertising world, and was able to put some numbers to it. People are now spending about 10% of their media time on their smartphones, but only 1% of ad-dollars is being spent on mobile ads. To compare this to what is spent on print, people spend 7% of their media time with print, but 25% of ad-dollars are being spent here. Just looking at these numbers, we can see a problem. As we know, print has been on its way out, not only because of the mobile web, but because of the web in general. But these numbers would make you think it hasn't gone anywhere.
More than 2/3 of the time spent on a mobile phone is now used for something other than talking. Mobile is making moves to surpass TV as their main source of entertainment (not to mention that you can now watch some forms of TV on your smartphone). This is the way entertainment is headed and advertising has to move with it.
Spending on the mobile web has gotten much easier. As stated earlier, it isn't just ads on mobile sites anymore, its in between a round of Words with Friends, in between songs on Pandora, and of course there's Facebook. Not to mention, this is still just the early years as far as smart phones and mobile web, we have a long way to go. So, if you haven't already jumped on the bandwagon, now might be a good time to try.
GM partners with Manchester United
This change comes with a change in advertising for Chevrolet to a new advertising agency, Commonwealth. They replace the approximately 70 agencies that have worked on advertising for Chevrolet. They have changed up their thinking and are working to create more effective spending. An example of that is the 20 or so TV commercials pumped out for the Chevy Cruze, when only a half dozen were needed, as stated by Chief Marketing Officer for GM, Joel Ewanick.
Manchester United has long been one of the most popular soccer teams in the world. With 659 million followers, they are easily the most popular club in the world. For example, in a regular season game featuring Manchester United versus fellow EPL great, Manchester City, there was a recorded 600 million viewers, and compare that to the 110-115 million viewers of the Super Bowl in recent years. Looking at these numbers, it's easy to say they made the right choice here.
In other soccer and GM related news, GM has recently announced a plan to donate 1.5 million indestructible soccer balls all over the world (137 countries have already received soccer balls). This is a part of the project One World Futbol which started in 2010.
Google’s Revamped Search Engine
I read an article on this change to Google on CNN.com and wondered to myself how this will affect certain aspects of SEO, etc. The example used in the article discusses the search term 'kings'.Now kings could be a number of different things, the NHL team (LA Kings), the NBA team (Sacramento Kings), or you could be searching for an actual King. The new Google search will have separate boxes asking you which 'king' you could be referring to. This will hone in on what exactly the user is searching for so they won't have to sit and look through pages of search results in order to find exactly what they are looking for. Another quote from the article reads, “More specific searches, say for the name of a celebrity, will render boxes with basic information, as well as links to what Google believes are possibly related searches”.
This new and improved search is known as Knowledge Graph, and claims to have Google search think more like a human. In a quote from the article, Jack Menzel, director of product management at Google says, “The web pages we [currently] return for the search 'kings,' they're all good. You, as a human, associate those words with their real-world meaning but, for a computer, they're just a random string of characters.” Menzel also says, “the initial version of Knowledge Graph has information on 500 million people, places and things and uses 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections to create categories for them.” This adds another innovative idea to Google's arsenal. Knowledge Graph should directly affect the way a user searches on the web. Another great job by Google.