I'm normally not in the practice of admitting when i'm wrong.  In this case i'll make an exception. :)

About a year and a half ago I wrote a blog article entitled “Does Anti-Smoking Advertising Remind us to Smoke?”.  The premise of the article was that we get it, smoking is bad and we’re quitting.  The more you remind us about smoking (positive or negative) the more its on our mind.  My suspicion was that anti-smoking ads, namely those sponsored by tobacco companies not only fail to deter young people from smoking, but encourage them to take up the habit. Nothing is more alluring than the thing you’re not supposed to do. And that allure increases the more often you’re reminded not to do it.

You can’t reach your audience until you know what they have in common.

Consider:  On one hand, you have a 24-year-old welder, living in a small house in a small town;  on the other, you have a 32-year-old university-educated hipster art director, living in a loft in a ‘creative’ area of Toronto.  What do they have in common?

Not everything should be advertised with cupcakes.

In my travels around the interwebs lately, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in online advertising: Cupcakes.

Today alone I counted 14 different online ads, for 14 different products (none of them cupcakes or even bakeries, by the way), which featured brightly coloured images of cupcakes.

You’ve spent a lot of time and money defining your target.
How well do you know your actual customers?

There's a reason this picture is creeping you out. We're not comfortable with faceless people.

The other day we talked about how it can be hard to draw a straight line from ‘advertising’ to ‘impressions’, and from there to actual ’sales’.

But there’s a fantastic, underutilized source of information about how well your online advertising is working:  Your online customers.

Measuring advertising isn’t a new problem.
Social media hasn’t made it any worse.

When I was first working in advertising, I read a quote that’s always stuck with me, because I mostly think it’s true:  ”I know half of my advertising dollars are wasted.  I just don’t know which half.”  The quote is attributed to John Wanamaker, the famous department store mogul – who died in 1922.

You can buy quantity, but does quality count more?

This week, Newt Gingrich was embarrassed when it was revealed that – surprise! – his 1 million+ Twitter follower base wasn’t so much ‘organic’ as it was ‘bought and paid for’, and that many of the people supposedly following him were in fact fake accounts.

Gingrich ended up looking particularly foolish because he’d previously bragged about how many followers he had, but it raises an interesting question:  If you pay for social media profile, does it count?

How do you know if your campaign is working?  Evaluating the value of display advertising campaigns can be real challenge. "You gauge current campaigns against past performance or compare across multiple campaigns and advertisers within your roster of brands or clients" says Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager at Google.

Advertisers and agencies alike are looking for more data to answer the basic questions of "How do I know if my display ad campaigns are doing well?" and "Are there credible benchmarks can I use to compare the results on my current campaign?" 

By now you will all have read that Google has agreed to purchase Motorola for a mere $12.5 BILLION DOLLARS.  This represents the single largest deal in Google's history.  Like many of you, I feel I have a fairly good understanding of what this deal will mean for Google... its a massive first step into mobile and comes with more than 17,000 patents that Motorola currently holds.  What I don't know is whether this deal will actually close.  

Great blog article by Leslie Horn in PCMag.com yesterday on the clash between the Facebook and Google+ for supremacy over where many of us spend our free time.  According to a recent poll on PCMag they predict 50 percent of users plan to leave Facebook in favour of Google+. Facebook has firmly established itself as the top dog in the social networking space by a country mile; 750 million Facebook members on Google+'s estimated 25 million.  Personally I think it's highly unlikely that half of those users will just leave.  

Charlie Sheen is reportedly getting $50k per tweet.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This week, the New York Times reported that Charlie Sheen is earning more than $50,000 through Ad.ly for his ‘promotional’ tweets.  He may even be worth it:  His tweet about looking for an intern, directing people to a posting on Internships.com, generated almost 100,000 clickthroughs in the first hour alone.