As is the n0rm, Huge marketing strategist lead Josh Seifert returns with his monthly submission, this time veering from politics to the much-publicized death of News Corp’s iPad-only trade, The Daily. Here, Seifert offers more of a lesson for marketers instead of a lament, but why put words in his mouth. Take it away, sir.

What’s left to say about The Daily? As everyone knows by now, News Corp. announced plans to shut down its iPad newspaper this week. While media coverage has included speculation about causes like debatable editorial quality and residual fallout from the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal in the U.K., to me the failure is a salutary example of what happens when a company employs technology for technology’s sake. While The Daily may have been an admirable attempt by News Corp. execs to skate to where the puck is going, just because mobile phones and tablet devices are being rapidly adopted by consumers does not mean consumers were ever ready to use them as a replacement for Murdoch newsprint.

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We guess the fall/winter interns are keeping busy at the moment, so we’ll pass the mic for this latest op-ed to an agency VP, namely Brad Carraway, who leads brand strategy at Calabasas, CA-based Mile 9, a decade-plus-old, full service shop that has worked with clients including K-Swiss, Disney XD and Atari.Speaking from one small agency to another, Carraway offers tips on how you can develop your own brand strategy come 2013. Take it away, sir.

December is coming to an end and a New Year is fast approaching. Before your agency toasts in 2013, now’s the perfect time to take a moment to reflect back & focus on what your brand goals are for the New Year. Think of it as a New Year’s resolution for your agency – building a brand strategy for your business.

Developing a brand strategy for your agency is a vitally important, but often overlooked endeavor. Think about it. We do it all the time for our clients – conduct an in-depth market analysis, a competitive brand analysis, consumer insight research, and maybe a SWOT analysis just for fun – all culminating into an integrated brand strategy designed to set brand X apart, break-through the clutter, fuel deeper brand engagement and make the cash registers ring.

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Huge marketing strategist lead Josh Seifert returns with his monthly contribution to this here site. The headline should give you the basic premise of our scribe’s latest entry, in which he reveals who really won out in the wake of the 2012 election. Take it away, sir.

Living in New York, I thankfully did not have to endure the billions of dollars spent on political advertising this election myself, but now that the results are in and our feeds on Facebook and Twitter are returning to their normal political apathy, it’s probably worth exploring what we as marketers learned from politics this year.

Losing a United States Senate race in a conservative state as a Republican used to be the hardest thing in the world, but as Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock learned, the potential impact of saying something stupid is even greater than it used to be. Inflammatory gaffes now extend far beyond the news cycle with social media and instant memeification reaching people who have long since tuned out traditional media coverage. While brands rarely have occasion to address topics as controversial as politicians do, their offline behaviors still have significant potential to be amplified and shared for long periods of time far beyond the incident. Just ask FedEx executives if this old package delivery YouTube video is what they want people finding and watching nearly a year later. Fortunately for brands, this can be merely damaging and not wholly destructive.

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It’s been a minute but we’re back with another entry in our Day in the Life of an Intern series. This submission comes to us courtesy of a Justin Jahng, a biz dev intern at Grey Group agency Wing, which focuses on the U.S. Latino market. It’s really hard to top Jahng’s title for his entry so we’ll just let the Boston University grad have the floor and explain. Take it away, young man.

For the past four months, I have been the Business Development intern at Wing, a full-service advertising agency focused on the US Hispanic Market.  I have learned a lot during my time here from fellow coworkers and supervisors, but there is something about who I am that makes my experience slightly different from the rest.  I am Korean American.

When clients, vendors, and/or partners come into the office, they sometimes see me and tend to be a little confused as to what I could possibly be doing here. Is he the IT guy? The Chinese food delivery guy?  I admit I see the comedic value in an Asian guy interning at a Hispanic ad agency, but I’m at Wing for a reason. I have a strong interest, if not an outright obsession, with Latin America. In the past 6 years I visited Peru, Brazil, and Mexico, and lived in Argentina for five months. I have very close Brazilian friends that I met in college, and Latin American food ranks in my top three favorite cuisines.  All of this has led me to throw a spin on the term “gringo” and coin a new one: “Kringo,” which takes into account my Korean heritage.

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Huge marketing strategist lead Josh Seifert returns with his monthly contribution to this here site. This time around, our scribe discusses the relationship between advertisers and digital folks as, to use a Costanza-ism, their ‘worlds are colliding!’ Can they understand each other better as the convergence continues? Let our old pal Josh break it down.

As marketing communication becomes increasingly digital—mobile, display advertising, online video, social, digital out of home and in-store, etc.—the future won’t be about digital agencies and traditional agencies, just agencies, each hired for their unique perspectives and skill sets for solving client challenges. This evolution is already making digital marketing the center of competing skill sets—advertising communication versus digital experience design.

The biggest challenge for agencies is that these approaches are rooted in two differing ideologies, currently colliding. Advertising people and digital people tend to be from different—and often hostile—tribes. At best, communicating with one another is like traveling to a foreign country and speaking very loudly and quite slowly in hopes of being understood.

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The op-eds continue to roll in this month. Now up to bat is Irving Fain, co-founder/CEO of customer relationship and loyalty platform, CrowdTwist. As the headline suggests, in his debut entry, Fain discusses the importance of marketers to start demanding, understanding and utilizing more valuable metrics. Prior to CrowdTwist, Fain headed digital marketing & social platforms for Clear Channel Radio Digital. Anyhow, take it away, sir.

The marketing world thrives on data and numbers, however, as access grows to more and more information, it is important to be wary of metrics that are alluring but lack true meaning. Whether they come in the form of Facebook likes, Twitter follows or—gasp—engagement, even marketing experts are too frequently caught referencing these enticing yet slightly evil numbers.

Many marketers are quick to complain about how useless, shallow and invaluable these oft-quoted metrics really are. Yet, we continue to hold them up as support for our efforts, campaigns and efficacy of the work we do everyday.

Why?

I blame the marketers; myself included, for those who criticize soft metrics should be initiating the shift to more meaningful methods of evaluation. As Milton Friedman outlined, free market economics tells us that markets are fundamentally efficient and that innovation and evolution will naturally focus on the areas where it’s most demanded. We as marketers aren’t demanding “better” loudly enough. The more adamantly we insist on deeper and more effective understanding of customers, the quicker companies will race to fill this need and the sooner we can stop relying on “fluffy” numbers to define our work. It is up to us to not only demand metrics that are more insightful and valuable but also to initiate the change.

This is my plea to marketers: We must lead the digital march forward to utilize more effective and trackable measurement for the work that we do each day.

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Our op-ed rotation continues, this time with a message to marketers about baby boomers from Beth Hallisy, partner at Cleveland “idea agency” Marcus Thomas. Without further ado, take it away, Beth.

I’ll admit, I’m not particularly proud of how I’m dealing with the new older me.  I always pictured myself aging gracefully like Anjelica Huston’s Clara in Lonesome Dove or Katharine Hepburn’s Ethel Thayer in On Golden Pond.  Yet here I sit, staring longingly at the plush, glowing faces of my supposed contemporaries in the Botox and Restylane ads and getting ready to speed dial the spa. Get me some of that!

But how is it that these ads found me all of a sudden?  OK, scratch that, I’ve worked in advertising-related fields for 30 years. I know too well. Still, it’s disheartening when ads for anti-aging cosmetics pop up in the right column of my Facebook page immediately after I update my profile pic.  I mean, can they (and by that, I mean we) track the number of wrinkles per pixel?

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We’re gonna flip the script a little bit today and get some perspective from the ones running the internship at the agency. Below, we get a lengthy recap/case study from Norm Shearer, ECD/partner at Denver-based Cactus, which works with brands including Denver Zoo and Smashburger.

The focus here, though, is on Whole Foods and a summer internship program where seven Cactus recruits spanning all departments from account to creative to social essentially served as the “agency” for the supermarket chain’s Rocky Mountain Region division. The end result is a Whole Foods-approved integrated campaign that will be produced early next year. But why don’t we just shut the hell up now and let Shearer share the story. 

Let’s face it, internship programs at creative agencies mostly suck. They eat up time and resources, and the work is usually junior at best. Sure they can act as a semester-long job interview, and over Cactus’s two decades of summer intern programs, we’ve hired more than a few participants—they’ve injected fresh energy and novel ideas into our culture. But in an industry where hours are always in short supply, lavishing them on interns sometimes just isn’t worth it.

So this year when my business partner Joe Conrad and I were deciding whether to keep the program alive, we were leaning towards no. Doing it “right” seemed like it would require pouring even more agency resources into it. The ROI just didn’t seem to be there. But the thing with big ideas is they almost always require risk.

I wondered what if we didn’t have the interns work on Cactus clients? What if we could create an integrated agency within an agency, equip them with Cactus’ beliefs and processes, and find a client that had a business problem they could tackle. Not a nonprofit looking for free work, but an experienced client that would expect the absolute best an agency can deliver.

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And so, our regular op-ed series continues, this time with a contribution from John Paolini, executive creative director at branding firm Sullivan. With Election Day coming shortly, why not take a look at the respective sites of the presidential nominees, from a designer’s POV that is. Take it away, sir. 

If you haven’t noticed, the official campaign websites for the presidential hopefuls look a lot different than they did six months ago.

Last spring, Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s sites were hard to tell apart. Both employed many of the same structural and design elements: There was lots of dark blue in the banners that framed up and merchandised their very patriotic logos. The navigation was more decorative than substantive. The content, whether written or image-based, did little to engage, let alone persuade. The net result was two sites largely focused on packaging and not much on positioning.

Fast-forward to today and you have two very different online experiences. The most dramatic evolution has taken place on Mitt Romney’s site: whereas it once relied on graphic elements for emotional connection, it now has a sweeping invitation to “come fly with me.” And I can’t help feeling Romney is suggesting something more than a trip on his plane.

Romney’s language is clear: join him and succeed. His navigation also supports the idea of success. Where there was once a set of decorative buttons there is now a corporate-feeling tab structure driving you deeper. His donation module is clear and unapologetic in placement, and language such as “victory wallet” all point to a clear narrative. The gift shop is a call to “gear up!” Read: if you vote for Mitt, you are buying success! Romney’s story line is clear: get on board with Mitt and you will succeed.

The Obama site has evolved as well. While Mitt’s site is a super-charged product experience designed with a top-down perspective, the Obama site is equally rousing from the bottom up; it’s a grassroots rallying cry that focuses on “we”. The written and image-based content has taken on an intimate feeling, which manifests itself in the Instagram-style photography, suggesting a sense of historic record. The language is also simple and straightforward: “get the facts, get the latest, get involved.” As you move deeper into the site, the “we” narrative extends to all types of groups and issues: Obama herein shares his success with each of his supporters. At this level, the site design lets go of its graphic identity and allows the individual group pages to have unique graphic badges and image styles. On a subtler note, the notion of forward is amplified by the use of backwards as a device to call out Romney’s position on various issues.

Overall, what is fascinating is how the past and present websites illustrate and record the progression of this election. These websites have become more than a merchandised expression of the campaign. As digital platforms, they are the living embodiment of the candidates’ evolving positions and how the cultural narratives that surround Romney and Obama have driven them to respond instantly and iteratively to the changing conversation.

And now, we get a developer’s perspective on Apple’s latest product, hopefully broken down in simplistic terms for the masses. Olli Siebelt, head of client solutions at Culver City, CA-based digital prodco The Famous Group, offers his initial thoughts on the iPhone 5. Is your wait in line worth it? Let’s take a look.

Here’s a quick-reaction overview on what the new Apple iPhone 5 and iOS6 inclusion means to developers, marketers and ad people:

•    The new A6 processor makes the iPhone 5 twice as fast as the 4S and creates a much more powerful gaming machine in both processing and graphics rendering.  As we’ve seen in previous updates, the jump to IOS6 will keep consumers wanting more.  Will it be compatible with the 4 and 4S?  Yes.  But users on the older handsets won’t be able to play with new toys such as Maps flyover, 3G-enabled FaceTime and turn-by-turn navigation as the older processors won’t be able to handle it.

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