Andrew Frank

“I warn you against believing that advertising is science.” So said Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s great legends who holds the number one rank in Advertising Age’s honor roll of most influential people. So what would Bill Bernbach think of Adobe’s idea, as expressed in its $1.8B acquisition of Omniture, that analytics (e.g., SiteCatalyst) can [...]

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Two web traffic quality monitoring firms, Anchor Intelligence and  Click Forensics, released click fraud reports yesterday and the results were pretty shocking: according to Anchor’s Traffic Quality Report, in Q2 2009 the incidence of attempted click fraud rose from 21.7% to 22.9% of all clicks. When you include “innocuous invalid” clicks – that is, clicks [...]

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Google’s 1Q09 earnings presentation left little doubt about where the company’s headed for the next year or so, and it’s in the direction of optimizing its role as the world’s most efficient marketing and sales channel. Google executives repeated the mantra that a key reason Google was able to outperform most advertising-supported businesses was that [...]

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The tension and speculation over Google’s anticipated entry into the hazardous world of behavioral targeting has been growing since its acquisition of DoubleClick, much of whose value lies in its visibility of consumer activity across a vast array of websites. Now, the curtain has been lifted, in characteristic Google style, in a blog post not-so-subtly [...]

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Last June, Yahoo!’s CEO Jerry Yang announced, "We believe that the convergence of search and display is the next major development in the evolution of the rapidly changing online advertising industry.” More recently, Google CEO Eric Schmidt echoed this notion when he indicated his company would focus on "bringing the science of search to the [...]

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I’ve been wanting to blog about changes in the agency world for awhile, and R/GA’s recent capture of AdWeek’s coveted 2008 Digital Agency of the Year award seems like the perfect chance. Congratulations, R/GA.
R/GA, whose marquee clients include a long-term relationship with Nike, for whom it not only created memorable advertising but also helped build [...]

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February 5, 2008, NY, NY. The Rubicon Project, an ad network optimizer for online publishers, drew about 150 new media people to its newly-opened Chelsea office this frigid morning, which is impressive for a company based in LA. As moderator Brian Morrisey of AdWeek wryly noted, it was unclear which was the greater draw in [...]

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What do “Shankapotamus”, “PepSuber”, “drinkability”, and “LMAO” have in common? Two things, actually. First, they’re all words that advertisers spent $100,000 per second to build buzz around during the Super Bowl, and secondly, they were all available as search terms on Google the morning after the advertising aired.
The current highest ranking link for “shankapotamus” for [...]

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You could almost hear the Internet breathe a sigh of relief at the realization that its bellwether, Google, would once again beat analyst estimates and post impressive growth numbers, even if guidance vaguely but ominously acknowledged unpleasant market realities. But what do these numbers really say about the health of the greater online publishing world?
Two [...]

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(This post is by Andrew Frank and Allen Weiner and is cross-posted on both of our blogs)
Online coverage of President Barack Obama’s inauguration brought new clarity to the media opportunity for social networks, proving the inherent value of varying social graphs and demonstrating what it takes to ignite powerful, meaningful conversations at a huge scale.
With [...]

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