BlogTraction

This blog has a new home

2010-11-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen. It is my great pleasure to let you know Traction has launched a new website and with that comes a new home for this blog. Please direct your bookmarks to: www.tractionco.com/blog/author/adam While you're at it, you can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or SlideShare. Well, what are you waiting for? Get moving.

Core Competencies

2010-09-17T11:44:00.000-07:00

The agency landscape is rapidly shifting. Many claim to do everything. Some do one thing very well. At Traction, we focus on the things we do best and leverage an ecosystem of existing partners to do the rest. I was recently asked what our core competencies are. The answer is Strategy, Advertising and Innovation. We refer to the discipline of these three considered together as Brand Experience

Watch this space

2010-09-10T07:20:00.000-07:00

About a decade ago, I was cutting my chops at DDB. Theo and I had been recruited to start the San Francisco office of their Tribal DDB office. One day, agency patriarch Keith Reinhard (he of "two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese..." fame) came by and addressed the teams at both "mainline" DDB and us geeks over at Tribal about the coming future of digital. That day, Mr. Reinhard

Trends with Traction: Social shopping is hopping.

2010-08-27T08:01:00.000-07:00

The cover of Forbes magazine last month let the cat out of the bag. Social Shopping site GroupOn is the fastest-growing company... ever. First came Google, then came Facebook, now comes GroupOn. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the next big thing. Half a billion dollars in revenue in less than one year. That's right, I said dollars. Not impressions. What is GroupOn? Well, it's the leader of

The Learn Phase: HTML 5, Recasting Agile and a Content Strategy Toolkit

2010-08-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Every month or so at Traction, we host The Learn Phase, a four hour session of shared ideas, debate, conversation and pizza. It's named after the first phase of our process, "Learn," because that's what we hope to accomplish. We created a SlideShare channel so you could learn too. Enjoy! The Learn Phase: HTML5. The Geekening.View more presentations from Adam. The Learn Phase: Recasting the

Trends with Traction: The Internet's Free Lunch Program is in Peril

2010-08-11T07:08:00.000-07:00

When I was in 10th grade, my math teacher ,Mr. Steen, scrawled T-A-N-S-T-A-A-F-L in giant letters across the board on the first day of school. It stood for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." Seemed like an odd duck thing to do at the time—and I have no idea what it had to do with math—but it was Mr. Steen's intent to make an impression and I still remember it 25 years later. It

Trends with Traction: Meaningful "social" measurement with Net Promoter Score

2010-08-05T08:29:00.001-07:00

If you're a CMO, you might feel like many of the business metrics you're chasing around in social media seem futile. The tactical click-throughs and engagements on marketing programs make sense, but the aggregate business ones don't quite make sense under close inspection. Volume of brand mentions kind of makes sense if you can measure if the mentions are positive, but take a close look at

Mad Men comes back to TV. But what about real life?

2010-07-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

Mad Men Season 4 opens with a scrappy upstart agency getting a lot of ink, but still not having a conference table. For some reason, the image felt very familiar to me (although I should add that after five years, Traction did finally get a real conference table this year). "Earned Media" then and now. With a nod to the world we live in (SPOILER AHEAD), the creative team used "earned media" to

What do you get when you throw a copywriter, an information architect and a media planner into a blender?

2010-06-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

Hint: the answer is not a new "Will it blend?" viral video. It's a content strategist—the hottest new job title to hit the agency scene since "social media guru" started popping up on LinkedIn profiles across the digital universe a couple years ago. With one great exception: this one actually services a vital business function and requires a professional skill set to perform (I could rant on

Why Danger Mouse is the most relevant man in music

2010-05-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

I came across a feature in this Sunday's SF Chron (yes, I still read the newspaper) detailing the litany of projects that Danger Mouse (the dude on the right) has produced since he put together "The Grey Album" in 2004 (which I'm listening to as I write this post). If you're not familiar with "The Grey Album," it was a mashup of Jay-Z's "The Black Album" with the Beatles "White Album."Was it

Facebook's virtual currency vig is not so bad

2010-05-13T07:44:00.000-07:00

Facebook-hating is becoming quite vogue these days. Seems everybody has an opinion about why these guys are horrifically evil. Maybe they are, but one thing that's come under scrutiny certainly doesn't make them so. It is their new rule that games use Facebook's virtual currency... and that Facebook gets a 30% cut. This is obviously a deep cut into the revenue of rising stars--particularly Zynga

Persuasion - A lost art?

2010-05-10T08:51:00.000-07:00

Some direct response marketers claim that the focus on ROI and auction-based media forces good creative. That notion illustrates a fundamental problem in advertising today—that the art of persuasion is dying. And it's simply not true. The dominance of direct response has made it so that good creative has been relegated to what performs well in driving clicks. Sure, the more sophisticated wonks

Traction named Top Interactive Agency for 2nd year in a row!

2010-03-11T17:14:00.000-08:00

We're drinking champagne again this week! BtoB Magazine just named named Traction runner-up for Interactive Agency of the Year for 2010. This on the heels of our winning Agency of the Year for 2009. Here's a snip from the article: “What differentiates us is that we're thinking about how the marketing landscape works in a world where the funnel no longer exists, and we're creating plans that not

Digital marketing resolutions for 2010

2010-01-06T15:40:00.000-08:00

If nothing more, 2009 was a year for everyone in this godforsaken industry to reflect. For most, it was a year of tremendous struggle. That's OK. That which does not kill us makes us stronger. And we're far from dead. I had the good fortune to see Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great" at the Inc. 5000 Conference (Traction was proud to be No. 1,399 on the list) a few months ago. He gave some

Brizzly Makes a TwitFace

2009-12-21T21:52:00.000-08:00

But do Facebook and Twitter belong together? Another guest post by Carly Schwartz Of all the social media aggregators out there these days, I was most excited to beta-test Brizzly, and not just because its icon is more adorable than the Snuggle bear. The program promises to simplify online social activity by allowing you to access Twitter and Facebook at the same time, on the same screen. As a

Happy holidays from Traction!

2009-12-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

A Creative Alien at the iMedia Agency Summit

2009-12-11T14:36:00.000-08:00

This is a guest post written by blogger Renee Crawshaw, Associate Creative Director at Traction. I've just returned from the iMedia Agency Summit in Scottsdale. On my first day, a group of four Summit veterans took us newbies aside to tell us what to expect in the coming days. Afterward, I asked the group of 40 or so freshmen if there were any other creatives present. Not a single hand raised. It

Trends with Traction at the iMedia Agency Summit: Have agencies become commodities? - iMedia Connection Blog

2009-12-09T20:06:00.001-08:00

iMedia Connection Blog: Trends with Traction at the iMedia Agency Summit: Have agencies become commodities?View >>

Traction pulls ahead

2009-12-01T10:22:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Business Times just published this article on Traction. You can read the original here.Ad firm Traction's software supports creative sideAs far as Adam Kleinberg is concerned, there are ad agencies and there are software companies. Traction Corp. is one of the few that blurs the line between the two.“We work across integrated branding and advertising, interactive experiences and

Twitter Lists to Followers Ratio: The new social media metric

2009-11-06T09:54:00.000-08:00

Twitter has been aunching a slew of new functionality recently, most notably Twitter Lists. I say most notably because Twitter Lists addresses one of the most pressing problems with using Twitter.com as a primary Twitter client. It's very easy to follow so many people that you wind up really following no one. People's tweets just get lost in the stream. Until now, I've solved that problem with

Marketing Megatrends redux

2009-11-04T14:40:00.000-08:00

The "5 Marketing Megatrends You Cant Ignore" article I wrote for iMedia last week has gotten quite a bit of buzz. I did a search on twitter and nearly 400 people have tweeted about it since it was released on Monday (writing this on Wednesday). It's fascinating how Twitter allows you to watch something "go viral" in real-time.It's also spawned a few interesting blog posts around the web. I

5 marketing megatrends you can't ignore - iMediaConnection.com

2009-11-02T20:58:00.001-08:00

"I just wrote this article for iMedia Connection and it's gotten some buzz (I measure buzz by retweets these days — this one got over 90 the day it was published). I'd love to hear your thoughts in comments."Our society is undergoing massive fundamental transitions. Learn how these forward-thinking brands seized the underlying marketing opportunities.View >>

Riding the Google Wave

2009-10-21T21:48:00.000-07:00

Another guest post here, this time from Tractionista Carly Schwartz — @carlicita to the twitterati. Carly got her hands on a prized Google Wave invite (eat your heart out Willie Wonka — golden tickets got nothing on these). Her thoughts are below. And a few of mine are below that.Carly says...When I first heard about Google Wave, a pair of Australian developers’ take on the next generation of

Zappos Presentation from the Inc. 500 | 5000

2009-10-01T15:46:00.001-07:00

This is Tony Hsieh's presentation from the Inc. 500 | 5000 Conference I mentioned in my last post. Great advice on how to build a brand from the inside out.Zappos - Inc 500 - 9-24-09View more presentations from zappos.