Austin has a robust advertising community. The Austin Ad Federation is one of the nation’s largest advertising clubs and has been named the “Club of the Year” beating NYC and Chicago’s advertising clubs. This Thursday, February 9, they will award top honors to the best of the best from this year’s local advertising agencies.

Great campaigns for brands such as Whataburger, L.L. Bean, HomeAway and more all originated here from the great talent we have in Austin. I’m very excited to attend this year and see the winners.  The competition is fierce!

The judges come from national agencies outside of the region and Austin’s ADDY winners often go on to win national awards.

The show is going to be at the beautiful ACL Live theatre in the W Hotel. The bars inside the theatre make it even better.

We did not submit any work this year since we are not a creative shop, but agencies we work with did and maybe a campaign we managed will win a prize!

It’s not too late to buy your tickets for the Austin advertising community’s biggest awards of the year!

When mixing the holiday with professional events, it is important to remember a few tips to avoid regret and over-commitments.

Here are my tips to survive the holiday work events and not kill your career

• Show up. This should be a no-brainer, but skipping the office holiday party will get you noticed, and not in a good way.
• Don’t be a complainer. Worse than not showing up is showing up and complaining about the location or the food. Nobody had to throw you a party and if you didn’t do the work to plan the event you certainly shouldn’t be ungrateful that someone did!
• Don’t drink too much. This is not a night out with friends and you should be on your best behavior. Alcohol loosens us up and for some, it turns them into really obnoxious assholes. Don’t be one of those.

I have been to company parties where someone danced on top of a table and unbuckled his pants before someone grabbed him and pulled him down. I’ve seen couples get in fights after they had too much to drink. And, inevitably, someone gets just drunk enough to tell the boss what they really think of him/her. All of those minefields are best avoided if you aren’t getting plastered.

My father taught me a wonderful trick when mixing business with alcohol. I have one cocktail and then sneak back to the bartender and give him a large tip. (Which reminds me, don’t complain about the cash bar. Your boss doesn’t want to hear that you think he is cheap and that you are ungrateful. And, tip your bartenders even if it’s an open bar.) Anyway, I tell the bartender that when I ask for another drink, put it in a cocktail glass with a stirrer but to not add any alcohol. This way while others may be getting boozy and thinking about climbing on a table for a impromptu strip show, I am remaining sober and not creating a humiliating and potentially career-ending YouTube moment.

Remember, it is possible to have engaging conversations and an enjoyable event without alcohol. It is also nice to not have to explain what you were doing in the corner with someone’s young assistant.

And, never call in sick the next day because of a hangover. Everyone will know and think you can’t handle your liquor.

• Don’t sexually harass your coworkers. Just because you’re out having a drink don’t feel someone up or make an inappropriate comment about how hot someone looks. You still have to work with these people. If you feel the urge to do this, leave the party…you violated a previous rule of drinking too much.
• Mingle. Introduce yourself to people you don’t know. Say hi to the boss (but don’t throw your arm around him or her and try to be besties). Make people feel comfortable and thank people that have helped you out throughout the year. It’s also ok to thank the people that planned the party. There is nothing wrong with being gracious.

Once you get past the holiday party, there’s a few other situations that often arise during the holidays at work.

If you deal with clients they probably expect a small token from you. This is true even if there’s a corporate policy against them accepting gifts over a certain dollar amount.

I have discovered that clients probably get a lot of bottles of wine or buckets of popcorn (our joke when we receive popcorn is that we must be a tiny client they hate.) So, I usually take some homemade treats or ask them out to lunch. I love lunch and getting to see my clients in a social setting and talk about something other than our business together helps build lasting relationships and is often more appreciated than dropping off a bottle of some wine they won’t ever drink anyway. And for the love of Pete…don’t drop off corporate logo mousepads!

I do prefer to schedule lunches over dinners. I’m a little selfish in that I like my evenings free, if possible. Chances are, so do my clients.

Keeping my evenings free allows me to spend time with my family and friends and that is truly what I love most about the holidays.

With that all said, I’ll see you at the next holiday party with my fake drink and genuine smile!

ComScore, an online traffic tracker, noted that Black Friday brought in $816 million in U.S. online sales, making it the heaviest online spending day to date this year. Friday’s online sales revenues represented a 26% spending increase compared to the same day last year.

Retailers traditionally pull out the big deals for the holiday shopping season and this year was no exception. Major retailers like Best Buy were opening Thanksgiving night with major sales on select items that had crowds lining up before they even finished the pumpkin pie.  While the economy continues to lumber along, many analysts were fretting over the holiday numbers. Meanwhile, it seems Americans are tired of saving their money and staying home and decided to take advantage of rock bottom prices designed to lure them back to stores.

Stocks rallied on Cyber Monday as news of the Black Friday success was heard, meaning a very Merry Christmas for not just little boys and girls, but for ailing retail outlets suffering through down numbers and low expectations.  Apple and Amazon were big winners on Friday.

New to the mix this year is a robust mCommerce report on purchases via mobile. The iPhone led among mobile devices, according to IBM, accounting for 6.58 percent of m-commerce activity, followed by Android with 5.2 percent and the iPad with 4.71 percent.

But what I found shocking was the dissatisfaction with traditional agencies and their ability to integrate digital into the comprehensive media strategy. Still? Only 38% of the clients surveyed were satisfied with the way their agency handled digital integration into their strategy. I’ve been traveling around all year giving speeches to industry professionals on the changes in the ways people consume media and how it requires agencies to adapt, evolve and think of new ways to strengthen relationships with their clients. I guess I’ve just been taking it for granted that what I was talking about was elementary and agencies were much further along in integrating digital into their strategies. Not so, according to clients.

The vast majority of clients feel that agencies are struggling to change their business model and, so far, are playing catch-up with interactive agencies. Clients simply do not see traditional agencies as adjusting well in an era of rapid technological changes.

When we started Broad Street Interactive, it was to bridge that gap. We knew that digital budgets weren’t always big enough to warrant taking on a designated digital agency and we knew agencies may not be ready to commit to hiring a full digital team of strategists, creatives and media planners just to focus on digital. We partner with agencies to provide that missing link.

We build relationships with our clients so we can provide input and digital strategy with them. We don’t walk around telling them traditional is dead and alienating agencies (and clients), but we work with them to fit seamlessly into a media plan. Our goals are to do what’s best for the client…the end client. Our agency partners understand that in today’s world sometimes nimble groups of experts may not all work in the same building and in order to serve the client we may have to reach out to each other.

I feel sorry for the CMOs that said they don’t feel their agency is integrating digital in their strategy. I also feel sorry for the agency that isn’t actively pursuing relationships with digital experts to provide a whole picture of media from every medium that benefits the client and the agency.

Here’s the video that started it all in 2009

The top three winners will receive donations to a breast cancer charity of their choice.  The amounts of the donations are $10,000 for first place, $5,000 for second place and $2,000 for third place.

They hit a nerve. The Susan G. Komen Foundation is helping raise awareness about breast cancer and the pink ribbon campaign, first launched in 1991, is wildly successful. Having worked in the healthcare industry for years, I carry around a bag of pink ribbons every October and hand them out while reminding everyone I talk to–airport ticket counter staff, waitstaff, grocery store clerks and clients, to get your routine mammograms!

More than half a million votes have been cast so far for the 139 videos competing in the “Pink Glove Dance” national contest. The competition features more than 17,000 people from across the country — from hospital CEOs showing “moves like Jagger” and a fire chief bringing new meaning to fireworks by shaking his groove thing to Katy Perry’s hit song — all dancing in pink gloves in the name of breast cancer awareness.

The videos are popular on YouTube and being shared across facebook pages. This online activism is helping to both raise awareness for women to get their routine mammograms and raising money to find treatment and a cure for breast cancer.

Social media has made it easy for people to just share a video on their facebook wall or tweet about a video or message relating to a cause. These online messages are a powerful part of a campaign and are not “just” status updates of “likes” or even votes for videos. A 2010 study shows that online activists are just as likely to donate money to a cause as those appearing in these videos.

The campaign combines the unexpected–doctors and nurses dancing–with humor (doctors and nurses dancing and lip-synching) with the emotional (videos including breast cancer survivors) and an uplifting message of hope through these videos. It is a perfect example of how the seed of one moment online can become a movement that creates a “sharable” event online.

Two years later, the sequel video shows 4,000 healthcare workers and breast cancer survivors from all over the United States and Canada.

The plan is to reach people spending a lot of time on facebook already with tools for job searching and educational opportunities. However, the real plan is to enter the lucrative job search business.

As facebook enters the market of job listing and employers begin to post jobs on facebook, the question will become how will people apply and will the employers you apply to jobs for have access to your facebook profile?

The personal nature of content we all post on facebook can do more harm than good. We always do a facebook search when we receive resumes and those candidates that don’t lock down their profiles are scrutinized for every drunk party photo and politically incorrect status update they have ever made. With people posting constant status updates on facebook, it could be the worst way to search for a job if there is access to your personal profile.

We would like to think that facebook users would clean up their profile and that prospective employers would not judge prospective employees by their facebook profile, but we know better. We are a firm believer in separating business and personal and facebook is personal, LinkedIn is business. But, if facebook is going to do it anyway we better start deleting a lot of content we’ve posted there!

Today’s article in TechNewsWorld pretty much sums up why we think the new design is pretty great, as well as why users are wary about the change. As always, privacy tops the list of social media user concerns and is usually the root of controversy. As a digital media agency, more data means stronger target marketing. We understand public concern about privacy and security, however what the new timeline does for the user is make Facebook easier to use—and privacy setting can be changed for Facebook’s timeline with a single click.

As the TechNewsWorld article indicates, “privacy advocates warn that timeline will contain new categories of information regarding media consumption and lifestyle habits as users connect to more social apps. This could make it easier computer criminals to unearth personal details that can be used to craft attacks. The vast amount of data that will be available on timeline will also increase the opportunities for intrusive and problematic advertising, the privacy coalition warned.” It’s the last sentence that sums up why our agency is pleased with the new changes and believes it should be noted that privacy advocates have questions every new design or change from Facebook since Facebook was, well, Facebook.

Successful social media sites (and Facebook tops every list for number of users, usage and popularity) know that there is a balance between revenue streams from advertising and user privacy. With the ability to change privacy settings with just one click, users can “opt-in” or “opt-out” of being a targeted online ad demographic. It’s the” opt-ins” that we’re excited about, creating a stronger targeted user base for advertising and allowing highly targeted ad content.

TechNewsWorld sums it up: “For advertisers who know how to take advantage of it, timeline could boost branding and raise brand awareness because it focuses so strongly on the visual element. Smaller businesses with restricted budgets may find timeline easier to leverage than apps, which are generally more expensive.”

For agencies like ours, with multiple years of experience getting the most from targeted online advertising for our clients with budgets large and small, timeline gives us a unique opportunity for maximizing ROI on campaigns, as well as a deeper level of reporting.

How about you? Have you jumped on the Facebook timeline train yet, or are you hesitating?

The article continued with, “Part of the problem is the result of a fundamental shift in web behavior. Media stalwarts erected a frame around the Web and organized, and sometimes produced, content. Now the frame around content is the web browser itself, and consumers do their own programming and are more inclined to see news consumption as a kind of voting, selecting smaller brands that reflect their sensibilities.”

Problem? Not for online media pros and marketers who have been focused on niche advertising online for more than two years now. We’d expected this shift long before the “collapse” of print publishing, seen it in our own and in colleagues online behavior, and in case studies and our own campaign analytics. We have numbers to back it up, including a highly successful new mom-targeted ad campaign we ran last year in which in-app advertising returned a staggering 50% higher ROI than online display ads placed on niche sites (which did quite well to their end).

In other words, we were niche-y when niche-y wasn’t cool. We’ve been making targeting recommendations to our clients since day one. We are  certainly advertising on “general interest” and “web portal” sites, but have seen better ROI from geo- and demographically-targeting online ads. Sure, the CPMs are slightly higher, but when it comes down to actual impressions reaching the intended specific audience (like moms-to-be), they’re worth every penny.

More impressions on general interest sites, you say? Yes, more impressions from a general interest audience-but fewer end users completed an advertising client’s requested call to action and therefore, lower ROI for the campaign. The verticals are key to getting those coveted targeted impressions, whether reaching out to new moms or sports fans, teen drivers or online shoppers.

Bigger doesn’t mean better. Bigger means larger audience. We’ll take small and targeted over large and general any day of the week.

The longest lasting backlash so far this year is the Summer’s Eve “Hail To The V” campaign. The campaign, created by Dallas agency The Richards Group has taken a lot of heat for their “talking vagina” ads featuring what can best be described as ethnic sounding accents saying stereotypical things relating to the racial makeup of said talking vagina.

I would be the first person to say that coming up with a campaign for a feminine hygiene product would probably be the challenge of my professional career. But, that should not be an excuse to come up with creative that an agency promotes as edgy or has viral potential but in reality is a campaign that is offensive and damages a well known brand.

Sadly, it’s happened again this week. Nivea is apologizing today for a print ad in Esquire called “Re-civilize Yourself.” As soon as buzz started about the ad it was negative. The power of social media means something can go viral very quickly. It also means once one person is offended and they have a large social media following it can become a mob mentality that grows into an all out PR nightmare.  This happened to other brands this year. HomeAway got into it because they threw a doll that looked like a baby up against a window in their Super Bowl commercial. Once it was reported that families were “horrified” by the commercial, it was only a matter of time that HomeAway issued an apology.

It’s hard to know sometimes if something is going to offend. But, an agency should have the strategic and seasoned industry professionals in the room to protect the brand and straddle the line between edgy and offensive. Snicker’s is an example that did a great job with their football ads featuring Betty White. No one was offended that Betty White got tackled and thrown in the mud because it was clear it was funny and was not advocating elder abuse. The ads still went viral, but in a good way for the brand.

Agencies are under great pressure to keep their accounts and build brands and grow sales in a tough economy and tough competitive marketplace. Losing sight of protecting the brand they work for with no one checking the creative team and inserting some strategy and wisdom in the process is blame I place squarely on the agency leadership (not the creatives). Too many hire young and inexperienced because they want to get people that understand new technology. I do that, too. But, someone has to manage and guide those young and inexperienced people even when it seems like you’re throwing cold water on a campaign that you don’t get because you’re old.  What I do get is protecting the brands we work for with a professionalism that sometimes means our campaigns may not be edgy, they may not go viral, but they don’t force the CEO of the clients we have to issue apologies for the work we did on their behalf.

Charlie Ray is the CEO of digital media agency Broad Street Interactive and has to apologize for his own gaffes a lot, he prefers to not have to do it professionally. Follow him @CharlieDR

I’m excited to visit Amarillo and look forward to a great lunch with the folks out there. I’ve been singing George Strait all morning while I’m packing for my afternoon flight, so I may or may not be wearing Wranglers and boots when I get back to Austin.