Nike’s latest worldwide project “The Human Race 10 K” unites a million runners, amateur and professional alike, in 25 cities around the world. The goal of the race is get you to run, to contribute to a good cause. When you register for the Human Race you can choose one of 3 foundations. The UN Refugee Agency, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, or the World Wildlife Foundation).  Then, you accumulate miles while training for the event (and at the 10K event). These miles will be converted into donations for the foundation you chose at registration. Of course there’s a business aim of this huge campaign. Nike informed people about the new Nike+ that allows you to measure the distance you run, know how many calories you’e burned, listen favorite music while running. With the Nike+widgets, you can share your workout scores with the rest of  the world in addition to getting helpdul information with the iGoogle widget. Nike is completely using Web 2.0

In addition, Armstrong Livestrong bracelet (yellow silicone gel bracelet sold raise money for cancer research)  itself is a buzz marketing project, so it supports web 2.0 strategies. Therefore, it’s a good idea to include Armstrong foundation in this project ( As a reminder these yellow bracelets are also very popular with their fake ones:). And, Austin is included in these famous 25 cities because Armstrong Foundation is based in Austin. This information is for the ones who has no idea where and what Austin is:)

Adjix is a URL shortener but at the same those who sign up to use it. Adjix caters to what it calls a growing need for short Web addresses. People not only send addresses by e-mail, they increasingly use text messaging on cell phones, which has very limited space. In addition, long links may not work when you send them in an e-mail because they wrap from one line to the next.

Adjix is not only a link shortener, but if you’ve logged into your free Linker account on the Adjix website you can track who has clicked on your links plus you earn revenue from the Adjix ads which run when your shortened link is clicked.

How it works for Adjix linkers:

When linkers log in and create links they can get paid when people click on their links. Adjix does this by allowing linkers to share in our ad revenue. Linkers receive $0.0001/link impression and $0.20/ad click-through.

How it works for Adjix Advertisers:

Advertisers can be a part of the Adjix ad network by creating simple text ad campaigns for free and when they’re ready to go live they can just add funds into their account. Ads created by an Adjix advertiser scroll into the top of each Web page created by a linker. For advertisers it costs $0.00035/ad impression and $0.75/ad click-through.

As a conclusion, this is really a simple way to make money, especially while tweeting. You can’t write more than 140 words on Twitter, so you have to shorten your message on Twitter.  At that point Adjix is an urgent need. Even the ads on the top might me annoying, it’s still a wonderful way to reach target in the presence of powerful social networks like Twitter.

Marissa Mayer who is Google’s Vice President of Search Product and one of the public faces of Google, interviewed with Venturebeat about Google’s interest in social search and their future plans in that area. She says that Google has different ideas to implement social search. Some of them are,

Labelling: With labeling, Google users could annotate the search results and those notes could then be shared with friends on their social network or with others like them.

Other user like you: Google takes a page from Amazon’s book, and adding “others like you searched for …” or “other people who did this search also did searches…” to Google’s search results.

Social Network Integration: To identify your friends and allow them to influence search results. For example, if someone has 300 friends on Facebook, and this person knew 10 of them all searched for one topic today, that might interest him.

Social-Influenced PageRank: People would attribute more authority to the pages that their friends have visited. So if Google took Web History and allowed that data to influence rankings, so that pages that your friends have visited were now bumped up in your search ranking, that that might be a good augmentation to something like personalized search.

Other people powered search engine services are,

mahalo.com provides search results edited and submitted users and paid guides.

wikia.com is based on the concept of Wikipedia, allows users to edit the search results.

eurekster.com is a do-it-yourself search engine, or swicki, allows you to define sites you want to search, post the results on your blog or website, and get a cut of any search ads your audience clicks on. It has global reach in over 15 countries.

It seems delivering the right message to the right person will be much more effective with social search engines.

Trafo, provides direct and interactive marketing services for Rafineri. Trafo is doing online branding, creative strategies management, digital design, viral and guerrilla marketing, trend watching. Different from other interactive agencies,  event and organization management is one of their services. Some of its clients are Bridgestone, Lassa, Renault, Akbank, Is Bankasi, MSN, Microsoft, Intel, Sony Playstation, Boyner, T-box, Beymen, Hurriyet and Mey Icki.

Magiclick,is a professional e-services company. They’re doing creative design and development for websites, relational database design, programming and management, content management, feedback management, e-mail marketing, e-commerce, personalization and advergaming. Some of the clients are Abdi Ibrahim Pharma, Danette, Efes Pilsen, Fortis, Finansbank, Akbank, HSBC, Yapi Kredi, Borusan Holding, Sabanci Group, Vestel Group, Kale Group, Vestel, Elidor and Whirlpool. It has 9 awards at Golden Spider Awards (Altin Orumcek), 2007.

41-29 is another agency focused on digital marketing. I guess 41-29 is less than 2 years old, but they have a real fame in the industry, especially after Kristal Elma awards. Some of the clients are Ulker, Beko and Levi. I’m sure they have other clients that I don’t know. They have several awards from Horizon Interactive Awards.

Rabarba provides interactive services for Alameti Farika. There’s something secret about them, and don’t know why. Some of the clients I know  Petrol Ofisi, Turkcell and Garanti.

Project House defines itself not only as a marketing firm, also a consultancy house or a technology creator. Some of the services are advergaming, interactive marketing, mobile marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, web analytics, database management, interactive media planning, desktop marketing tools and content management. Some of the clients are Coca Cola, Adidas, Four Seasons, Sony Ericsson, Rixos, Shaya, Petrol Ofisi, Olay, Microsoft, Toyota, Mercedes Benz, Avon and P&G.

C-Section is doing microsites, banner ads, facebook applications (like any other interactive agencies), websites, MSN applications and advergames. Some of the clients are Istanbul Modern Museum, Fiat, Anadolu Hayat, Arcelik, Milliyet, Beko and Ford.

Digital Mccann is the digital agency of McCann Erickson Turkiye and founded in 2007. They’re doing almost everything including microsites, websites, animation, advergame, content management, digital strategic planning, media planning, desktop marketing tools and all the other technological needs of an interactive campaign. Some of the clients are Intel, Loreal, Coca Cola, Goodyear, Saab, Becks, Lufthansa, Exxon Mobil, Cnbc-e, Radio Eksen and Capital Radio.

The other interactive agencies might be checked are Adinteractive, Litespell and Manadigital.

Awards are not the only criteria to decide the best interactive agencies for sure, however, at least to have an idea about the interactive agencies in Turkey, I should mention Kristal Elma 2008 awarded interactive agencies. 41-29 had two Kristal Elma awards, the best corporate web site award, Levis.com.tr and the best advergame, Ulker Coco Star. Rabarba had two awards, the best microsite, Garanti and the best online ad with Petrol Ofisi. And, C-Section had the best microsite award with Arcelik.

I think, in addition to microsites, web sites, advergames and  banner ads, interactive agencies should do more work on RSS advertising, search engine marketing, social search engine marketing and mobile marketing. Especially, in the very near future, there’ll be a booming in PDA’s with Vodafone’s Iphone launch in Turkey.

I should definitely write someting about Obama, especially after his gorgeous Berlin talk. Obama is not a president yet, just a presidential candidate, but his speech had the same effect with former famous Berlin speakers, Ronald Reagen and Kennedy. Thousands of fans watched him there.

Obama campaign has been one of the best organized and executed presidential campaigns in memory. How is Obama using media to affect people?

-He does Twitter. Obama Twitter followers’re getting all the updates online and on your mobile.

-He’s the most involved politician with social networking. He’s got a profile on Facebook, Youtube and Myspace.

- Using web, his website, simple and effective.

- “Yes, you can” video which is spreading around, kind of buzz.

- Barack Obama’s campaign will be among the TV sponsors of NBC Universal’s Olympics coverage. the Obama campaign has taken a $5 million package of Olympics spots that includes network TV as well as cable ads.

I added a photo from the debate night with Hillary Clinton at my school, the University of Texas at Austin.

I can’t imagine my blog without an Austin tag.

South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) takes place in Austin every spring. It’s a set of film, music and interactive festival and one of the famous ones in the U.S. I couldn’t attend in 2008 because, the tickets of interactive section range from 250$ to 450$, which is unbelievable.

In 2008, some of the key speakers were Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Frank Warren (PostSecret Project), Henry Jenkins (MIT Comperative Media Studies) and Steven Johnson, author of a bestseller “Everything Bad is Good For You”.

Zuckerberg talked about Beacon, a part of Facebook’s advertisement system that sends data from external websites to Facebook. It enables customers to share the actions they take on the other websites with their Facebook friends. Facebook Beacon works through the use of a 1×1 GIF web bug on the third-party site and Facebook cookies. Clearing Facebook cookies from your browser after explicitly logging-off from Facebook will prevent the third-party site from knowing your Facebook identity. I think mentioning the Facebook Beacon partners such as Ebay, Blockbuster, NY Times, Travelocity helps us understand the power of this application.  An internet cliche works here as Zuckerberg said “someone you care about is doing something, that’s much more effective.”

A Clickz article said that t0hirty-four percent of global respondents to a March social media survey from Universal McCann said they had “ever” subscribed to an RSS feed.

The top media company Starcom Worldwide mentioned that there are the creative limits of RSS advertising including Flash, IFrames and JavaScript.Therefore, companies like Pheedo are offering non-traditional advertising ways for RSS feeds. Some benefits of RSS advertising discussed by Pheedo are desirable demographics ( becuause they’re active online), word of mouth effect, reaching the most loyal and dedicated readers, reaching unreachables.

Even, RSS advertising has been constrained by the dominance of FeedBurner, acquired by Google a year ago, it seems it will be very profitable and popular in the near future, especially because of the big change in Internet users’ habits.

AdMob is one of the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, offering solutions for both discovery and monetization on the mobile web. AdMob has several campaign several strategies for mobile advertising such as clicking to call that lets a mobile subscriber call your nearest retail outlet or call center with a single click from your ad. Another example is store locator option. It allows customers enter their zip code within the ad unit itself to find your locations nearest them. There are many other ways to capture the target audience. Fortune 500 companies are taking advantage of AdMob. Therefore, it worths to check out AdMob’s website to see the latest trends on mobile advertising.

To have it, you need to install ad-art and use Firefox. I tried to download it, but it did not work with Firefox 3.

One more thing, even this is an anti-advertising project, I think it will increase the efficiency of banner advertisements. Normally, many people find them disturbing, however, this time people might think that they will see an artwork and give their attention to it. However, instead of it, they will come across with with a real banner ad which will be tricky for them.

Last semester, I was interning at a well known Hispanic-targeted advertising agency. Why I was there?

- First, I got my acceptance from this agency without knowing any Spanish word:)

-Second, I was in Texas and the Hispanic population is really high in Texas (second after California).

At the agency, I was working on a new culturally relevant strategy for an automotive brand that targets national Hispanic market in the United States. While working on this campaign, one more time I noticed that, Mexicans and Turks are very similar to each other culturally and physically. ( When I was in Mexico, everybody was thinking I’m a Latino, even the police holding my passport).

Hispanics are early adopters of mobile data services, especially text messaging and more involved to use social networking sites than any American. Because of immigration, they want to keep in touch with family back in Latin America. Also, family and friends are very important for them, like in Turkey. As I know, text messaging is the most expensive way of using cell-phones in the U.S. Therefore, I don’t know why they’re using text messaging so often. Maybe, like us, they’re thinking it’s cheaper. Anyway, at the end of all these studies, I found a couple of good websites for mobile marketing strategies.

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/

http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/