1896 was a big year – the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece; the first x-ray was taken, and, of course, The ADVERTISING Club of New York was born. Located in the heart of Manhattan, The ADVERTISING Club is the industry’s premier venue for networking and creativity and professional development. As such, the club plays a vital role in cultivating advertising professionals of tomorrow and supporting the thought leaders of today.

While The ADVERTISING Club may be best known for the International Andy Awards, which recognize creativity and innovation in advertising around the world, it has garnered its most recent attention for its “I’mPART” initiative, which celebrates diversity within the advertising and marketing industry and works to recruit a wide variety of fresh young voices and talent to the business. That goal is embedded in last four letters of the name – Promote, Attract, Retain, and Train. I’mPART was recently featured in The New York Times, which celebrated I’mPART’s success in making the advertising industry more inclusive and more reflective of the diverse and increasingly global market it is trying to reach.

The Way I See It:

  • I see The ADVERTISING Club remaining an important pillar within the industry, and a symbiotic relationship forming between the older and younger generations. We will continue to see millennials mentoring the older generation on emerging technology and how to best implement it, and the older generation providing seasoned advice that only experience can provide.
  • I see The ADVERTISING Club playing a strong role in continuing change within the industry on the topic of diversity, not just from a race and ethnicity perspective, but a gender one as well.
  • I see The ADVERTISING Club paving the way for young people and creating a more inclusive industry.

The Way The Industry Sees It:

I sat down with Gina Grillo, President and Chief Executive Officer of The ADVERTISING Club of New York to discuss the impact the Club has on both the industry and the members.

The ADVERTISING Club (The AD Club) of New York has been engrained within the industry since 1896, and encompasses thousands of industry professionals. In terms of membership, have you seen members you’ve attracted at a young age stay active within the Club throughout the duration of their career? What’s the longevity trajectory like?

Our membership of four thousand strong includes many legacy members who joined The AD Club as young professionals and have grown up and progressed in their career with us over the years. While the industry focuses on recruiting new talent, we see retention as just as big of an issue and believe it is critical to nurture talent after they have entered the field. Part of our mission as an organization is to support members along their career journey – as they move up the ranks – keeping them active both within the industry and within The AD Club. We also have a Young Professionals group that is designed to help advertising, marketing, and media professionals ages thirty and under grow to become tomorrow’s leaders. It is truly inspiring to see this ambitious, philanthropic, and outgoing group of future industry leaders develop themselves as professionals and people.

It’s no secret that The ADVERTISING Club has a myriad of impressive initiatives. Are there any initiatives that the Club is especially proud of?

Advertising is about experimentation in communication. It is the business of inventing ideas to be discussed, debated, assessed, and adjusted daily. The AD Club exists to support this process through a number of initiatives around our core pillars – access, creativity, professional development, and diversity. We are proud of our efforts in all of these areas, but I am especially proud of our diversity initiative, i’mPART. It’s our belief that diversity of people, ideas, culture, and craft is a major driver of creativity and creates better work in our business. i’mPART is a fundraising effort that aims to raise awareness of the benefits of diversity and support the nation’s leading diversity programs.  i’mPART employs an acronym that represents the four pillars of the initiative – to Promote, Attract, Retain and Train diverse talent. It’s a movement to make diversity a priority and increase accountability for this issue through a ten-year-long benchmarking survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which will track the progress of diversity programs to ensure long-term success. We are committed to supporting diversity of thought and seek to inspire a diverse mindset in the advertising industry.

Continue Reading Creativity is Poppin’ in New York’s The ADVERTISING Club

There were significant changes in almost every aspect of the law relating to advertising, marketing and promotions in 2013, and Davis & Gilbert published a piece entitled, “2013 Lessons Learned and 2014 Practical Advice.” This piece explains and discuss what happened, and offer suggestions for advertisers and agencies to think about and address in 2014.…

Let’s say a senior at MIT is about to graduate with a double major in Computer Science and Comparative Media Studies. Career Services tells the student, “You can make six figures at a Manhattan consulting firm, or you can apply to ‘Venture for America.’ Oh, and if selected by Venture for America, you will be sent to a city in need of entrepreneurs. There you will make less than $40,000 a year working for a start-up.” Which would you choose as your first job?  Fortunately, in 2013, hundreds of America’s best and brightest college students chose the latter and applied for the seventy fellowships offered by Venture for America.

Venture for America is the brainchild of entrepreneur Andrew Yang. Yang saw the Ivy League-to-hedge fund/investment bank/consulting firm conveyor belt and thought, “What a waste of talent.” Venture for America re-allocates that talent to where it has the potential to do the most good. Specifically, start-up companies in mid-sized cities across the country that are trying to revitalize their local economies. Recent college graduates receive invaluable experience that they would likely not get at a large, established company, and the start-ups are provided with access to talent they otherwise probably would not have the resources to recruit.

Among the many interesting projects Venture for America has supported is “SocialProvidence,” a social media analytics and consulting company based in Rhode Island, that is supervised by executives from HavasPR, but is run day-to-day by two Venture for America fellows. One of SocialProvidence’s main selling points is that digital natives – like the two young men running the company – have a much more intuitive and accurate sense of what kinds of social media marketing techniques will be most effective.

The Way I See It

  • I see a growing intersection between start-up culture and community development. Some of that is driven by a consumer niche that wants to buy local products and have real relationships with the people whose businesses they patronize. But a lot of it is driven by the genuine desire of a certain class of entrepreneur to use their business as a way of building community.
  • I see a millennial generation that is really driven by a sense of connection. They want to feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves. Millennials are one of the reasons that community service has become such a big deal on college campuses. Venture for America has certainly tapped into that spirit.
  • I see entrepreneurship gaining in popularity among the youth of today, and not just in the sense of entrepreneur as business owner. But embracing the entrepreneurial spirit and building things, creating new ventures, and solving problems.

The Way the Industry Sees It

I sat down with Venture for America CEO, Andrew Yang, to discuss entrepreneurship and his upcoming book, Smart People Should Build Things.

Before you started your own company, you were on the same Ivy League to law/finance/consulting path that you’re trying to knock your Venture for America Fellows out of. What shortcomings did you find in that path?

When I was graduating from college, law, finance, and consulting were the options that were presented to me – mainly because the consulting firms and financial services firms were recruiting heavily at Brown.  It just seemed natural to go down one of these paths on the road to success and prestige.  After becoming a corporate lawyer, I found that it wasn’t a great fit for me because of how narrow and specialized the role was, and that I didn’t enjoy acting as a document reader and deal facilitator.  These “prestige pathways” of finance, law and consulting, as I call them in the book, are still the options that are being presented to college seniors. The professional services firms have millions of dollars to spend recruiting talent on college campuses each year. The salaries and benefits that they can offer are certainly appealing. These kinds of resources are not available to early stage growth companies that are actually creating jobs in this country and are most in need of the nation’s best and brightest minds.

Your last business was a test prep company. What did you see in the students you were working with that made you think that maybe they were open to a different kind of opportunity?

When I was at Manhattan GMAT, I met hundreds of bankers and consultants who were preparing to enroll in business school. Many of them seemed a little lost, like I had been when I realized I no longer wanted to be a lawyer. They would talk about wanting to make a real impact in an organization, and I think they were going to business school often to reset and seek that kind of opportunity.  Our young people want to build things; they just aren’t being presented with the choice to do so. I started Venture for America because I believe that if we provide the path to entrepreneurship to smart, enterprising young people, they will embrace it.  And early returns suggest that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Continue Reading Building the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow: A Candid Discussion with the CEO of Venture for America, Andrew Yang

Concluding the three part prediction series, I turn to Will Smith, Brown Shoe Company’s Chief Marketing Officer, to get his thoughts on what 2014 holds for the retail industry.

2014 Predictions within the Retail Industry and How They Have the Potential to Affect Marketing and Advertising, with Brown Shoe Company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Will…

Continuing with predictions on what the rest of 2014 will hold, I turn to Jon Podany, Chief Marketing Officer for the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), to get his thoughts.

The Way The Industry Sees It

2014 Predictions within the Sports Industry and How They Have the Potential to Affect Marketing and Advertising, with LPGA’s…

It sure didn’t take long for 2014 to shift into high gear.

Little more than two weeks into the New Year, we’re already knee deep in stories with big implications for marketers in the retail sector (charged anything at Target lately?), sports marketing (the ruling on Alex Rodriguez’s suspension for the 2014 season), and the…

It seems youth marketing has always been a hot topic in the advertising world. As young people move from the “discovery” phase of their tween years to the “experimental phase” of young adulthood, they shift from being motivators of their parents’ buying habits to influential consumers in their own right. But today that demographic is extremely important. Not only are today’s young people the first true digital natives and harbingers of how digital media will influence how we all interact with brands, but also, as baby boomers age and their $400 billion in annual consumption slows, retail, food, and entertainment companies are counting on millennials to fill the gap.

One marketer that has been particularly successful in tapping the youth market is Erin Yogasundram, the twenty-one year old founder of Shop Jeen, an online boutique that sells everything from dollar packs of Ouija gum to $530 filigree sunglasses. Yogasundram launched Shop Jeen in March of 2012, while she was a junior at George Washington University (GWU). She started out with posting cell phone photos of new products to Instagram and filling orders out of her dorm room. The Instagram feed and the business were such an immediate hit that Yogasundram walked away from the remainder of her full-ride scholarship at GWU and moved to New York City, where Shop Jeen now has three offices, nine employees, and half a million Instagram followers.

The Way I See It

  • I see a retail industry increasingly focused on millennial and youth marketing. As baby boomers age, their $400 billion in annual consumer spending will fade. The world will turn to millennials to make up the difference.
  • I see a demographic increasingly inclined to shop at multi-brand retailers and to do their shopping online.  According to recent research by Piper Jaffray, roughly eighty percent of teens shop online. Piper Jaffray’s research also confirms millennials’ growing reliance on peer recommendations when making buying decisions.
  • I see a social media market in continued flux as young people gravitate toward new platforms; according to the latest semi-annual Pew survey on teens and social media. While Facebook still has the largest number of teen and millennial users and those users have their largest networks on Facebook, the percentage of teens citing it as their most important social network has fallen by half, from forty-two percent in the fall of 2012 to twenty-three percent in the fall of 2013. In that same period, the percentage of teens citing Instagram as their most important network doubled.

The Way the Industry Sees It

I sat down with Shop Jeen’s founder, Erin Yogasundram, to discuss her brand and how she uses social media to build a customer base.

Where did your initial vision for Shop Jeen come from? What niche or need did you want to fill?

I started the company, junior year, in my dorm room at The George Washington University. I had worked a few internships in the fashion industry in high school as well as during my winter and summer breaks in college.  I was working three part time jobs in retail, and one day I thought, I could do this myself.  I have always been an entrepreneur, and for example I sold autographs online when I was twelve and owned a shoelace selling business in high school. While working retail, I found that I had a keen eye for what would sell well.  I was always suggesting new brands for the stores to carry and had an invisible hand in the buying process.  I had about $2,000 saved from working retail and blew it all on a Celine bag (the bag was very rare, and had a wait list process at the time).  I have always been a workaholic and never a bookworm, so I quickly realized I could have used that money to start a new venture for myself.  I then sold the Celine bag for $3,000, yielding a $1,000 profit!  I decided to pool my money into wholesale purchase orders to fund my new venture.  Initially the site was to be a hub for the “best of Etsy.”  Etsy was gaining popularity, but it was very difficult to navigate and find the good stuff.  I used my keen eye, combined that with my researching skills, and I was able to find the cream of the crop on Etsy.  I negotiated wholesale terms with the sellers on there – most of which did not know what wholesale even meant when I approached them – and Shop Jeen was born.  I coded the original website from trial and error CSS writing.  I sold on campus at every event possible.  And I slowly started bringing on more well-known brands to gain traction and reputation in the industry.  Though we do carry some of the same brands as Bloomingdales, Urban Outfitters, Hot Topic, Bergdorf Goodman, Nasty Gal, Spencer’s Gifts, and ASOS, our curation is what makes us unique. So unique, in fact, that those retailers would not normally be mentioned in the same sentence.

What’s your curation process like? How do you decide what makes it on ShopJeen.com, and how have your decisions affected revenue?

Our Creative Director, Amelia Muqbel, and I work very closely to decide what products are sold, our marketing strategy, our social media voice, the look of our graphics, etc. Everything Shop Jeen stands for is a true representation of the two of us. Luckily, we somehow managed to find each other in this massive world. We share a very unique sense of style, thought-process, and outlook on the world, which is why we work so well together. I think our cohesive mindset comes across when you visit Shop Jeen.  We approach everything from a different angle than everyone else, and I’d say this has aided our success.  We quickly pull apart “competitors’” strategies and try to do the exact opposite.  It sounds crazy, but it’s been working! A lot of retailers are trying to mimic each other in order to come out on top, but if everyone is doing the same thing, how boring is that going to be for the consumer?

Continue Reading Youth Marketing: How the Founder & CEO of Shop Jeen Builds a Customer Base

In just a few short years, DVRs and video-on-demand have dramatically altered how television is watched. In 2006, fewer than two percent of households owned a DVR. Now, more than half do. The use of DVRs has changed along with market-growing penetration. Instead of just being time-shifters, many viewers are effectively becoming collectors, stockpiling so many shows on their DVRs that they don’t have time to watch them all. As a result, they’re also watching shows later, at a time when it’s convenient to them.

As The New York Times reported recently, this fall’s television season saw a surge of viewers watching shows four to seven days after the initial air-date. Broadcasters and cable networks typically base their ad prices on so-called C3 ratings or the amount of viewership over the course of three days of delayed viewing, and view those later impressions as effectively uncompensated.

The Way I See It

  • I see people spending A LOT of time in front of a screen. According to a recent survey from eMarketers, adults in the U.S. spend four hours and thirty-one minutes in front of a television and an additional five hours and sixteen minutes in front of a computer, tablet, or smartphone screen every day.
  • I see some doors opening while others close. While most viewers fast forward through at least some of the commercials on their DVRs and services like Dish’s AutoHop continue to proliferate, many networks are creating apps that allow viewers to easily access their favorite shows on their phones or using dynamic ad insertions to update ads embedded in shows viewers’ access through video-on-demand services.
  • I see a growing integration of TV and social media as viewers use tablets and smartphones to engage with friends or networks while watching TV.
  • I see the very meaning of “watching TV” changing as viewers increasingly access programs from a variety of devices. While televisions still dominate living room viewing, a recent survey by Motorola shows that most bedroom TV viewing now takes place on a tablet.

The Way the Industry Sees It

TargetCast has had great success as an agency helping its clients navigate these churning media waters.  I sat down with Audrey Siegel, TargetCast’s Agency President, to discuss how shifting viewing habits have changed how TV advertising is sold and used.

A lot of the discussion around changing viewing habits has been focused on viewers being able to skip or fast-forward through commercials, or view ads later, because of delayed viewing. Are there other, more subtle trends in viewer behavior that are getting overshadowed by these larger issues? If so, do they represent opportunities?

It is certainly true that increased consumer control over multiple aspects of their viewing behavior has forever changed the medium at its core.  The ability to time-shift viewing is really the tip of the iceberg.  We must now add to time-shifting the viewer’s ability to platform shift, to actually change the location of their viewing as well as the time in which they view a particular program.  In effect, dayparts are becoming intensely personal; “my primetime” supplants generic primetime.  The language around the nature of the viewing experience – at-home, lean-back, me time – must now recognize mobile as well as multiscreen viewing.  All of this viewing, ultimately, will be wrapped in the cloak of digitized delivery, of both ads and programming, and will open up television advertising opportunities for addressable messaging and dynamic creative versioning.  This ultimately will make our most mass medium most personal, promising greater viewer engagement and potentially greater brand engagement as a result.

How have changes in viewing habits altered our ability to track the effectiveness of the advertising that does get seen? What opportunities does that create?

Tracking the effectiveness of TV advertising has long been a promise unfulfilled.  We have settled for surrogates – such as program engagement, ad awareness, and commercial ratings – but in fact have not been able to directly connect television advertising with marketplace effectiveness in the most direct manner.  The increasing digitization of the video medium, as well as the multi-screen nature of program and ad delivery, brings us closer to the realization of effectiveness metrics.  In addition, as we build more complex multi-channel attribution tracking and modeling applications, we will better understand not only the effectiveness of one video channel, (television) but its impact on, and relationship with, other video elements (mobile, online) as well as other messaging channels (search, social).

Continue Reading Changing How We Watch Changes How We Sell

As we reported last year, there’s a new entrant into the “holiday days” tradition – #GivingTuesday. The brainchild of New York’s 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation, #GivingTuesday is a movement to create a national day of giving to kick off the giving season and is celebrated the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.…