We’re proud to announce the launch of CLUBbuzz, a new social media site designed for lovers of the club life. Members can easily post photos, music and videos of their club experiences and follow updates from their friends as they upload their own moments. Even better, members can find and connect with new friends who share their passion for a club, band or activity by simply searching profiles and interests, or even joining specifically designed groups that include people with the same interests.

This is a brand new, unique social media site. CLUBbuzz is Facebook for the Party World, a place free of haters who keep you from being you! Freely post what matters to you and share it with the people who find it interesting. The site offers the option to join as a member, club owner or vendor. As a member, you have exclusive access to the club world including events, groups and music. Owners and vendors can easily spread the word about upcoming events, post to the interactive job classified section and view a directory of clubs with location information.

Joining the club is currently invite only, but we’re ready to give you a shot! Just fill out your request for an invite. And don’t miss out on your chance to bring the club to you—download the free iPhone app or the Android app. Enjoy the club!

Clockwise from Top Left: Walter, Josh, Luke, Mark

One month ago, Sherman Health announced a new Facebook contest: mustache-growing for men’s health awareness. Deanne wrote about the contest last week, and you can get contest details here, but for this post, I wanted to toot the horns of some mustache submitters who, because of their affiliation with Sherman, are not eligible to win prizes. All mustache scores below are out of a possible 10.

1. Walter

The Man: Walter is Web Art Director and the man we rely on at Demi & Cooper for all things technology. As far as we know, Walter controls the Internet. If you told someone besides Walter to go reset the modem, we’d stare at you with a blank face until you went elsewhere. We literally need Walter to function.

The Mustache: Luckily, Walter does not need his mustache to function. It’s nearly indistinguishable from his skin, which is not ideal. His lips are pursed in the photo above, implying he’s chewing something, he’s super creepy, or both. The hand on the chin tells us he’s thinking about something, most likely prunes.

Also, the name he gave the photo (“You stay classy, Chicago”) reveals a close affiliation to the movie Anchorman, a film whose protagonist was #1 on our Top 5 Movie Mustaches list.

Creepy Score: 7.5

2. Josh

The Man:Josh is Sherman’s Marketing Communications Manager, and a man with a quick wit and an open mind for any idea. His unmustachioed personality is one of the best we could hope to work with.

The Mustache: The smirk is unsettling, as is the black background. This photo may have been taken in an underground lair. Extra credit goes to Josh for going for a creepy look and nailing it (he titled it “Not at all creepy”, which just made my sarcasm detector explode).

Creepy Score: 9.99

3. Luke

The Man: Luke is me, and thus I will stop talking in the third person. I write things at Demi & Cooper, and I am newly married to a beautiful woman who is fully supportive outside of all things mustache.

The Mustache: It’s in black and white not for stylistic purposes, but because of necessity: my mustache in living color is one of the most horrifying things you will ever witness.

I said earlier Walter’s mustache is almost skin-colored, but that’s nothing compared to this. To properly explain, I recently described the mustache to a group of people who were wondering what it looked like as “fleshy”. Eww.

I titled my submission “1950s blog author”, which is funny because blogs did not exist back then, you see. And just like that, I ruined the joke.

Creepy Score: 4 in black and white, 12.5 in color

4. Mark

The Man: Mark is also recently married, to Michelle, Marketing Specialist at Sherman. He is ineligible to win because of his wife’s ties to the contest. Dealbreaker? Dealbreaker.

The Mustache: I cannot stress enough how much more awesome Mark’s mustache is than the previous three.

We’re all friends here, so I’ll shoot straight. I’ve creeped on some of Mark’s Facebook photos. In my defense, whatever, man. Creeping happens. I had no idea that beneath his seemingly clean-cut exterior lay the perfect Hulkamania trucker mustache.

Awesome Score: 10

Want to vote in the Sherman Health Movember Mustache Contest? All you need is a Facebook profile. Click here to get started, and remember not to vote for Walter, Josh, Luke, or Mark.

Someone’s watching you — and who you are determines what they’ll show you.

In malls, health clubs, gas stations and even grocery stores, small cameras are being embedded in the screen or hidden around it to track the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity – and can change the ads it displays to those ads that are aimed at that demographic.

That could mean hardware ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens. Crazy, huh?

And even if the ads don’t change to match the viewer’s demo, the technology’s ability to determine and record this info in general market terms is important for advertisers who want to know how effectively they’re reaching their target audience at any given location.

While the technology remains in limited use, advertising people say it is finally beginning to live up to its promise. The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined. With hair styles on today’s youth, the system is probably more accurate than I would be.

Demographics, but no individual information

Remember “Minority Report”? Tom Cruise’s character enters a mall where a retinal scanner identify him and greet him by name. Well, it’s a little like that, but people are not identified by name. They’re just categorized by how they look.

Using this technology, a screen might show a truck ad for a group of men but switch to a minivan ad when women and children are spotted in the frame by the hidden cameras.

Anyone concerned with privacy?

Because face tracking might scare people (think “big brother”), manufacturers are hurrying to offer reassurances. When the systems capture an image of a person watching the screen, a computer instantly analyzes it for specified variables. The systems’ manufacturers say that nothing is ever stored and no identifying information is ever associated with the pictures, thus making the system less intrusive than a surveillance camera that records what it sees right now. At least that’s the manufacturer’s take.

How does it work?

In general, a sensor or camera in or near the screen identifies viewers’ faces by analyzing shapes, colors and the movement. The concept is similar to the way consumer cameras now can automatically make sure faces are in focus. Yes, those little boxes that make pictures so good are now coming back to haunt us.

When the system focuses in on a face, it compares shapes and patterns to those that are already identified in a database as male or female, thus allowing the system predict the person’s gender almost immediately.

“The most important features seem to be cheekbones, fullness of lips and the gap between the eyebrows,” said Paolo Prandoni, chief scientific officer of Quividi, a French company that is also developing the technology. Others include Studio IMC Inc. in New York.

The companies say their systems have become very good at determining a viewer’s gender, but age is not so simple. Currently, the software can group age in only the broadest terms – teens, younger to middle-aged adults and seniors. The companies developing this technology acknowledge that determining a person’s ethnicity is more challenging than figuring out his or her gender and age range.

Is It Accurate?

It may never be more accurate than it is now, but we should never say “never”. And anyway, even 70% accuracy is better than what is out there now. Think about it: If you’re advertising housing to empty-nesters, you can choose to have your ad seen in a mall by everyone who passes, or take a shot at targeting the ad to those in your demo. Even if you miss 50%, the other 50% will see your message — and only they will see it.

According to the Daily Online Examiner, only 58% of adults younger than 30 say they watch TV almost every day, while 23% of those under 20 say they watch television only a few times a week. That’s according to new research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Among older adults, the numbers are higher. Seventy-two percent of people age 30-49 watch TV almost every day, as do 80% of those 50-64 and 89% of those 65 and older.

These stats make it clear that, while advertisers aiming to reach people older than 29 can still count on television, those trying to reach consumers in the 18-29 bracket need to consider placing ads elsewhere. Which is one reason why the faltering economy might not be completely devastating for online media. Yes, a struggling Yahoo is expected to lay off 1,500 workers this week. Yes, ad networks like AdBrite are shedding staff while others, like JellyCloud, are closing altogether. And, yes, some start-ups are in cost-cutting mode.

But, ultimately, consumers continue to spend time online, and advertisers have no realistic choice other than to follow them.

Independent of the Pew study, The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about the growing number of adults who have stopped paying for cable TV because they can watch any programs they want online. Presidential debates can now be streamed live, shows on cable channels like MTV are available for free streaming, and the best moments from “Saturday Night Live” can be viewed on demand at Hulu.com and NBC.com.

If people had already started canceling their cable subscriptions before the recent economic events, it’s easy to imagine that more will do so in a recession. And that means that Internet video, which already commands some of the highest CPMs out there, will grow in popularity. Current predictions are that the market could reach $1 billion by 2010, but that could turn out to be an underestimate if more people than expected stop watching TV.

Additionally, as people spend more time online, search advertising also is likely to continue to grow. Many Web users now view search engines, and not portals, as the gateway to the Web; when those people go online, they start at Google, Yahoo or another company’s search engine. Just last week, Google reported that second quarter profit grew 26%, showing that paid search is holding up very well, even as the rest of the economy teeters.

Below is an excellent article/interview written by Steve Smith for “Behavioral Insider” concerning the future of TV advertising. While none of this affects us now, it is interesting to see where things are heading and even more fun deciding what to do with this knowledge if the plan comes to fruition. Read on . . .

AT OMMA BEHAVIORAL (conference) in July, 2008, former TACODA Chairman Dave Morgan advised the industry he helped proselytize, if not invent, that the next frontier for behavioral tracking was the living room. Addressable TV promises to bring Internet-like interactivity and marketing accountability to the set top box.

As cable, telco, and satellite providers all start migrating TV delivery to IP-based systems, we can imagine an infrastructure where individual TV screens can be tracked and segmented in much the way Web traffic is today.

But what is the status of these interactive TV technologies? The undisputed guru of ITV is Mitch Oscar, executive vice president, Televisual Applications, MPG. For years at Carat, and now at MPG, Oscar is renowned for his research into bleeding edge ITV platforms and consulting work on many systems. On occasion, he gathers nascent technologies for presentation to gatherings of agency professionals and the press. In a lengthy discussion with us recently, he walked through the history of interactive TV technologies, the state of the model, and the hurdles he sees to moving forward with the platform. In this first part of the interview, Oscar outlines the major players and some interesting learnings from early trials. Next week he explores the kinds of targeting possible in addressable TV and the limits of behavioral tracking on the platform.

Behavioral Insider: Interactive TV and addressable set top boxes seem to be a technology that has been promised for a long time, with a lot of fits and starts. How has it evolved?

Mitch Oscar: It’s never been linear. But every time a technology gets launched, whether it succeeds or fails, we learn something from it. WINK was one of the most notable failures. It went to about 8 or 9 million homes through DirecTV. While people watched, a banner ad would come up with which they could interact. Do you want a coupon, someone to call you, or do a study, etc.? So we have a lot of companies now that are attempting things in the particular addressable environment. There is Invidi Technologies, Navic, Visible World, and OpenTV. Each is at a different phase and has different applications.

Visible World is involved in a trial with CableVision in Brooklyn. Invidi is with Comcast in Baltimore. OpenTV had done a Comcast in Huntsville. Those companies are addressable with video. So there is no interactivity. The consumer doesn’t know that somehow they are being targeted. They just know they are getting commercials and it is regular TV viewing.

Then there is Navic, which doesn’t work with video but works with an overlay. You watch a commercial, and a banner may come up and ask, do you want to know more information or get a coupon or a call? You click on it and there is either a response or a micro-site. And that is addressable to about 10 million homes right now. And those are the two models we see moving forward right now. Hopefully, they will intermingle at some point where you can have a video commercial and interactive elements attached to it. I also think EchoStar does an iAd application that is at least in five million homes.

BI: On a logistical level, can any of these applications just be layered onto existing set top boxes, or do they require new technologies installed?

Oscar: They require injection. It’s about middleware. None of these is built into the set top box but does have to be in the future. Right now it is root canal. Historically with cable, there is a bunch of legacy boxes from 10,000 systems. So although there are six major operators there was once 10,000 individual systems, each with a different box and different middleware.

Uniformity of cost is one problem. The second is bandwidth. How much can you put into a box, and what can it tolerate? The third is your own cost and bandwidth. The fourth is, how much is it worth? If I invest in all of this, then what kind of premiums will advertisers pay?

BI: Will they? Do we have any insight yet about whether the added functionality will benefit marketers?

Oscar : Unfortunately in our business the operators want the advertisers to invest by purchasing at premium cost and they can’t give us leadership as to what might happen. They can tell us what the technology can do, but they can’t give us guidance as to the experience. With the Navic or overlay technology a banner or overlay will come up over the commercial as it begins to play. We did one experiment and we had to wait 10 seconds in a 30-second commercial before we introduced the banner. With the creative in the commercial it just didn’t fit anyplace. We found that we got a response rate of 33% less because we lost those 10 seconds. Now, someone should be able to tell me that.

BI: Are you seeing initial results from response rates involving frequency and the context of the ads?

Oscar: One example involved TiVo. When you do a campaign for TiVo you generally buy one week at a time. We discovered that if you buy two weeks and use the same creative, there is really very little deliverable in the second week. With the Navic technology we just finished an experiment in a four-week campaign. After the first two weeks of running a schedule the number of responses decreased dramatically. We also learned that for interactivity, even when you are targeting, news programming doesn’t seem to do well in terms of responses. It doesn’t mean that news programming is wrong for a campaign. If someone saw enough branded commercials maybe they will be interactive on another one [elsewhere].

BI: Have you run into any privacy issues with these systems yet?

Oscar: There is also something called the double opt-in. Cable satellite, and telcos are very concerned about privacy. There is a 1984 privacy act that says if you violate a consumer’s privacy then there is a $500 a day fine per set top box. So they want to be very careful. We did one experiment for Hyundai asking if viewers wanted a dealer to call. After the person clicked on yes then there was another banner that said please confirm that you did say yes. We lost 75% of the people who clicked on the first one. So the question was, I know we are concerned about privacy, but do we really want to lose 75% of our interaction because of this? What could we do? All these things the cable industry and telcos should be experimenting with and coming to the advertiser to say these are things we discovered. When you advertise with us, here is some guidance for you. They really haven’t done that. So that is also holding it up.

I wrote in an earlier post about the shrinking newspaper audience, but here’s some good news about another traditional media that isn’t going away.

According to Business Week, August 17, 2008, fewer Americans are reading newspapers and are instead getting their news online, but television remains the leading source of news in the country.

Not surprisingly, younger people tend to get more of their news on the Internet, while older folks use traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Pew Research Center’s biannual survey on news consumption habits said.

Pew said the results show an increasing shift toward online news consumption, but that there is now a sizable group of a more engaged, sophisticated and well-off people that use both traditional and online sources to get their news.

The Pew researchers referred to these people as “integrators,” and says they account for 23 percent of those surveyed, spending the most time with the news on a typical day.

“Like Web-oriented news consumers, integrators are affluent and highly educated. However they are older, on average, than those who consider the Internet their main source of news,” the survey said.

It is this group that advertisers typically like to target, which helps explain why newspaper publishers have seen sharp declines in ad revenues as spending shifts online.

Pew found that the largest group of news consumers — 46 percent of those polled — have a “heavy reliance” on television for their news at all times of the day. This group is the oldest, with a median age of 52, and least affluent, with 43 percent unemployed. They are unlikely to own a computer or go online for news.

Overall, among those who get some of their news from TV, fewer are watching the 6:30 broadcast network newscasts, and instead opting for cable news sources such as CNN or Fox News Channel. CNN’s audience is now majority Democratic, while 39 percent of Fox News viewers are Republicans, 33 percent Democrats, with the remainder independent or didn’t specify.

The group that relies most on the Internet for news is the youngest at a median age of 35. It is also the smallest, at 13 percent of those polled. Fewer than half of them watch television news on a regular basis. Eighty percent of this group has a college education and they are twice as likely to read an online newspaper than a printed version.

The emergence of this group and the shift among integrators online led to an overall decline in the percentage of people who said they read a newspaper the day before, to 34 percent from 40 percent two years ago, the researchers found. That is also reflected in a shift in the industry that has seen circulation figures slip in recent quarters.

The beneficiary of less print newspaper consumption has been other online news sources, with about 25 percent of the people surveyed saying they go to an Internet site for news at least three times a week. That’s up from 18 percent in the 2006 survey.

Pew found that consumers of online news tend to be more educated than those who get their news from traditional sources, with 44 percent of college graduates saying they read news online every day. Just 11 percent of those who topped out with a high school education go online for news.

About one-third of those younger than 25 said they get no news on a typical day, up from about 25 percent in 1998.

The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. It polled 3,615 adults 18 years or older by telephone between April 30 and June 1, and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

So what does this mean? Advertisers trying to reach what Pew calls “integrators” should include TV news in their buys. This includes any healthcare organization, as well as home builders or banks who market to older consumers who are influential. But remember that that same market also tends to go online — so while a broad message can be delivered through TV News, a banner ad on news sites may work in tandem to deliver a prospect to your website.

While establishing and managing Facebook pages for our clients, we discovered the advertising side of this social media that allows us to present messages for our clients to a very targeted group of people. What separates most social media advertising from traditional online advertising (such as banners on newspaper websites) is that you pay per click versus per impression. Facebook is a pay per click.

Those of you with vocal CFOs know the value of having hard data to support your advertising decisions. This is one easy way. Each ad on Facebook can be targeted by age, marital status, hobbies, interests and location to name a few so your ad will be seen by mostly those who fit your target market. So if 2,000 people see your ad, it’s a good chance that many of them are in your market and that exposure is good for your brand. What’s even better is that you only pay for those who click on your ad and get driven to your site (preferably a landing page, but that will be a later post).

Think of this as if you have a retail store in a large mall. If you place an ad in the mall directory, you pay for it based on how many people will see it regardless of how many people are led to your store. But if your ad were on a Facebook page in the mall, you’d only pay for it if the viewer of the ad actually came into your store. Makes sense, huh? And to keep your budgets in line, you can establish daily or monthly advertising spending limits so you’re not caught off guard by a large response.

The key to this type of marketing is what you make the viewer do once they get to your site. If you’re like most advertisers, your site is like a retail store open 24/7 without any salespeople allowing any visitor to look around, compare, and do whatever they want anonymously. But since you’re paying money through Facebook to get those people to your site, you must put more emphasis on capturing some information from that visitor.

Nowadays, a basic “contact us” form means nothing. It’s likely that most people don’t want to contact you either because they found what they want or because they don’t want to be bothered. So instead, we like to add other links for the viewer to “subscribe” or “stay informed” or “receive valuable web only offers”. Those links go to a basic email signup form which, when completed by the viewer, allows us to communicate with him or her on various subjects via eblasts and blogs in order to build a relationship toward a future sale.

With the sales cycle in most industries getting longer, building relationships and maintaining communication with prospective clients is critical. So while we recommend Facebook advertising for all its positive attributes, we also stress that the results will be weak if your website doesn’t work hard to capture contact information from those who click through the ads to your site.

By now, we’ve all heard about the death of newspapers as a marketing medium (although I strongly disagree with the term “death” since I believe print will play a decent role for advertisers for at least five more years and then will play more of a specific role reaching certain demographics) and the power of the internet to cost-effectively reach customers. While there certainly has been a large shift in ad dollars to the web (we’ve seen excellent results from banner ads, etc.), we must recognize that web marketing by itself poses the same problems as utilizing any other medium exclusively. The point here is to mix the media — but make them work together.

If you want proof that TV can generate response, take a look at our effort for 1555 South Wabash in Chicago (1555 South Wabash Chicago ). While we didn’t produce the site itself (one look and you’ll see why I wrote that), we did insert the TV spot we produced. You see, print was ineffective, especially when the cost was considered. Web banners helped, but unless the banners were geotargeted, we saw a lot of waste in impressions and clicks. So for this community in the south loop area, we produced and ran a tv spot on cable TV in the areas surrounding the community. That spot ended with a special domain name used to track the results (you could only know about the web address if you saw the TV spot). This was the step approach: see TV spot. Go online to website. Schedule appointment. Receive confirmation. Visit sales office.

We budgeted a modest amount that included everything — production, media and the website, and have just ended the flight. Despite the short run, this was more effective than anything else done for the community since the Grand Opening.

Key to this approach was the web site which is really a landing page ( http://www.1555wabashchicago.com/ ). While it is all trackable, the most important element was the appointment scheduler. We knew that anyone looking at the TV spot who wanted information would visit our website. But we didn’t just want them to visit — we wanted them to come in. That’s where the appointment scheduler comes in. But we also wanted their name and info for our eblasts, just so we could stay in touch.

You see, the easier we can make it for people to fulfill our goal (in this case, schedule an appointment), the more likely it is that we’ll get people to work with us. The site was intentionally sparse — no floorplans, no area amenities, etc. since the key points were covered in the TV spot. But what happened? The first days the site was live and the TV spots ran, two appointments were made. What’s even more impressive was that the domain recorded more traffic in the first two weeks than the main website itself had in the three months before the spot ran. All for about half the cost.

So if you’re looking to focus exclusively on internet marketing, beware. You’ll be missing a lot of your market that simply won’t catch your online messages.

Here’s some research I’ve uncovered related to newspapers and their websites. What’s important to note is that your results from newspaper advertising (which are likely down) does not necessarily mean that newspapers are worthless. Rather, it’s possible that although people are seeing your ads, they do not perceive the need to act now. Here’s the data:

According to the 2008 Readership Institute, Northwestern University tracking study of newspaper and online readership in 100 U.S communities, reported by Mary Nesbitt, Readership Behavior Scores (calculated on a 1-7 scale) among the general adult population have averaged 3.4 over the last six years, with variations likely due, in whole or part, to seasonal variations. With non-readers out of the mix, readers of the local daily newspaper registered a 4.7 score this year, a level that has actually risen slowly since the first measurement in 2002.

Some of the key findings of the study are reported by the writer as follows:

• Readership among 18-24-year-olds in the general population continues to slowly decline; but the habit is fairly stable for 45-plus
• People who read newspapers say they spend, on average, 27 minutes with them on weekdays, and 57 minutes on Sundays. The first figure has stayed stable, but the latter figure has been slowly dropping since 2002
• Readers continue to engage with the newspaper, on average, more than five days a week
• On average they complete 60 percent of the paper on weekdays and 62 percent on Sundays, also stable habits says the write

The penetration of newspaper Web sites is still quite low in most communities, though it should be noted that only the main sites were measured, not related sites whose ownership consumers might not recognize.

62 percent of respondents said they had never visited the local newspaper’s Website, and only 14 percent said they had visited between the last seven to 30 days, numbers that have improved only a little over the last five years. The Site Usage Measurement (SUM) score for the general population is only 1.26 on a 1-7 scale. When non-users are removed from the sample, Web site users score 2.54.

Readers are more engaged with print than with the Web site, according to the report, with ratings for four experiences that are significantly higher for the newspaper than for the site:

• “gives me something to talk about”
• “looks out for my interests”
• “ad usefulness”
• “touches and inspires me”

The trends are clear, concludes the writer, that low-reading groups continue to take their low-reading habits with them as they age. The very youngest adults have media and news habits very different from their parents. For the first time in six years RBS scores are dropping among people who also look at the newspaper’s Website.

So what does it mean to advertisers? Well, don’t count out print paper for reach. I believe that today’s tough market conditions has led to less direct results from advertising, rather than the commonly held belief today that print newspapers’ days are over. What needs to be revised is our expectations that print newspapers will deliver immediate results. Give it time, but of course, be sensitive to the overall budget.

I gave some serious thought to this question over the past year, understanding clearly that blogging was a growing communication tool. After all, we create, write and manage blogs for our clients, so why wouldn’t I practice what we preach (to be fair, Jim Tome from my office has been an active blogger for a while now)? I wasn’t concerned about coming up with enough content. Those who know me understand that I’m not short on words. My fear was the time commitment necessary to make my blog a valuable resource for marketers who take the time to read it.

You see, I came across many blogs that got off to a fast start, but failed to keep the author’s own attention to the point that the most recent entry was months ago. Not only does that blogger look bad, but the company itself looks bad. That hit to my firm’s reputation is not something I was at all interested in feeling.

Obviously I’ve decided to blog. And I can assure you that I’ll keep up with it.

In addition to being enjoyable for anyone who likes to write, blogging lets our current clients know what we’re thinking about before we even present it to them. It helps them understand why we recommend what we recommend, and what leads us to change course in things like web stat software, TV spot doughnuts, print media, etc.

For potential clients, blogging helps them know who we are and what we know so that they might consider including us in a discussion about their marketing needs. Blogs build name recognition, and enhance our brand. It allows potential clients who are searching similar subjects on the net to “find” us (due to some complex tagging work on our part). But most important, blogs give potential clients an anonymous way to stay familiar with an agency that they might want to talk with in the future.

So read away ’til your hearts content. Comment where ever and whenever you think necessary. Dialog is good here. In fact, it’s really the point. If you’ve experienced something different or similar, post your comments. It won’t hurt. You won’t get a call from us. And it will be greatly appreciated.