Clips by Deborah Branscum
Telephone: 510-962-4776
E-mail: dbranscum at yahoo dot com
Under the Radar, CMO Magazine, December 2004
Four years ago, Tom Dugan's company did some work for Peet's Coffee & Tea by covertly plugging a Peet's promotion online. He'd love to share the names of more recent clients, but none of them, he says, want to speak on the record. "Most of our clients are loath to discuss the work we do for them, because they don't want their competitors to know about it," says Dugan, president of NewGate Internet, which specializes in search engine and grassroots marketing through the Internet.
Then again, it's also possible that Dugan's clients don't want to admit they're paying for chatty postings in Internet forums--the kind that NewGate and similar agencies organize to look like the thousands of casual recommendations swapped daily by forum enthusiasts. After all, it's hard to sneak up on consumers if they see you coming. (Registration required or request copy.).
If you want reality, forget "Survivor." Check out Weblogs: public online journals that can be racy, riveting and alarmingly blunt. The updates--often daily--let fans follow every twist and turn in an author's life. In Tennessee, Meghan O'Hara has been working up the courage to ask Alex out for a date--a mere eight years after she first got a crush on him in high school. In Texas, chest pains sent Noah Grey to the hospital again, and his camera is broken--a blow to the self-described gay, agoraphobic photographer who rarely leaves the home he shares with his mother and two sisters. Writing from the Netherlands, American Rachel James shared an erotic Valentine's Day surprise engineered by her Dutch boyfriend. And it wasn't a teddy. (Paid archive or request copy.)
Max J. Erdstein is a man with a mission. His job is to make the Internet a warm and welcoming place for Google advertisers. Every morning Max the Maximizer, as he's called, strides through the self-consciously hip Google lobby in Mountain View, Calif. He walks past the baby grand, past the collection of lava lamps, the plush red sofas and the glass case of organic juices. He passes the refrigerator stocked with three kinds of organic milk, the big plastic bins filled with dry cereal and the shelves filled with energy bars. Eventually, he arrives at the nondescript space he shares with a new colleague, Jennifer Erdmann. Working back to back, the two put their classic liberal arts educations to work by "optimizing" the ads Google sells to companies looking for a highly targeted audience.
Let others dabble in banner ads, rich media, streaming video, interstitials. Alongside its search results Google serves up nothing but text advertising--24/ 7. "If it didn't work, we wouldn't be advertising," says Lorne Lieberman, marketing director and cofounder of Barewalls Interactive Art in Cambridge, Mass. Barewalls has been in business since 1997 and Lieberman advertises lots of places. Google is his favorite. In fact, he sounds practically giddy when he discusses the company--and he's not alone. (Subscription required or request copy.)