Archive for June, 2009

Last week Adam Hermsdorfer, Jake Fields, Cheri Reeves, Jenn Baker, and I attended the 2009 AAF National conference in Washington DC where we accepted a 3rd place Club Achievement award in Communications. The club achievement awards are presented annually to ad clubs and federations who display exceptional accomplishments in club operations. This award wouldn’t be possible without all the people that helped makes graphics & logos, write copy, & maintain our website. Thank you for all of your help & support!

Board Member Spotlight

Gary Ware
Search Marketing Manager
Covario

Gary Ware has been an Ad 2 member for almost two years (or so he thinks) and loves every minute of it. He joined the club to network and experience personal and professional development. However, he also joined because he just felt the need to,

“Hang with people who wouldn’t give me a blank stare when I told them what I do for a living.”

Gary got involved quickly by joining the board in order to learn things he wouldn’t normally do at his day job and has been an integral board member every since. When not working or being a board member rock star, Gary loves bubble baths, playing golf and hanging out in bars after a long day with an ice-cold Corona. He also someday hopes to find an App that lets people have fun without receiving blank stares from people when he tells them he designed an app for the sole purpose of having fun.

Member Spotlight

Anthony Miller
Director of Sales and Marketing
X1FM Network

As one of the newest to join the Ad 2 crew, Anthony joined this month after attending last month’s Start Up or Shut Up. He’s wasting no time and has volunteered to get involved in the 2009-10 Board of Directors by working on Public Service in the media/promotions area.

Although he’s new, Anthony has already realized that,

‘The best thing about Ad 2 is the networking and industry connections that can be made as well as additional industry educational events which helps any industry pro stay up on new and current trends.’

Be sure to introduce yourself to him at the next event!

Drink Drink! Tweet Tweet!

“What are you doing?” We think you should come join us Sat. June 20 for the 3rd Annual Ad2 SD Pub crawl. This year’s theme is going to be Twitter, so we are going to drink & tweet the night away.

When: Sat. June 20
Who: Everyone!
Cost: Members – $5
Non-members – $10

Where: Starts in PB at The Tap Room from 3-4pm.

We will then start moving towards the beach and spend about 45 minutes at each of the following bars:
Tavern
Bubs
Moondoogies
Millers Field
Shore Club

Everyone who joins us will get a Twitter style shirt where you can write in your status. We will also have a Pub Crawl hash tag set up so people can follow our progress. We will be tweeting regularly about where the group is and other random funny stuff!

RSVP Today!

T Shirts Sponsored By

Last months “Startup or Shut-up” event at the Air Condition Lounge was a great time and a valuable learning experience. With a crowd of over 50 people the energy was high and the drinks were flowing. Chuck Longanecker, Micha Mikailian, and Craig Macdonald really got down to details and gave us a intimate perspective on starting and running a new business. They talked about the highs and the lows while stressing in the end of the day it’s all about loving what you do.

There were a lot of takeaways from the event, some of the most notable being:

- only take investment capital when you really need it
- be mindful of business fluctuations, don’t expand too soon
- empower employees
- hire people who believe in your vision
- keep it fun
- don’t email angry
- once you go entrepreneur you you won’t go back

Audience Member Quote:

“It was also great to be able to contrast Chuck and Micha bootstrapping startup knowledge with the early beginning of Craig VC funded operation. ”
-Jeff Weinberger of Ground Up Logic

Big Thanks to all the speakers and to everyone who attended!

Attending conferences in our own fields is easy enough, but branching out can be an eye opening experience. To see different industries converging is especially exciting, and that was exactly the message I took away from the Where 2.0 conference two weeks ago. Hosted by O’Reilly Media in San Jose, Where 2.0 brought together major players in mapping, location based search and advertising, plus a variety of companies and organizations working on everything from marketing to city planning and disaster relief. Private industry, government, and nonprofits alike discussed their innovations, discoveries, and needs. Over the past decade, web and other technologies have overlapped to create many new exciting and lucrative fields: apps have merged with mobile; PR has hit the web; news reporting has met blogging. Now geolocation is bringing everything together.

Location
Local search has been a major focus for many advertisers, but with more and more devices becoming location aware, local and proximity marketing is becoming a whole new game. The the iPhone is undoubtedly the current poster-boy of location aware devices, but it’s certainly not alone. Hundreds of new mobile devices and even more applications are bringing the power of geo-location to our fingertips. At Where 2.0, Ryan Sarver from Skyhook Wireless spoke about the updated W3C Geo-location API, and how their Loki product allows any website to determine a visitor’s precise location. Moving forward, the majority of computers you use will know where you are, opening a world of possibilities, including quickly serving up extremely focused information, and a new level of geo-targeted advertising.

Maps
Taking a step back from where a consumer is located, the web has embraced the ability to display a multitude of dynamic information on a map itself. Outside the GIS community, people often take the style, design and layout of the maps for granted. This artistic, technically challenging field of cartography is both a science and and art. Google Maps is and example of a well adopted design standard for global map viewing but many other companies are pushing the envelope in terms what is possible. Geo-extraction tools like Yahoo Placemarker and new mapping services from Nokia’s Ovi Maps are allowing developers to control more and more of the mapping experience while bridging the gap from a 2D to a 3D web, and sometimes to 4D by adding a time-based element. Marketers are going to be forced to think out of the box and innovate in the ways that they reach consumers. With these environments, the days of banner ads and popups are quickly getting wiped off the map.

The conference featured a wide ranging set of topics, sessions and speakers that explored everything from the technology used to gather map data to the future of augmented reality. Here are a great videos from some of the conference sessions:

Unleashing Innovation for the World with Maps
Michael Halbherr (Nokia), Christof Hellmis (Nokia gate5 GmbH)
The largest manufacturer of phones owns the largest geodata provider and has been busy building geo-aware web apps on Ovi. Michael will share their latest thinking.

Beyond Maps – The Hyperlocal Experience
Mark Law (MapQuest)
MapQuest has moved beyond maps and directions into a location-centric user experience with an emphasis on a hyperlocal strategy. Learn actual stats and behaviors of users, best practices for building a local network and how local data supplements a mapping experience. See the value of hyperlocal content strategy within the .com to mobile experience.

How Consumers are Really Using Location
Ted Morgan (Skyhook Wireless)
There has been an explosion of location based applications on mobile devices in the past year thanks to the opening of app stores and more advanced devices. Morgan will report on the growth and variety of location applications available today as well as how often they are being used and where.

Tricky Issues With Local Search
Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land)
Presentation: Tricky Issues With Local Search Presentation [PPT]
As local search continues to grow, so do issues on how we represent the real work virtually. Should Google allow individuals to block their homes from Street View? How do you balance listing brick-and-mortar stores along with virtual outlets? Do we need a master control panel to clear location tracking from all our apps – and what they’ve stored on their servers?

Photos courtesy of Bo Cross www.bocrossphoto.com

Jake Fields, Gary Ware and myself represented Ad 2 San Diego at last weekends AAF National Conference. We were also joined by Greg Joumas, President of the San Diego Ad Club, Cheri Reeves, Ad 2 National Chair, and Jenn Baker, Past Ad 2 National Secretary. During our trip, we won the bid to host the 2009 Ad 2 National Mid Year Retreat! This event will be held on November 13-15 at the Dana Mission Bay Resort.

The Mid Year Retreat is a staple Ad 2 event where each club sends delegates for a weekend of networking, educational, and club management seminars. By having it in San Diego, we’ll be able to give our board and committee members a ton of knowledge at no cost to our club. This will be my 4th Ad 2 Mid Year retreat and I’m very confident that we can put on an excellent show.

We competed against Phoenix and Grand Rapids to host the event. Our presentation was very thorough and painted a clear picture of what we could offer in San Diego. They say that it’s during the Mid Year Retreat where you “Drink the AAF kool aid”. Jake Fields offered the crowd a Pina Colada instead if they come to San Diego!