Over the last year, ShopText has provided Hearst’s CosmoGIRL with code-enabled advertising so that readers can text to buy items or receive promotions from advertisers. The effort has been an overwhelmingly success—one issue last year resulted in 100,000 sent texts. With advertisers struggling these days to find new ways to not only capture their target audience’s attention, but also motivate them to action, the CosmoGIRL/ShopText partnership is a very successful case study in advertiser engagement.

Hoping to build on the success of the project, Hearst plans to experiment with some of its other titles, including Good Housekeeping and Oprah’s magazine O. It’s a smart strategy if you consider the latest predictions from eMarketer, which forecasts spending on mobile advertising text platforms to more than triple over the next five years. While $1.47 billion was spent in 2007, eMarketer estimates that promotions and ad placements will grow to $4.5 billion by 2012.

These are big numbers, but I’m still not sold that the texting platform will translate to the Good Housekeeping and O demographics. Readers of CosmoGIRL are completely immersed in texting as an integral part of their social interaction with peers. The same can’t be said of the predominantly older readers of Good Housekeeping and O.

It’s not surprising with ad pages down that magazines are pulling out all the stops for advertisers in an attempt to gain more pages and boost revenues. Earlier this month Starbucks played with Bon Appetit‘s masthead and now Men’s Health has entered the game. If you are a reader of Men’s Health, make sure your cell phone is handy when reading its July/August issue.

Every one of the issue’s ads will be camera-phone readable, thanks to an image recognition technology from SnapTell. When readers snap a photo of an ad they’ll receive instant promotions—from ringtones to coupons to wallpaper. The set-up is especially attractive for advertisers because of its integrated call to action and defined measurement. With advertisers chasing engagement metrics, it’s clear why the platform appeals to them.

In a recent issue of the e-mail newsletter Online Spin, Max Kalehoff provided the following thoughtful description of the role your company Web site must play in today’s digital marketplace.

Web Site As Brand Hub. For most businesses, the Web must become your brand hub. The Web site is the anchor for a range of critical actions in the consideration and purchase funnel. It is where search engines discover brands and where they direct prospects. It is the currency of pass-along when others wish to refer or recommend you. It is where the most engaged prospects learn about your brand, or fail to learn what they need to know in order to engage further. It is often a critical repository for collecting names, demographic information, purchase intentions and behaviors. It is a listening mechanism and interaction platform when customers do wish to engage. For many businesses, it’s where transactions actually take place, and services are rendered. It increasingly is where people turn when things go wrong, and the place where problems are corrected, or not. It is where companies have the choice to engage intimately with customers, or instill a cold, faceless façade. As the marketplace increasingly goes digital, the Web site should play a central role in leading a company’s key customer performance metrics to drive overall marketing strategy.

At Hammock, we agree that Web sites play a powerful role in building stronger relationships, but your site must be optimized for this type of interaction in order for it to be successful. We recommend the adoption and integration of social media tools such as blogs, photo or video sharing applications, and wikis to help initiate this engagement and conversation with your audience.

Want to get started but aren’t sure what to do first? Contact us. We’ll provide an assessment of your site and make recommendations for what changes are needed to transform your site into a destination online, fully optimized for this Web 2.0 world.

Starbucks recently sent an RFP to their media partners with a “call for innovation.” Bon Appetit‘s well-executed response can be seen in its May issue. Readers flip to the masthead page to find the business team’s names and positions listed on a Starbucks-like chalkboard. After the headline, “What do you like best with your Starbucks coffee at home?” six members of Bon Appetit‘s staff share their favorite Starbucks pairings.

With print advertising revenues down and magazines fighting for their share of limited budgets, maybe it’s not that surprising that Bon Appetit opened up its masthead to advertising. Still, though I admit it’s a clever promotion, my sense is that it crosses a line. This isn’t simply advertising—by putting the “promotion” in a format that readers count on to be straight service editorial (just the facts), the page has been transformed into a Bon Appetit endorsement. Perhaps in this increasingly competitive marketplace for magazine advertising this is how “innovation” will be defined, but I’d like to think that there are better, less ethically murky ways to incorporate advertising “innovation” without requiring or encouraging members of a magazine’s staff to become advocates or spokesmen for an advertiser’s product.

Update: Mediaweek reports that the Bon Appetit Starbucks masthead treatment was a one-time deal.

A common failure among organizations is to forget all of the touch points one’s members or clients have with their brand, and the opportunity the organization has to capitalize on those engagement opportunities. What does that mean for today’s marketing and communications professionals? As we continue to be bombarded with millions of competing marketing messages, it’s important that your organization successfully breaks through the clutter. Here’s how you can make your organization’s marketing stand out:

Take inventory: Evaluate those communication vehicles already in place. Include magazines, newsletters, e-mail newsletters, annual reports, e-mails, Web site, direct mail, event promotions, advertising, telemarketing efforts and sales materials in your assessment—and be willing to discontinue those that aren’t working.

Revisit your logo: Is your logo representative of your organization’s mission and culture? If not, it might be time to consider investing in a new logo to reflect your brand more effectively.

Be consistent with print and online products: Make sure that all of your print and digital media products share a common design template. This includes the use of fonts, sizes, headers and overall aesthetic.

Create a style guide: If your organization does not already have one in place, author a rulebook of standards for editorial and design work.

Police your communications: Assign a member of your team to be responsible for monitoring all outgoing company communications to ensure that your organization’s guidelines are applied before the messaging goes out the door.

Last month there was a splash in the agency world when the Boston-based agency Modernista launched its new Web site. But this wasn’t your typical agency Web site. Modernista’s new site looks like this:

What? That’s right—Modernista’s homepage looks like a Wikipedia entry. Your eye is guided to the red area at the top where you read:

“Do not be alarmed. You are viewing Modernista through the eyes of the Web. The menu on the left is our homepage. Everything behind it is beyond our control.”

I applaud the bold statement Modernista is making with this approach. By structuring their site in such a creative, extreme way, the agency is illustrating not only that they “get” social media, but that it’s the right choice for anyone looking for an interactive, dynamic, cutting-edge ad agency.

Modernista and Hammock share a similar philosophy that embraces social media, and while Modernista exploits the medium a little more radically, their site and ours have a lot in common. We both post examples of our work on an easy to update, easy to view Flickr account. They post their digital work on del.icio.us, a social media bookmarking site; Hammock.com’s Industry News is fed from our del.icio.us account, too. Like Hammock.com, Modernista also utilizes the features of YouTube and Google Maps.

At Hammock, we believe that social media should become an integral part of corporate and association communications today. Like Modernista, we often demonstrate ways a site can take advantage of the benefits of online communities, such as Facebook, del.icio.us, YouTube and Twitter. We invest our time and energy into learning and utilizing these platforms because we’re convinced the old static Web site model is not only a thing of the past, but will prevent organizations from accomplishing their communications goals. To engage with your members or clients, you must utilize these new tools to connect with your audience online.

Hammock partner Jim Elliott of the national advertising sales firm the James G. Elliott Company shares some tips on how to train your magazine sales force to sell digital platforms in the latest issue of their company newsletter Ads&Ideas:

Training is, of course, necessary here to sell a brand which resides in different media platforms. But that training has to be in just the fundamentals or basics of each medium—not in the technical or mechanical aspects.

For instance, a seller should understand the fundamentals of podcasting; how it is delivered, its advantages and drawbacks and what kind of advertising works with the medium, but the seller doesn’t have to be an expert in the technology. Hopefully, the brand has a podcast traffic manager to handle the technical questions.

One of our Hammock partners is the national advertising sales firm the James G. Elliott Company. In the latest issue of their company newsletter Ads&Ideas, President Jim Elliott shares his perspective on recent news coming out of the advertising industry:

Oh, what a difference a few months can make! The first quarter of 2008 has been one of the roughest in magazine ad sales history. A quick glance at the revenue numbers for monthly magazines is sobering. The decline has been caused in part by many agencies holding back on placing 2008 schedules due to their clients not releasing budgets. But it has also been due to advertising money being diffused into various new delivery platforms.

Of course, the magazine industry has been trying to hold on to some of these dollars by creating their own multiple delivery platforms for their content. However, there is no dominant selling strategy in the way they actually sell advertising around these new platforms.

For instance, some magazine companies have created a separate digital advertising department. Some have hired outside representatives to handle on-line advertising, with a different outside group to handle mobile and so on. Others have taken their current sales force and trained them to be knowledgeable in several different media platforms.

We are keen on the last strategy being the most sensible approach because, regardless of the platform, it is the brand and its community that set magazines apart from other media. It is the strength of our business. For those of us who have also been on the buying side of the business, there is, and has always been, one thing that stood out about magazine representatives. Both trade and consumer magazine reps have always sold the brand — which is a conceptual sale.

Historically, magazine sellers were allowed to call on clients, account people at the agency and the media department because they were selling the audience, and what made that audience distinctively different, both psychographically and demographically from the competition. Magazine sellers have always been distinctively different stylistically in their approach from that of broadcast sellers in that the sale was more complicated, involving more channels of decision makers built around selling conceptually. Branding is a concept.

A good friend, Dave Smith of Mediasmith —a large digital San Francisco advertising agency—told me recently that their agency had identified many new digital platforms by which to offer up content. For example, they have identified things like:

• Rich Media Display Advertising

• Video Display Advertising (Web)

• Video SEM/SEO & Video Distribution

• Video on Demand & Interactive Television

• Over-the-Top (OTT)

• Widgets

• Mobile

• Digital & Interactive Out-of-Home

• Digital & Interactive Cinema

• Consumer-Generated Media and Advertising

• Mashups

• Blogging

• Social Networks

• Peer-to-Peer

• RSS

• Advergaming and In-Game Advertising

• Virtual Worlds

By the way, to learn more about each one of these subjects, you may visit Mediasmith’s website to see a section dedicated to emerging technologies:

From an advertising sales perspective, how many different groups–either internally or externally—will a magazine brand require to handle their ad sales needs in this world of diverse platforms? And what will happen to a consistent brand story with so many different groups involved?

I would strongly argue that magazine representatives are uniquely positioned to handle ad sales in this emerging world of different delivery platforms.

In our travels among publishers, we often hear that magazine reps don’t understand the Internet. But when you investigate these statements more carefully, often what they are really saying is that magazine reps don’t understand the technological aspects of the online medium. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t understand the audience or the community represented and can’t, with a little training, translate the particular online site into a part of a brand for an advertising buyer.

Frankly, how many magazine representatives actually understand the many facets of the print production part of the magazine industry? I have noticed that magazine management frequently confuses the activity of order taking with the art of selling. Those folks that often take orders also perform tasks on the web that are similar to those performed by a print production manager in magazines or a traffic manager in the broadcast world.

Check back this Friday for Part II of Jim’s article.

Thanks to you, friends around the globe, we reached our goal! More than 100 Hammock T-shirt photos have been uploaded to the Hammock T-shirt map. (Including the one above from some of our friends at the DAR in Washington, DC.) You know what that means—you’ve helped us meet our goal of donating 20 laptops to the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

For 16 years we’ve designed an annual Hammock T-shirt to give to our friends. In 2008, we decided to experiment with a crazy new idea—figuring out how we could make T-shirts, a little interactive collaborative media and a social cause work together. Happily, we discovered that it wasn’t that hard to do—and more rewarding than we could have imagined.

We simply used the Google Maps API to create our mashup map, asked our friends to upload a picture wearing their Hammock T and then donated one laptop for every five photos uploaded. Then voila—our wonderful friends took it from there, sending in amazing photos of themselves at work, at play and in sometimes freezing or rain-forest temps, all in a quest to give laptops to kids who really need them. What’s better than that?

Thanks again for taking time out to participate—we hope you had fun! Check back later in the year for our plans for next year’s T-shirt.

Haven’t posted your photo yet? Upload your photo here. We’ve met out goal but we still want to keep adding our friends to our map. We’ve got a few extra T-shirts left, so if you have an exotic or special place you’d like to add to this map, email us (including your size) and we’ll try our best to get one to you. Check back often and watch the map grow.

We’re proud of Rex for his foresight in helping to found the Custom Publishing Council (CPC) back in 1998. The CPC has always been a special partner with Hammock in promoting and creating excellence in custom media, so we were thrilled to attend CPC’s first conference, the Custom Content Conference, held in New Orleans earlier this week.

Here are some of my favorite quotes and highlights from the sessions I attended:
Joe Duffy, Duffy & Partners: “Yesterday’s consumer is becoming today’s programmer.”
Remember when Time named its 2007 Person of the Year “The Consumer”? As Joe’s session illustrated, now consumers are in control—from the color of our Nikes to the playlist on our iPod to the design for our Mini. In this atmosphere, it’s vital for brands to deliver authentic experiences. One exciting way to make that happen is through custom content.
Robert Passikoff and Amy Shea, Brand Keys: “The percentage of contribution that ‘customization’ makes to products and services through engagement, adoption and loyalty is 18%. It was 4% in 1997.”
People are bombarded with advertising messages all day, every day. To cut through the clutter, you have to speak directly to your audience with messages targeted specifically to their wants and needs and desires. With customization’s growing reach, how can you afford not to?

Joseph Plummer, Advertising Research Foundation: “Engaging storytelling campaigns prove superior in creating relevant, lasting connections with consumers that enrich brand meaning and ultimately impact brand behavior.”
At Hammock, we say “Your Story Starts Here.” It’s not only a catchy slogan, but it represents how we feel about the work we do for our clients. To us, a client’s story is the essence of their brand, so our primary goal is to communicate that story in the most engaging way possible to their members and customers.