MarCom Professional

Google has flexed its muscles on the advertising stage, abandoning all talk of accountability and ROI, by running a 52-second commercial during the Super Bowl yesterday.

$3million dollars for 30 seconds is all but out of reach for most advertisers but its loose change for Google.

So why is Google backing an ad campaign on a platform that its CEO Eric Schmidt famously called a “bastion of unaccountability.”

Martin McNulty, director of online agency Forward3D (disclosure: Speed client), says that this is a bid by Google to understand how marketing channels interact and that Google analysts will be closely watching how the ad impacts search traffic. More...

I’m delighted to have received my copy of Fifty dangerous things you should let your children do.

The book is an antidote to our safety-obsessed bubble-wrapped society and encourages parents to educate their children to take responsibility and appreciate risk by making and doing dangerous things.

Flying a home made kite, building a fire, melting glass, creating an explosion and nailing and whittling wood are all projects contained in the book.

Fifty Dangerous Things written by the gang that runs Tinkering School in Montara, California. I first came across its founder Gever Tully at TED. More...

Here’s a write up from Mark Kobayashi-Hillary who attended the Speed Social Media Week breakfast this morning.

Thanks Mark.

Social Media Week has generated some criticism in recent days, unfairly in my view, for the saturation of events.

Undoubtedly the market is overhyped and is approaching bubble-like proportions. An element of the industry is taking on the hallmarks of a cult with self-proclaimed gurus ranking their prowess by follower numbers on Facebook and Twitter.

But a series of events that shines a spotlight on the market and its emerging potential can only be a good thing. And for the 120-odd people that attended events at 33 Digital, Porter Novelli and Speed this morning I hope it was worthwhile. I’ve never known a time when the PR industry has been so open and willing to share ideas. More...

Stuart Bruce says that the combination of media databases and inexperienced PR executives are the root cause of PR spam.

“While I applaud [the inconvenient PR truth] initiative, I’m not totally convinced about either the approach or if it will work. It also fails to mention the elephant in the room – the media database companies.”

Perhaps we can learn from network theory? Media databases are a form of automation that promote mechanical networks. They enable PR executives to distribute press releases to lists of journalists with whom they have no prior relationship. More...

New cufflinks from Swagger & Swoon (@swaggerandswooon)

This is my daughter’s Year 5 design and technology project. Its a wooden bob-a-long children’s toy fashioned in the image of the Twitter Fail Whale. It made the briefest of appearances on the Makezine blog after we submitted a snap to the MAKE Magazine pool on Flickr.

I’m so very proud

I’ve just spotted that The Independent is taking a proactive approach to charging for the commercial use of its online content. Users are offered a menu of options when they print an article from the online edition of the newspaper.

WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell has spoken out against politicians and business leaders for celebrating economic recovery when the market was “less worst” rather than growing.

Speaking to Bloomberg at the annual World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, he said “you can’t declare victory until you see consistent gains year-to-year.”

Delegates at the PRCA and CorpComms Conference last October received the same message when Sorrell delivered the keynote.