LevelTen now has three individually Qualified Google Advertising Professionals on the team, and will soon be a Qualified Google Advertising Company. Congratulations to our marketing team for months of participating in the online tutorials, taking practice quizzes, reading the books, and scoping the forums. Visitors to LevelTen’s site will soon see an officially licensed logo from Google stating the certification, which will also lead a page explaining it.

In order to obtain the qualified Google Advertising Company, at least two individuals must be certified through testing, and the company must manage an ongoing minimum of $100,000 in ppc per quarter.
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If you’re in web development then you’ve heard the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and probably cringe at even the slightest mention of it. Among what would be considered a WYSIWYG includes Dreamweaver, Front Page, and a host of others that web developers would rather not think about. However, with the advent of the CMS (Content Management System), clients needed a way to create their own content without having to know or learn HTML and/or CSS. A WYSIWYG seemed like the perfect idea for this to be accomplished but a WYSIWYG produces bloated, unsemantic, non-semantic, poor code. Not to mention that they are usually packaged with many additional options and features that clients do not need to be using. Thus the WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) was born.
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iPhone is not alone anymore.

Microsoft just released a preview of its new mobile technology, Deepfish. Deepfish improves upon existing mobile web technologies “by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience.” There is a zoom and “cue map” feature that allows quick access to information without losing track of where you are.

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Do blondes have more fun? Are brunettes really smarter?

One hair products company has taken a new approach to differentiating themselves from the competition. Sunsilk has created a new image with the introduction of commercials and a fancy interactive website pitting blondes against brunettes, fighting it out to see which color is better (sorry redheads). The campaign basically pokes fun at the common stereotypes of each hair color; blondes being dumb party animals who can’t read and brunettes being the smarter, intellectual types.
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I was browsing the latest issue of Wired Magazine and came across a great ad at the bottom of pages 32-33. The ad on left hand side is for the Smooth Swings Golf Academy and touts a 1600-page tutorial and eleven-week seminar to help smooth out your golf game. On the right hand side is a nice clean Newcastle Ale draft with the slogan smooth like no other; the uniqueness of this particular ad comes from the interaction between the golf instructor for the Smooth Swings Golf Academy and the large pint of Newcastle. Using an iron, the instructor on the left hand side has hooked the pint and is pulling it toward him, being careful not to tip over the topped off beer.

As I continued to look deeper at the ad, I noticed that there was a phone number listed on the ad and a call to action of Reserve Your Spot.” I looked further but no where on the ad could I find a web address. I even did an abbreviated search for the Smooth Swings Golf Academy and found nothing, even a visit to the Newcastle corporate site turned up null. I thought to myself, how can this be? The viral opportunities here are boundless yet the marketing team behind this campaign clearly missed the boat.
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Most of the details of Adobe’s massive upgrade to all of it’s CS3 (Creative Suite 3 for those who aren’t familiar with Adobe’s product naming conventions) line of graphic and interactive content creation software have been out there for a week or two. Adobe already annouced an officiall rollout date of March 27th for the suite, but no shipping date or pricing information was available until now.

Amazon leaked the pricing information by posting pre-order pages for the new Adobe software.
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So, there I was sitting in my office searching for viral marketing ideas for a client of mine. In walks Kevin, a designer of ours who spends more time online than a college kid on MySpace. “Hey man, have you ever seen Line Rider?” Kevin said with a devilish smile. It’s gotta be the most addicting game I’ve ever played.

For productivity’s sake, I should have known not to search those two simple words. But what the hell, I type it in and found a dozen sites promoting the game – I selected Beta 2 for the ultimate experience.
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We’ve all had them. The client from.. well, you know where. The one person whose name alone can strike fear into your heart. When they call we groan, stare at the phone and wonder what excuse we could possibly come up with to not talk to them. Is severe nausea good enough?

While we’re not to happy about dealing with these people, they are our clients after all. They’re the ones ultimately paying our bills and we have to find some way of dealing with them.
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It was rumored about last summer, and this spring it has become a reality. Pay-per-action (PPA) has officially been released in beta form for users of Google AdWords. Pay-per-action, or cost-per-action, as both names imply, charge only when a specific predetermined action has occurred on a website being advertised though Google AdWords.

Clicks & Impressions
As of now, there are a few other options an advertiser can choose to be charged by, the most popular being the pay-per-click platform. Advertisers can also choose to be charged based on 1000 impressions for text ads, image ads, and video ads, regardless of number of clicks.
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Tired of low-budget, poorly directed, terribly acted local television commercials? You know, the fast talking cowboy, the pepperoni counting grandmother, the co-worker with dragon breath, and the ubiquitous Japanese pitcher with ants in his pants.

Thanks to Spot Runner, the budget barrier has been busted. Small businesses with limited financial resources can now run high quality, professional-looking commercials and stay well within their shoestring budgets.
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