Check out the two great presentations of @joakimnilsen and @samismail. Focus on people, their context and find out what they like to do to engage with them.

Yesterday I found some interesting papers from Forrester Research about social media, interactive and online marketing.

European Online Marketing
How Consumers use Social Networks
Interactive Marketing Channels

Universal McCann published the wave.3 of their social media tracker, I had no time to read it yet, but it looks interesting and useful.

The Austrian national broadcaster (ORF) and the Cannes Lions Festival are hosting also this year the young lions competition. It is the first time that young guys can participate at a media challenge next to print, film and cyber. To win an all inclusive trip to Cannes you and your partner need to challenge a brief within 24/48 hours.

I’m looking for a partner who wants to team up with me for the media competition. The briefing for a media strategy will be on the 5th of April and the application deadline is on the 4th. You should have an easy-going personality and be fucking brilliant while working as media planner, strategic planner, account manager or something similar. If you are interested, please leave a comment or contact me via one of the obvious social networking platforms.

I started to put together a list of books that should be a rough guideline for people that are interested in advertising or just started to work in an agency. My focus is on literature for strategic planners and accounts and not necessarily for creative departments, sorry. The collection should cover both classics about advertising but also the latest books especially from other related disciplines. I collected the following books over the last months, my source was mainly blogs of other planners or people working in the industry. If you have the feeling that I forgot an important book, please leave a comment.

Essential books for planners and account (10-03-08) work in progress

Problem Playground

do, keep doing, do some more

W+K London uploaded their two new spots for Honda on welcome to optimism. The strategy fits especially to the UK market and the execution is simple an joyful. Good work.

Amazing viral clip from Wieden + Kennedy for EA’s Fifa Street 3 Game. The clip reminds me a bit of Ray Ben’s – Catch Sunglasses viral of last year. I’m sure that in the next months YouTube will be full of soccer virals, which brands doesn’t want to grab some attention in the EURO year?

Last weekend I was in London and it was impossible to ignore the new Reed (online job search) campaign. They have a massive media budget and I just love their message.

Let’s all be more optimistic – monday is the new friday!

According to Horizont Jung von Matt/Donau just won the Unicredit coporate image tender against W+K and some other big names. I wonder if the guys from Vienna can top properly one of the best image ads for a bank ever – Hypovereinsbank – Money by W+K back in 1998.

Chris Anderson (the author of The Long Tail) thought too that money is a pain in the ass and a gave a lecture about free economy at the NokiaWorld 2007.

The Optimus Maximus Keyboard of the Russian Art. Lebedev Studio looks very interesting. The OLED technology open up totally new ways of interacting with hardware.
I’m curious if it is possible to access the keyboard via net, so that you can run banner ads on the space bar? Another cool things would be if you connect it with the online commercial you are looking at your display, so that you just need to push one button (with a tempting looking picture on it) for direct order, more information, gift voucher…

If you are bored these days or just feed up of writing papers like I am. Go the Werbeblogger and check out the Kaisers hilarious interview with George Parker (AdScam) about swearing, agencies, advertising, WPP and ad schools.

I hope there will be soon a second part.

Happy New Year, this is the last post for 2007. I’m off to Portugal with tons of books to read.