Thanks Rocket Fuel! We love ya!

Rocket Fuel and Booyah Advertising team in Denver

Booyah is agnostic when it comes to tools. Truth be told though, we hold a special place in our agency for Google’s tools. They are virtually indestructible, fast, affordable and come with top notch support. More than 75% of our clients use the Google stack as their primary digital advertising platform. We’ve been heavy users for the past five years and don’t see that changing in the next five.

With such a robust tool, we are able to save a tremendous amount of time on reporting, trafficking, and optimizing. The time we save gets redirected to campaign strategy and expert thinking for our clients.  

DoubleClick offers a superb unified approach to digital advertising that pushes our team to become better and better marketers every single day.  We are pleased to partner with DoubleClick, and even more pleased to be featured in their video series documenting successful case studies. Check it out at the link below!

DoubleClick Search and Booyah Customer Story

Thank you, DoubleClick, the video turned out great! Booyah!

A big thank you to Collective for taking the Booyah Crew out to a fun and educational event on Tuesday night!

Several members of our display and creative teams were lucky enough to visit Stir to Learn, a cooking school located in Northwest Denver, to whip up a delicious meal with our lovely host Kelly.  Amidst stirring up a delicious risotto, munching on candied walnuts and sipping delicious wine, we chatted about innovations within the big data and audience    industry. We also learned a lot! Between finding dry rivers in our risotto and discussing the difference between chicken stock and broth (stock is made with both the bones AND the meat, resulting in a cloudier liquid; broth is made with just the bones), we managed to solidify our work partnerships and real-life friendships over sharp knives and fresh ingredients. What a treat!

We are excited to work with Collective on upcoming campaigns with our various clients, and even more excited to eat some of that delicious leftover risotto! Booyah!

How to make a digital advertisement- Booyah Style from Whitney on Vimeo.

Warning: Please consult a Booyah advertising specialist before attempting any of the mayhem seen here. Digital advertisements may be more complex than demonstrated and are not edible.

Visit: www.booyahadvertising.com to learn more about these scrumptious ads.

Pros

• New creative opportunities
• More interactive advertising
• Long term brand benefits
• Offers metrics that aren’t available on traditional TV (unique views, behavior, state, zip code, etc.)
• Effective for advertisers to engage with their target
• Manufacturers plan to push out more models of connected-TVs this year
• Connected-TV is not limited to just TVs but can be used for game devices, blue-ray players, and Roku
• Last but not least, there will be room for it to improve and continue growing

Cons

• Should primarily be used for brand campaigns
• Many people with connected-TVs have not connected their devices to a network
• Lack of a cookie
• Trouble with targeting
• Primary ads are pre-roll
• Measurement challenges
• Reach is not that great compared to TV

• “West Texas is so flat you can see your dog running away for 3 days.”
  Texas is big, so big in fact that El Paso, Texas is closer to Needles, California (516 miles) than it is to Dallas, Texas (571 miles). Growing up in the Texas Panhandle, if you wanted to go out for dinner (and that’s either the meal at noon or the one in the evening) you had to load up in the car and drive an hour to get to a restaurant, and believe me, there is nothing between towns except cotton fields, lots of cotton fields. Good design also has a lot of space and room for things to breathe. It doesn’t take much to clutter up a really good design and lose your message and audience. Good design allows the viewer the chance to take in your message at a glance and then pull them further into the details. You want to capture someone’s attention and tell a story, not scare him or her away.

• “Everything in Texas is broken ‘cause everybody is always fixin’ things.”
  If good design is not cluttered and full of space, then you need to pay attention to the little details. This is where a concept goes from being “good” to being award winning. The sign of a good designer is one that is always busier than a one legged man in a butt-kicking contest fixin’ things. The subtle fixes that make a great design might not jump off the screen and slap you in the face, but those are the elements that make your concept relatable to your audience.
• “I never wet the bed, I always crawled up on the pillow.”
  This one is straight out of the mouth of my great-grandfather. In speaking about how he was respectful to his mother, he always said that when he was little he never wet the bed; he always crawled up on the pillow. This was so that his mom wouldn’t have to get up and change his sheets in the middle of the night. It may sound a little crass at first, but this nugget of wisdom is some solid design advice. Good design typically isn’t the product of one person. It is a team effort and is the product of collaboration. There is nothing worse than watching a great concept fail miserably because the designer wasn’t willing to listen to the advice of those around him.

Last year I started to feel the grind of working on my own. Great months working on interesting, up-all-night projects bookended by soul-crushing, self-defeating bone dry months. This yin-yang can be extremely invigorating most of the time, but I began to feel the need to have an alternate route to take in case the lifestyle became unsustainable, or worse, unfulfilling.

The Technology

The last time I graduated, back in 2003, I was still handing in hard copies of final essays. I saved my work on ZIP disks. Google was just getting its big-boy pants on, and Facebook had acne. Away messages were your online presence. My dorm had Ethernet installed my sophomore year. Prior to that my roommate and I took turns using the phone cord for dial-up.

Now, all my class material and assignments are online. Registering for classes is as easy as browsing Amazon. I email my papers to my professors. I created a slide presentation on teaching autistic children and presented an hour later using Google Drive, negating the need for both a flash drive and PowerPoint.  My 66-year old printmaking professor is a Facebook friend.

The Experience Once I got over the self-consciousness of being an older student, I felt a bit more youthful being around and working alongside and exchanging ideas with late teens/early 20-somethings. They helped refresh my view of art and ways of creating. During critiques, I felt I was able to bridge the gap with my experience, and their youthful exuberance helped forget our age difference. Their observations were pretty honest and humbling many times, and I found that if they weren’t understanding something I was doing, chances were not many others would, either.

Being on time for attendance again was once again a major thought upon waking. Aside from my graduate classes, my program required me to take a number of studio classes, an experience which I eagerly welcomed back. My car was full of art supplies – printmaking tools, ceramics clay, fabric dyes, bronze ingots, numerous sketchpads. I came home with dirty hands and pants covered in all sorts of marks – paint, clay, glazes, ink, rust… a girl scout sash of different skills I’ve acquired over the past year.

Project management is much easier this time around. I no longer wait until the last minute to complete projects. My writing process is substantially improved, my concepts are sound. My writing is fluid and to the point.  Reading is now a pleasure rather than an inconvenience. My citations are impeccable, and I now know the difference between MLA and APA format. Bullshitting is no longer a major writing tool.

Why Go Back?

My past year has been light on both free time and sleep, and scheduling my time well is paramount. I didn’t know if I would be able to handle the workload along with a job, but here I am a year later still doing it and enjoying it.

What I wanted to share is that if there is something that you want to do, like going to school, even just for the sake of learning something new completely unrelated to your current career, you will find a way and you will make it work. I recommend to anyone that if you have it in mind to return to school, do it now. There are plenty of options to help you financially that work with your schedule, and like any other endeavor in life, there will be no perfect time to go until it is too late.

So here’s to being the old guy.

 If Facebook users had been asked what kind of button they want, I think we’d be seeing a “dislike” button, but that’s a lot of negative energy to bring to the universe.

Don’t hold your breath waiting to be bombarded with notifications about not only friends but strangers clicking “Want” on all of the selfies you’ve posted lately. Currently the “want” feature isn’t a readily available social plugin on Facebook’s developer site, and it will only be available to objects marked as products. In the meantime developers have been able to create their own want actions, but users need to authorize a third party app in order to do so. This means you need to authorize some developer’s “Want” app to “access your profile” and then send annoying app requests to everyone you know.

“Liking” and “wanting” can be pretty similar. For example, I like Pop Tarts and I usually want to not only eat them, but make ice cream sandwiches out of them too. I like wine and usually want to drink it. So what’s the point of having both? Well, “Like” and “want” can also be pretty different. I like a gym called KC’s Fitness because I went to a free class there once and the people are nice, but ultimately I don’t want to go back there because the entire place smelled like the inside of a hockey glove. “Want” is a little more serious than “like” – it cuts through the clutter of pages people just “like” because someone asked them too, or some other reason that is not particularly good.

The “Like” feature allowed Facebook to collect massive amounts of data about our affinity for everything from company pages to cat pictures to various products to long romantic walks to the fridge. As a member of the advertising industry reading this article, you know full well how the information collected by Facebook has been used. Think about it this way: if all the brands could get a better idea of just how badly you want to buy their stuff, maybe they would treat you a little differently?

Since the early 90’s users have been exposed to pop-ups, leader boards, skyscrapers, wallpapers, and all different types of banner ads across both desktop and now mobile devices. After their introduction the success rate of these placements for ads has declined over time. Users become blind to them as they scan a page for content.  Although banner performance is tough to measure with Click-Through-Rates (CTRs) measuring in at 0.1% sometimes and conversions being counted off of post-click and post-“view” actions, it has been tough to find a new way to reach consumers at scale in the digital space. Native advertising may be that new way.

Native ads are becoming more popular, with large social players like Facebook and Twitter including Sponsored Posts and Promoted Tweets. And even publishers are creating ways to integrate into their content directly. The goal with units like these is to provide seamless ads within the stream of content the user is consuming. This has been hard to do in the past, but it seems larger players are coming aboard.

In the Mobile space, AdAdapted has built relationships with a network of apps to integrate native, relevant, and useful ads to consumers in a way that is not intrusive. This way the user’s experience is not put in jeopardy at the cost of a click/engagement with the ad. As you can see in the example, a task manager app has an integrated ad for Manilla, a bill organizer, with a unique call to action built into the user’s list of tasks.

Mashable writes on native ads, “native advertising not only represents a way for advertisers to reach an engaged audience, but also allows us to do work that our readers love.” As technology progresses, execution betters, and scale increases the banner will start to fade with the rise of native ads. So long are the days of working within the confines of a 300×250 box. It may take some more work to build custom ads, but dynamic native ads are on the horizon.

No longer do you need to sit behind someone in class or hide in a tree or whatever. Suddenly, people are willing to upload personal information onto the web. Realizing the need to gather this information, the Prince of Stalking himself Mark Zuckerberg created what he called “The Facebook”.

Look at that guy. He single-handedly boxed out competitors like MySpace and Friendster. Since it was released in 2004, over 1 billion people have joined; sharing their personal information, interests, and pictures to a flourishing online community. He built the stalkers finest playground.

Urban Dictionary, the authority on this sort of subject matter defines Facebook stalking as “A covert method of investigation using facebook.com. Good for discovering a wealth of information about people you don’t actually know.”

Alright, let’s illustrate the practice with a situation….

Solution: Advanced Search. While it has been stripped down the past few years, it is still a powerful stalking tool. The first guy failed because he has no idea what he is doing. The second guy has narrowed it down a little but by school has a long road ahead of him. The third guy is golden, he utilized the name AND university search parameters, found the girl, and guess what…..2 mutual friends!

Once the stalkee’s profile has been located, it is time to mine whatever data you can. With the new privacy settings, this can often be limited, but most of the time you will be able to see profile pictures and general information, including mutual friends. If you do share a mutual friend, it might be time to call that friend up for a favor.

Meeting in real life should seem unplanned. I know actually talking a to girl/guy can be intimidating for some stalkers, but if you get this far you can actually send them a friend request on Facebook.

Be sure to ask the stalkee basic questions: “Oh, where did you go to school? Where do you work? Oh that’s interesting!”

Whatever you do, don’t let on to the fact you already know all of this information….CREEPBALL!

Once they have accepted your friend request, it is time to really get your stalk on. Take this opportunity to completely judge them and make inferences on what type of person they are. Are they are worth pursuing, questionable, or just out of the question…

The main thing you have to worry about is the same-way-stander or the dreaded duckface. It’s the same look! I feel like I am taking crazy pills!

They must be hiding something.

The next tool in the stalker’s toolkit is the “see friendship” button – basically created for jealous Facebook stalkers. Click it and stare at a relationship you were entirely absent from. Look at all the pics and events they have shared. Pick it apart piece by piece. Learn to hate people you don’t even know.

Facebook chat is something I have grown to love and hate. On one hand… It allows you to spark a conversation that seems unplanned. You are on Facebook, I’m here, no big deal. It’s a seemingly nonchalant approach when compared to calling or texting.

On the other hand, it is buggy as hell and there is a large risk of sending unrequited messages….embarrassing

Some basic Do’s and Don’ts:
DO…Stick to Facebook stalking in private. Close all of your tabs when you leave your computer! If the evidence isn’t there, it never happened, right?

DON’T….creep on you cell phone. It is much easier to accidentally “like” something on a touch screen. For example, a picture of your ex and their new boyfriend or girlfriend. Awkward!

Take this fine young gentleman here: he is probably leaving an awfully thought out message that he thinks is HILARIOUS at the time. For this scenario I would recommend Webroots social media sobriety test. It’s like a roadside test for your finger to protect yourself from this sort of thing.

DO…take it EASY??? Checking out your ex to see if they downgraded is fine. But to check out their new boyfriend’s job, friends, his fraternity. etc is going overboard. Don’t even think about friending him either. Walk away from your computer, stretch, and take some deep breaths.

Don’t…Play Farmville. It is the only thing creepier than stalking.

As you know – Facebook can turn the most confident people into crazy stalkers, and it’s OK. Whether you are clicking through 100s of pics or looking at every single post on their wall….It’s not like we are sitting in a windowless van outside their house, right?! We are just reading what they want us to read! No Privacy settings?? No problem!

And in conclusion…Stalking isn’t even that weird anymore. In fact, it is beginning to be portrayed in modern and sure to be classic literature as a sign of devotion and love. Perhaps we should give Facebook due credit for this wonderful paradigm shift. I love you Facebook…