two of the most relied upon sites in advertising and help to inform the professionals in the industry. Advertising Age, a veteran website amongst a young online advertising community (see photo to right), covers the most important and large scale agency and client news, and also comes in a printed weekly copy. Direct competitor, Adweek, follows closely as a site for consistent and relevant information yet is seen to be a more inclusive feed as it utilizes integrated video features. The two sites are often heralded for their special summations of the industry, whether it is about the clients or agencies, and both maintain widespread reach with their sibling sites throughout the news sector of marketing and advertising. The most prominent website with this direct relation to Advertising Age is Creativity-Online, which is the online supplement to the print periodical that looks at the designs and ideas backing the world's best advertisements while providing in-depth news on the people who make these ads happen. One of these siblings reaching from Adweek (and their parent Nielsen Business Media) is Brandweek, another weekly periodical respected by many to be the leading source for information regarding current branding and marketing practices. Following suit, an additional sibling is Mediaweek, a site laden with plentiful news of mass media especially focusing on television by using ratings and other data to generate useful stories about the media industry. The final prominent website, actually a blog, with relation to Nielsen Business Media is NielsenWire, where the world's leading provider of marketing information, Nielsen Company, uses their extensive research to provide advanced and current knowledge on everything from sports to politics to consumer trends in an easy-to-use blog format.There are many blogs on the Web that are now written for news providers' websites and I was able to find numerous of these blogs that pertain to the advertising community. AdFreak is one such blog that falls under the powerful empire of Nielsen Business Media. It is a much respected blog and is frequently updated with witty and informative posts using numerous different writers whom all add their own flair to the site. BusinessWeek has a blog named Brand New Day, which often writes with a focus on current branding techniques but also divulges into other popular marketing and advertising stories. Brand New Day sometimes though struggles to keep away from too much analysis of current politics and may also be slow on generating new posts from its two writers who are already staff members elsewhere in the publication. The Los Angeles Times has a fitting blog as well, Web Scout, yet it seems to steer much emphasis towards online entertainment and does not consistently enough blog about online advertising. Yet when the blog does deliver worthy content, writer David Sarno, covers advertising's online efforts with great form and depth.
To cover my category of Highly Established Blogs, I was easily directed to many of the most respected blogs that are featured on just about every linkroll in the blogging community. Jaffe Juice is a weekly column turned blog and revamped to now be a self-described "unshackled, uncensored and uninhibited dialogue on the subjects of new marketing, advertising and creativity," but the one thing missing from his description is frequency of updates, as this seems to be his downfall when posting only in clumps at a time. Following this trend is Adverblog, which too lacks consistency in posting, yet makes up for this by finding extraordinary features to discuss when covering the field of interactive marketing. Though the writer of A/D Goodness often has little to say with his posts, he focuses heavily on new, innovative design elements of advertisements to showcase all forms of advertising media that have been done exceptionally well.
A blog that mixes a sense of quirkiness with seriousness is AdPulp, which balances well between reporting major news stories and just posting for humor's sake. One of my favorite blogs is AdRants (see photo to left), a blog that has an outstanding pair of writers and has strength in opinion and defined character, as is surely summed up by its website title "Marketing and Advertising News with Attitude." The What's Next Blog has gained success and praise by sharing useful professional advice amongst humorous posts and has especially excelled due to the outstanding writing abilities of the author, B.L. Ochman. Last in this category is Make the Logo Bigger, which is a strongly opinionated blog with the stories delivered to you in an often rude and negative way but the author does consistently provide a wealth of useful links and strives to constantly update the blog.My final set of blogs encompasses those in the Independent or Less-Known Blogs category. I hold these blogs to less rigorous standards, knowing that they are not the primary sources of information and often have difficulty posting constantly or etcetera; however I do feel that many of these blogs are better written as the authors care more about those posts. The Responsible Marketing Blog brings about marketing practices and examples that are extremely useful and pleasing to hear for their caring spirit. Also using practical marketing teachings, the Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog uses multiple writers to generate intelligent posts aimed at informing university educators. Ads of the World loses almost all of the written aspect of an independent blog and instead focuses on the strength of imagery advertising worldwide by picking monthly "winners" to feature in the blog and on the homepage. Last but not least is Madvertising, a blog that reminds me of the same content that I am trying to cover with oddities of advertising, except that the posts are more visually driven and less opinion/explanation based than my own. Overall, the vast array of websites and blogs on the Web have allowed me to gain more influential and active sites to use to propel my blog and increase my understanding of the industry.
Also, I would like to acknowledge and thank the first website to link to my blog, Contaigous Magazine, a magazine, DVD and online effort to identify the world's revolutionary marketing strategies.
1 comment:
This is a great post with lots of resources across the spectrum. I never realized that there was such a great number of sites dedicated to the analysis and being interested in the field, I have definitely found some sites here worth following.
I really liked how you separated your links into a few different categories, because it brought a lot of structure to the article. By relating them to one another within their respective sections, you were able to distinguish which blogs stood out in their own categories, rather than comparing highly regarded news sources to a smaller personal blog.
Aside from the lack of posting, which you mentioned about a few sites, were there other flaws that you found in the sites? I would like to think that sites dedicated to advertising would have clean, good-looking designs, but I could be wrong.
After looking through all of these resources, did you see a lot of overlap? I imagine that there would be so many different angles and campaigns in advertising that there is a lot of unique information, but I'm not adept in the field. Also, even though you held the "less-known blogs" to a "less rigorous standard," did you find that they really needed it, or could they compete with the "big dogs"?
Also, I applaud your achievement in having an outside website to link to your blog.
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