In conjunction with the re-branding, Améredia managed the launch of Tea India’s instant tea product, Chai MomentsTM. The launch strategy included an integrated marketing campaign across digital and traditional channels throughout diverse consumer segments in both the US and Canadian markets.

“Relevant consumer insights are at the heart of all successful campaigns,” said Pawan J Mehra, founder and principal at Ameredia. “We understand diverse consumers and our design and messaging connected well with the targeted audience generating desired awareness and traffic for the client”.

The Tea India website (http://www.teaindia.com) was developed through consumer insights including use of aesthetics and messaging that would engage targeted groups. The agency collaborated with the client team, the mainstream agency and a digital partner to develop a culturally appealing site that strongly resonates with consumers. Design elements were made consistent with the mainstream branding launched in the United Kingdom, a key market for tea consumption.

Améredia’s expertise in multicultural advertising, marketing and communications also earned a 2013 Hermes Creative Awards Honorable Mention. The agency was recognized for their outstanding 2012 holiday creative work for long time client, Comcast.

Hermes Creative Awards is an international competition for creative professionals involved in the concept, writing and design of traditional materials, programs, and emerging technologies. The 2013 Hermes Awards attracted 5600 global entries from leading corporate marketing and communication departments, advertising agencies, PR firms, graphic design shops, production companies, and other digital creators.

About Améredia

Améredia Inc. (http://www.ameredia.com) is a full-service multicultural advertising, marketing and communications firm specializing in building brands within U.S.-based diverse communities. The agency enables private, government and non-profit organizations to connect with Hispanics, Asians, Europeans, Middle Easterners, Pacific Islanders, Africans and other diverse cultural groups nationwide. Conceptualizing culturally engaging campaigns across print, TV, radio, online, outdoors, events, grassroots and social media platforms in over 20 leading languages, Améredia has positioned itself as one of the fastest-growing diverse market agencies nationwide.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10752777.htm

Stiefel is an experienced talent in technology sales, holding senior account positions at a number of prominent companies, including: AppNexus, NetApp and EMC. Prior to 140 Proof, Stiefel became a top 5 sales performer in EMC’s US Commercial Division and closed the largest single transaction ($7.2M) to date in the Division’s history.  

“We’re excited to have Kim on the 140 Proof team,” said CEO and co-founder Jon Elvekrog. “Our mission is to make what everyone sees in social more relevant by mapping the blended interest graph. As we grow our advertising network into new areas, Kim’s skills will ensure that we have the best ads and the best network available.”

“Social advertising is about expressing meaningful messages across the social universe, and adding relevance to advertising. This has big implications for developers and bloggers,” said Stiefel. “140 Proof is uniquely positioned to transform digital brand advertising and I’m thrilled to help build out the best social ad offering available.

Stiefel received a Bachelors degree from The Ohio State University, and recently made the move from New York City to San Francisco for this opportunity.

About 140 Proof
140 Proof is the leading social advertising service, providing brand advertisers an effective way to reach millions of consumers primed to discover and share. The company delivers relevant, native, sharable ads across millions of social sites and apps connected via the Blended Interest Graph. 140 Proof’s Blended Interest Graph targeting matches ads to audiences based on public social cues such as who a user follows and keywords that a user sees. The solution is optimized for social and includes native social, IAB standard, and rich-media ad units. 140 Proof is headquartered in San Francisco and has additional field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Detroit.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/140-Proof-Hires-Sales-Ace-as-New-Director-of-4518940.php

Leveraging its optimized consumer-driven platform, ZooZ’s “In-Ad Payments” enables publishers to streamline their mobile performance marketing and provide an experience that corresponds with the behaviors and needs of the average impulse buyer. ZooZ In-Ad Payments is significant because it enables ad agencies and networks to introduce new monetization models that are based on actual commerce transactions and not just clicks. According to Berg Insight, a telecom research company, the global mobile ad market is poised to jump from the $3.4 billion in 2010 to $22.0 billion in 2016.

While today’s mobile-oriented consumers expect immediate, hassle-free payment transactions, their experience is still sub-optimal, leading to persistently low conversion rates. According to a Nielsen study last year, 79% of respondents felt that shopping on a mobile device was slow and difficult to navigate, with many noting they had abandoned the transaction because the experience was so bad.

In-Ad Payments

ZooZ’s In-Ad Payment replaces prevailing offerings that force mobile shoppers to undergo an excruciating process, including redirecting them to a new site where they may be required to download a different app and then have to find the product all over again, or being asked to leave contact details and then wait for someone to respond to them later.

ZooZ In-Ad Payments enables mobile users to checkout with one tap within a visible banner ad inside of an app. After tapping on the ad, ZooZ’s checkout will pop in and present the mobile user with a full native checkout experience but without requiring one’s credit card details to be re-entered. Already used by thousands of merchants, ZooZ’s new functionality incorporates all the benefits of its flagship offering, including the new “quick payment,” support for e-commerce sites and apps, multiple payment methods, and its unique fraud detection capabilities.

“For the past year, ZooZ has been squarely focused on making payments click for in app purchases and e-commerce. However, we recognized that the ad industry is also facing immense challenges trying to create viable monetization models for mobile, yet thus far their efforts are still hampered by low conversion rates. We believe our new In-Ad Payment functionality will be an important new alternative and are pleased to offer them a new viable option,” said Oren Levy, Co-founder and CEO of ZooZ. “Notably, our new In-Ad Payment offering essentially minimizes the process mobile shoppers have to go through and replaces it with a seamless and quick purchase experience.”

About ZooZ

Through its unique checkout platform, ZooZ offers a complete, secure, and easy-to-use payment solution for e-commerce websites and mobile apps. ZooZ provides retailers and merchants with a set of tools that enables them to increase shopping conversion rates, reduce shopping cart abandonment, and grow their business based on smart consumer insights generated by its platform. By focusing on users’ behaviors and needs, ZooZ provides a standardized, branded, fast-and-easy checkout experience. Founded in 2010 by a team that includes a former executive leading VeriSign’s Fraud Detection group, the privately-held company has partnered with leading payment gateways, processors, and e-wallets worldwide to ensure that both users and retailers enjoy full flexibility and the broadest of payment options. The company’s patent-pending, bank-grade security technology also keeps user information secure in PCI-compliant servers. For more information, please visit http://www.zooz.com.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/ZooZ-Previews-In-Ad-Payments-at-Finovate-4518501.php

Called simply Sköna Vignettes, the collection of videos features 10 businesses and organizations that express the artisan, learned-hand ideals that have made Potrero Hill famous. This small pocket of San Francisco has surged in popularity in recent years, marked by an influx of young techies and upper-income professionals who hope to preserve the neighborhood’s originality and pluck. 

“Sköna Vignettes was born of our desire to share Potrero Hill with people outside of San Francisco – people who don’t have the luxury of spending a weekend on the Hill and experiencing the vibe in person,” said Scott Springer, creative director and partner, Sköna Advertising, Inc. “What once was an industrial, downtrodden area is now such a hot spot that The Wall Street Journal and New York Times have taken notice, but the spirit of the neighborhood has remained unchanged.”

Many of the businesses featured in Sköna Vignettes are household names including Recchuiti Confections, Rickshaw Bagworks and Papa November. The series also showcases the people behind the Taste of Potrero – an annual food event and fundraiser that helped rescue a neighborhood elementary school from closure – people whose passion and industry echo the spirit of the Hill.

The series includes a vignette of Sköna, too, as the company is based in Potrero and its owners hail from the Hill. “Sköna is cut from the same cloth as the other businesses in the series,” said Jenny Sagström, Sköna’s president and partner. “We’re passionate about our craft, and we’re also blue-collar, roll-up-your-sleeves at our core.”

The Sköna Vignettes series can be viewed at vignettesf.com.

About Sköna Advertising, Inc.
Sköna is a Potrero Hill-based, full-service advertising and design shop focusing on business needs from a holistic communications point of view. A small firm with big creative muscle, Sköna’s award-winning work is based on this premise: We no longer have the luxury of “talking” to consumers; we must engage them in the conversation. This is where inbound and outbound marketing come together. For more information, visit skona.com.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/Sk-na-Vignettes-Shine-a-Spotlight-on-San-4484873.php

The San Francisco-based company is unveiling Social.com, a new offering that combines services that originated at Buddy Media and another acquisition, Radian6. The idea is to help advertisers and agencies more effectively manage advertising using the likes of Facebook  and Twitter, a practice frequently called social advertising. 

For Salesforce, which started out by offering Web services to help automate company salesdepartments, the acquisitions and the new offering are the latest sign of its determination to diversify into marketing. Why? That’s increasingly where the money is.

“Within the next few years, the CMO is going to spend more money on technology than the CIO,” says Michael Lazerow, who was Buddy Media’s co-founder and CEO, using acronyms for chief marketing officer and chief information officer.

Buddy Media built up a business of helping companies manage all the advertising they place on Facebook and other sites. Lazerow, who is now chief marketing officer of what Salesforce calls its marketing cloud, says that could get pretty complicated considering all the ads a big consumer products company could place on different variants of social networks in different countries.

Radian6, meanwhile, was known for monitoring Twitter and other sites to help companies track what users are saying about their brands.

With Social.com, the idea is to better package those offerings and link them with others. One thrust, Lazerow says, is to connect the ad management system with company sales and other data generated by Salesforce services. The other is to augment that combination with the “listening” components enabled by the former Radian6 services.

The idea is to let big brands do ever-more sophisticated targeting using social networks. A company like Ford, hypothetically speaking, could exploit sales data about customers to help create Facebook communities of Ford owners and send offers to them, Lazerow says.

But advertisers want to investigate and exploit many more subtle kinds of associations, he says, like finding out what kinds of rock bands its customers like–or the friends of its customers. “Like which of these people are 25 to 35, who live in these areas and talk about Radiohead,” Lazerow says.

Many of Salesforce’s expansions up to now have been of use only to people who are customers of its customer relationship management offerings, for which it charges per user at each company. The parts of Social.com that rely on Salesforce-generated data work like that.

But there are other parts of the site that remain open to any business–not just Salesforce users, Lazerow says.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/04/23/salesforce-com-courts-brands-and-ad-agencies-with-social-com/

In an example posted Wednesday by Twitter revenue manager Nipoon Malhotra, if you tweet you’re listening to a band that happens to have a concert coming up in your city, the concert’s venue could send a Promoted Tweet into your Twitter Timeline with a link to buy tickets. 

So this new “keyword targeting” platform could be a key revenue generator step for the San Francisco microblogging service.

“This is an important new capability – especially for those advertisers looking for signals of intent – because it lets marketers reach users at the right moment, in the right context,” Malhotra wrote in a company blog.

Twitter says it’s not going to push more advertising in front of Twitter users and insists it’s making the experience better.

“Uusers can still dismiss Promoted Tweets they don’t find relevant,” Malhotra wrote. “In fact, we believe users’ experiences with ads will improve as a result of this feature as they see more relevant Promoted Tweets.”

He said tests with advertisers like Microsoft Japan and Walgreens showed users were “significantly more likely to engage with Promoted Tweets using keyword targeting in timeline than other forms of targeting in the timeline.”

He also said wearable video camera maker GoPro “saw close to two million impressions, and engagement rates as high as 11 percent on Tweets promoted using the new feature.”

So what if someone tweets about bad experiences with a particular store or restaurant, will they still get Promoted Tweets exhorting them to come in and buy something?

Not necessarily. Twitter’s advertising platforms do have negative sentiment matching and forms of automated and human intervention in place that are designed to prevent, for example, a Burger King from targeting someone who tweets he hates McDonalds. Or for that matter, an advertiser who might try to target a drug user or fan of adult entertainment.

That still won’t help advertisers who aren’t in their right minds, such as whoever was responsible for a food website’s regular tweet this week (as captured by the blog Mr. Media Training) suggesting a whole-grain scone recipe “in honor of Boston and New England.”

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/04/17/twitter-targeted-ads/

Sun-Maid, the largest raisin and dried fruit processor in the world, has selected Baker Street Advertising as its advertising agency of record.

Baker Street Advertising’s responsibilities for the iconic brand include marketing strategy,research and creative development for advertising and communications across all media channels including broadcast, print, on-line, outdoor, social media and event marketing.

Said Barry F. Kriebel, President Sun-Maid Growers of California, “We were extremely impressed with Baker Street’s breadth of talent, experience and creativity across all facets of the marketing business. We look forward to a very successful partnership.”

Baker Street Advertising President Jack Boland commented, “Sun-Maid is one of the world’s pre-eminent brands. We’re extremely thrilled to have this opportunity to partner with them and help build on their longstanding success.”

Brian Bacino, Baker Street’s Chief Creative Officer remarked, “We’ve been stuffing our faces with yogurt covered raisins and can’t wait to create new ways for people to experience and engage with such a rock star brand.”

———————

Founded in 1912, Sun-Maid Growers of California is a farmers’ cooperative owned by 750 family farmers whose vineyards comprise approximately 50,000 acres in California’s Central Valley. Headquartered in Kingsburg, California, Sun-Maid’s facilities are centrally located in the heart of the world’s largest raisin producing area, featuring long, dry summers optimal for grape production and natural sun-drying of grapes into raisins.

Sun-Maid is the leading consumer brand of raisins and dried fruits in the United States and distributes products to more than 50 countries worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.sunmaid.com and http://www.facebook.com/SunMaidGirl.

Baker Street Advertising is a full-service, independent advertising agency with a staff of 35. Other clients include the Northern California Honda Dealer Advertising Association, Northwest Honda Dealer Advertising Association, Northern California Acura DealerAdvertising Association, The San Francisco Giants, Church & Dwight, The DialCorporation, Bronco Wines, Servandus, The University of San Francisco, and The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl.

For more information, please visit http://www.bakerstadvertising.com andhttp://www.facebook.com/BakerStreetAdvertising.

From: http://envirolib.org/press-releases/baker-street-advertising-shines-with-sun-maid/

“Flurry is among a handful of companies that helped shape the mobile app revolution from its origins in 2008, working diligently with tens of thousands of app developers to optimize apps, improve user experiences and deliver innovative ad experiences that connect marketers to their desired audiences,” said Simon Khalaf, Flurry president and chief executive officer. “As ‘Mobile-first and Web-second’ becomes more than just a slogan, Flurry is opening up its platform to the mobile web.”

Flurry Analytics customers can now benefit from a common analytics platform for both native apps and mobile web sites. Flurry Analytics for the Mobile Web is completely free of charge. Beyond top-level metrics such as Active Users, Sessions and Retention, power features include Custom Events, Funnels and User Acquisition Analytics. The Mobile Web analytics solution can be integrated into a mobile website in just minutes using a JavaScript SDK.

“Flurry is focused on helping its customers measure consumer behavior across different platforms to provide a more 360 degree view,” said Brad Jones, head of product management for Flurry Analytics. “By extending its native app solution to mobile web, Flurry is helping companies better manage their entire mobile portfolio.”

The SDK will be available to all users at http://www.flurry.com in the coming weeks.

About Flurry Analytics

Flurry Analytics offers a comprehensive suite of analytics services across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Mobile Web and HTML5. Over 100,000 companies use Flurry Analytics across more than 300,000 apps. Flurry Analytics measures app usage on more than 1 billion active connected devices each month.

About Flurry

Flurry helps companies measure, advertise and monetize apps and mobile websites in the new app economy. The company’s comprehensive measurement and advertising platform reaches over 1 billion monthly unique smartphone and tablet devices across iOS, Android and other platforms. The company has offices in San Francisco, New York and London.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/Flurry-Extends-Leading-App-Analytics-Solution-to-4406161.php 

The win is a huge victory for new McCann CEO Harris Diamond, who cancelled his schedule at the 4A’s conference to meet with General Motors earlier this week, Adweek reported. 

Diamond is under pressure to turn McCann around. The agency has suffered several high-profile account losses in recent years. Diamond will likely use this win to signal that McCann is back.

The split with Goodby was predicted by Business Insider as far back as last July, due to the unusual conflict at the heart of the GM-Goodby-McCann triad. GM had asked Goodby and McCann to form a joint agency, called Commonwealth, to service the business in a 50-50 split, with Goodby handling Chevy in the U.S. and McCann handling international duties. That created a conflict of interest at the heart of the account: Goodby and McCann are rivals, and so are their parent companies, Omnicom and Interpublic Group.

About 200 Goodby staffers must now decide whether they want to stay on the account and transfer jobs to McCann, Ad Age notes.

Founder Jeff Goodby traveled to Detroit on Tuesday, apparently to receive the bad news.

GM had asked McCann and Goodby to share the account for more than a year, a relationship that was troubled from the start and became rockier when former GM CMO Joel Ewanick — who had brought Goodby on to the business — exited the company last July.

The split also caps a weird chapter in Chevy’s history. Goodby was originally brought on to the brand by former marketing chief Joel Ewanick. But Ewanick left the company after allegations surfaced that he had tried to conceal from his employers the full scope of a $559 million sponsorship of Manchester United.

Here’s McCann’s press release:

McCann Worldgroup, an Interpublic Group company, today announced it will assume sole responsibility for Commonwealth, Chevrolet’s global advertising agency, assuming the 50-percent joint ownership share held by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an Omnicom Group company.

Commonwealth will continue to serve as Chevrolet’s global advertising agency of record and work in conjunction with both IPG and Omnicom resources, including Agency 720 and Fleishman-Hillard.

All current employees of Goodby’s Detroit office will be offered employment consistent with their current employment terms.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chevrolet-fires-goodby-awards-all-business-to-mccann-2013-3