Image via Computer World

Google dominated industry chatter this week with its announcement of Buzz and swirling rumors of its plans to acquire social search service Aardvark. Foursquare also made headlines for its new partnerships with Zagat and the New York Times. We’ve summarized these items and more in the recap below.

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Last week 360i attended a Dynamic Logic and 4A’s webinar during which they presented best practices for display banners based on analysis of best- and worst-performing campaigns (you can access the press release about the study on Dynamic Logic’s Web site).

One key insight, which we have espoused for years, is that taking the time to develop strong online creative is critical. So much so that poor-performing banners don’t merely perform worse than better creative, they actually can negatively impact brand metrics such as awareness, favorability and intent.

Here are some key design and messaging recommendations from Dynamic Logic’s analysis and some of 360i’s thoughts based on our display creative experience:

1. Brand impact is only as strong as brand presence.
Specifically keep your logo on every frame. Intrigue rarely drives awareness and response. The longer the logo appears, the higher the lift in aided awareness. And consumers most likely will not see the logo if it only appears on the product and not prominently within the ad. For example, here is one of the ads we developed for a recent Panasonic campaign. Note that the logo is persistent throughout the interactive animations.

Click image to play ad:

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So what’s one of the world’s most respected venture capitalists talking about at Ad Age Digital? Earned media.

He noted paid media’s about media and creative. Earned media’s about conversations, and also analysis. (He blogged about earned media recently if you want more on this).

He actually proposed a future scenario, soon available (along with the rest of his presentation), on his A VC blog, where overall marketing spending rises thanks to increases in spending on technology and creative, but a decrease in spending on media. He’s not even labeling this a prediction, but more of a possibility.

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By Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i

Display advertising: Can it be both a branding and a performance marketing tool? I’d argue yes, but not at the same time. And that’s where some of the recent debates over the art-and-science approach to display have gotten it wrong.

You see, we need to rethink the way we buy and sell display advertising in a way that clearly distinguishes between various marketers’ objectives — whether that is direct response (e.g., e-commerce sales or generating web leads) or enhancing the brand (influencing purchase intent, favorability ratings, etc). We’ll be best served by treating it not as a hybrid but as two different tactics.

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Experts are having a whale of a time guessing how Twitter will monetize itself (Image via JustPete).

Will all that twitters soon be gold? Last night, social media hotshot Twitter began rolling out house ads to its homepages. The text ads, written in the form of pithy (no surprise there) dictionary entries, currently promote the Twitter Widget and Twitter Search features – though industry insiders speculate the ads are likely being used to “test” the slots for future third party advertisements.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington says “it isn’t much of a stretch” to make this assumption. After all, Twitter Japan has hosted display ads since its inception last April. With an estimated 10 million users – a number that surged 33 percent in February alone – few would be surprised by Twitter CEO Evan Williams and company seeking to capitalize on this popularity and monetize the site. The question now is, how? Read the full article

Google’s taking a stab at behavioral, albeit with a bit more disclosure than James Stewart in “Rear Window” (1954).

Big news today – Google is getting into Behavioral Advertising. Surprising, considering the search leviathan has never been keen on Behavioral. Not surprising, considering Google Display was being left behind by competitors in the space, including Yahoo!, when it came to user-level targeting. Read the full article

Will Yahoo!’s new targeting features hit the sweet spot for digital marketers? (By clevercupcakes via Flickr)

Marketers are increasingly tying their search and display together and, by looking closely at attribution reports, gaining better clarity into how search and display work together to drive sales. This week, Yahoo! announced that they will offer “search retargeting” for display ads, or the ability to target display ads based on data such as what a user has previously searched for or their browsing behavior on an advertisers’ site. Read the full article