Open House

Google and YouTube

Now I know everyone and their dog has written about the purchase of YouTube by Google for a whopping $1.65 billion, but I am going to as well.

Chad Hurley (co founder of YouTube) has done well considering the whole operation started in his apartment.

Will be interesting to see where it all goes and what sort of combined offering they come up with but it should be good.

Some data I got from Antony Mayfield's Open Blog about the geographical spread of traffic for YouTube and Myspace is interesting:

MySpace has a bit more users, at about 85 to 75 million judging from the graphs. But Myspace traffic is about 92% from North America, and almost all of the remainder from Europe. YouTube is much more evenly split, with its largest usage from Asia about 38%, then Europe 32%, then North America 28% and the rest of the world splits the rest

The fact that YouTube is so evenly split globally is testament to their ubiquitous appeal - i.e. pretty much everyone thinks it's great.

This infor comes from Alan Moore's blog called Communities Dominate Brands which is worth reading too - very interesting stuff.

Cheers

Steve

How not to get a job

OK so you want to get into banking. Personally it's not a choice I would make, but some people live for 16 hour days. And I'm talking about the weekend.

One of these people is Aleksey Vayner - a Yale student, professional athlete and all round hero.

According to his CV.

Basically he sent in the most ridiculous CV to UBS with a link to his own website that featured his own video entitled 'Impossible is nothing.'

His CV and video went round the banking circuit in New York in a matter of hours and he was an international laughing stock. And I am shamelessly jumping on the band wagon. Here is the video

And here is the CV of this God among men. GeniusDownload vayner.pdf

And check out Ivy Gate Blog for the full disclosure of this chap's fabrications and the 'Cease and Desist' order he sent them.

Point being, don't lie, and don't do ridiculously vain and arrogant things when applying for a job. Cos you don't want to get famous for the wrong reasons.

Steve

PS He didn't get the job.

Just another reason not to go into investment banking

A new study has shown that sleep deprivation can have the same effect on your abilities to function as being drunk.

Apparently the macho culture of working yourself to death in certain industries (naming no names) is a bad thing.

Read the post on futurenet's marketing and innovation blog here

As far as I can tell this means two things:

Being really really tired is a bad thing and means you do a crap job, and make very silly decisions.

If you have no money to go down the pub and actually get drunk, just stay up for 24 hours and let the fun begin.

By the way futurelab is a great blog. Read read read.

Cheers,

Steve

More money spent advertising online

Than in national newspapers by the end of the year. That's the prediction based on the current figures for the amount of money being spent in online advertising as reported by Brand Republic. Check out the full article here. One quote though that I will add here is

The UK is the first market where internet advertising [spend] has moved into double digits

The only sectors of advertising that are growing are the ones that are focused on building relationships with consumers - Direct Marketing and Digital.

TV ad spend is decreasing, possibly because consumers are becoming more demanding - they want the interactivity, personalisation and individuality the intertnet offers in everything. Where they don't find it, they switch off.

Maybe. It's just an idea. Check out the following links to find out some more if you are interested:

Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)

Enclick and the rise of viral marketing vs TV

As always, am very interested in your ideas and comments.

The Industry

This is an explanation about the industry that has got me through those conversations with friends who ask me who I work for. It's not that interesting but if you can get it now when you start applying for things it'll give you a clearer picture of who you are trying to work for and also show you have done a bit of research. Never a bad thing.

Basically all the advertising, marketing, pr and media agencies in the world are all owned by one of the following (I'm deliberately ignoring all the independent agencies to make it easier to explain) :

Omnicom

WPP

Publicis

Interpublic

Omnicom is the biggest in terms of something called market capitalisation - which is how much money would be available if they sold all their shares at once at any given time. It is something around the $16 billion mark.

Omnicom is basically a holding company - they are not an agency in themselves, they only own other agencies. They don't produce any advertising, they leave that up to the agencies they own.

One of the divisions of Omnicom is DAS or to use its full title Diversified Agency Services. DAS is where all the agencies that aren't advertising are 'kept.' So, it has responsibility for all the direct marketing, digital, sales promtions, branding, healthcare and pr agencies that belong to Omnicom all over the world.

And every year, DAS London run a graduate scheme called Accelerate, and my time on the scheme motivated me to create this site to help students who want to get into marketing improve their knowledge of the industry and therefore their chances of getting a job.

School's out

Seth Godin writes here today about the death of standard methods of presenting, as a result of the possibility the internet provides for talking to individual as individuals.

The old ways of conveying information by standing up in front of a group and talking are over:

Speech is both linear and unpaceable. You can’t skip around and you can’t speed it up. When the speaker covers something you know, you are bored. When he quickly covers something you don’t understand, you are lost

Because of the internet and the resources for discovering and learning it gives, the 'old ways' just don't cut it anymore.

This applies to everyone.

For agencies who are looking to employ grads, it means that they have to look to new ways to talk to students in a relevant way - glossy A4 brochures ain't good enough I'm afraid in my opinion.

Corporate websites where you send you cv and hope for the best are wasting the opportunities for interactivity and relationship building the internet offers.

But it's not all one-sided - something I have learnt (the hard way) this year is you are the one who wants to work for them.

You need to look at how to connect with them - and writing the world's best cv (even if none of it is exaggerated) and making sure everything is spelt right is important, but it's now a given.

What resources can you exploit? Where can you look? On the left are some places to start, some sites that I look at and find useful. Search through the millions of blogs on Google Blog Search here.

I really want to hear what you have found, what is useful, or interesting then I can develop Open House further.

Cheers,

Steve

Something a little bit different...

My name is Steve, I am coming to the end of a graduate scheme called the DAS Accelerate Scheme - read the official website here.

This site is my project, and part of a drive to achieve better relationships between students and marketing agencies.

Every agency needs great talent. Every agency wants the best.

But every day for the last year I have been forced to realise how little I knew about the industry I was dead set on joining.

This site is on the one hand designed to be a source of information, help and support for people looking to start work in the marketing industry after university.

On the other hand agencies are right in demanding the best - and this site is a place for discussion and sharing of ideas that will help everyone improve their chances of being successful in the marketing industry.

Are you prepared to take a few minutes out of the long hours of online assessments and corporate websites to be part of something different?