A hearty thanks and a tip of the hat to Nimbology, for their post regarding their experiences with our advertising platform and specifically, my little ad-hoc demonstration at SFBeta.
It’s always a great feeling when people you talk to and meet out in the real world understand what you’re trying to do and the value of your product. We work on the platform all day, every day. We know the product inside and out, and we strongly believe in the value we provide to display advertisers and interested consumers. However, just like anything else you commit yourself to, it’s hard to see the outsider perspective - so it always brightens our day when someone comes along and gives us feedback like that.
Just a reminder: this Thursday, August 21, Spongecell will be hosting Lunch 2.0 at our HQ office here in San Francisco, CA. We strongly recommend showing up earlier rather than later, as the response to the event has blown us away. Hope you can make it!
Spongecell CTO Chris Hobbs will be presenting at the Rails Conference Europe on September 4, 2008 in Berlin Germany. The RailsConf Europe is organized to meet the increasing demand for skill building, and to spread the developments of Rails to programmers and IT managers alike. The most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies from around the world, including Spongecell’s very own CTO Hobbs, will provide examples of development paradigms and design strategies to enable businesses to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.
Hobbs will be presenting “Add E-Commerce to Your Website in Less Than One Week Using ActiveMerchant”. For more information on the conference or registration, click here.
Last Thursday, some of our East Coast office made an appearance at Mashable’s SummerMash at Touch in NYC, where there was lots of socializing about Web 2.0 over food, drinks and live music. The event was the grand finale of Mashable’s cross country Summer Tour, and a couple hundred people came out to celebrate. We had a great time meeting folks and talking up our new Rich Media. If anyone from SummerMash didn’t get a chance to run into us and wants to grab a drink and recreate SummerMash, get in touch and we’ll make a date!
Spongecell’s CEO Ben Kartzman was recently inducted into The Internet Oldtimers Foundation, erzognized as being as a leader in the digital advertising community. The foundation highlighted Ben’s experience in the digital and online advertising worlds alike, writing:
“Ben Kartzman has emerged as one of the leading minds in the creation and management of highly usable software products. He is a qualified expert in interactive advertising and possesses particular strengths in global team building and development.”
The Internet Oldtimers Foundation was founded in 1999 and represents the leading decision makers in the digital media and marketing industry. Read more about where New Media goes for experience and perspective here!
The first challenge that we set out to solve when we started Spongecell was to figure out how to make it easy for consumers to move relevant content from a transient place on the web into a permanent one in their lives. It has always been our mantra to take the interest that is created by content on the web and find an easy way for consumers to convert that interest into real-world participation. Since we’re all more likely to do things when we have a social connection to them it’s natural that we would want to tell our friends, through email and social networking platforms, what we’re doing. That correlates directly to interest as placing that content into one’s cellphone, social network or calendar makes one that much more likely to participate in it offline.
It is this thesis that has us and our advertisers so psyched about our Rich Media Ads platform. I grabbed this from Brad Burnham’s post on Meetup:
“for the web to have a greater impact going forward it will not only have to touch the real world, it will have to reach real people.”
This really is one of the key tenets of our offering. Display advertising is such an incredible way for brands to reach interested consumers, but for too long the only option within display ads was just to click through to learn more or engage further. In our eyes, the real opportunity for all brands and advertisers in using display ads is reaching people with relevant content, and then giving them an easy way to pull that content into their lives.
First things first, let me introduce myself. I’m Nik, the creative director here at Spongecell. I joined up with the team about seven months ago after a two year stint at Yahoo!. Before that and like most other members of the team here at Spongecell, I attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where I graduated with a Bachelors in Information Systems/Communication Design, and a Masters in Information Systems Management.
Whew! Glad that is out of the way.
Last night, I had the distinct pleasure of demoing the new Spongecell Rich Media Ads platform at SFBeta, a very highly visited and respected tech meetup in Downtown SF. I got to meet some great people, received a lot of great feedback, and had a blast doing it. It really seems like people are taking to the product and our value-adds over traditional display advertising, which is great to see.
As a company, we’re planning on a lot of different things, and we’re thinking about different ways to open ourselves up to the community. Yesterday was SFBeta, but tomorrow might be Lunch 2.0, and the day after that might be a softball game in Golden Gate Park against DIgg. Who knows - just keep your eye out!
Newspapers are facing rapidly falling ad revenue, and advertisers are planning to spend less money across major media categories–TV, newspaper, radio. In a recent survey by Jupiter Research, the majority of marketing executives reported plans to cut traditional marketing channels. The bright spot is online, where 75% of advertisers anticipate increase in spending.
“Digital and direct marketing would be the last budget item to be cut in a spending squeeze, according to a new study from Millward Brown.
The promo mediums most likely to be slashed do include traditional advertising, point-of-sale marketing and PR, but 75% of companies said they planned to boost their spending on digital promotions in the next
year.
The reason: digital can be tracked and it’s cheap.”
-Adotas, 75% of companies to Increase Digital Spend
We want to give a big thanks to all the good folks at Adverlab, Mashable and a great number of advertising blogs that are talking up Spongecel’s new Rich Media solution for display ads. Whether you’re interested in display advertising, rich media, Spongecell or all three, visit the Spongecell Press page here to read more about the conversation being stirred up by Spongecell Ads.
People Like to Share - What Are the Limits to the Social Web?
Adthropology - Banner Ads as Tools
Adverlab - Bookmarkable Banners with Reminders from Spongecell
Brand Flakes for Breakfast - Banner Ads as Tools
Businessuu - Spongecell Ads Turn Banners into Bookmark Buttons
Goodness in Sharing - Serve Me a Chance to Participate
Last month I had a very frustrating experience where I kept seeing ads for Mad Men’s July 29th season premier, but couldn’t set it to record on my DVR, set a reminder nor add the event to my calendar easily. I 
ended up manually making an appointment in iCal (and wishing AMC was beta’ing our new software).
Today we are announcing an exciting new way to use Spongecell to connect with people - Spongecell Rich Media Ads. We’ve been calling them “bookmarkable ads” around the office. People viewing a Spongecell Rich Media Ad about an upcoming product launch, event, or TV show, can add it to their calendar/social network/mobile device and invite friends without leaving the ad unit!
Advertisers spend massive amounts of money and energy targeting and engaging their audience, only to let the attention they have earned dissipate afterwards. Our message is simple: Stop wasting your hard earned engagement! Measure it (with our great new engagement reports) and make it last (with our rich media tools).
Please contact us for a trial. The rich media ads aren’t available to the general public yet, that will happen later this summer with full integration into the Spongecell web app. Thanks to Mashable and Adverlab for the early coverage. I’m going to be demo’ing a couple of ads at SF New Tech tonight, please say “hi” if you are there.
BTW - The NYC and SF teams have been working extremely hard for the past couple of weeks to get this product out the door. We are proud of everyone… Go Sponge!
The internationally recognized NGO Oxfam, recently started using a Spongecell list widget to communicate with activists about how to get involved in the fight against poverty around the world. A worldwide campaign against poverty calls for mobilizing tools that effectively spread word about how people, everywhere can get involved. Today, you can visit the Activist Calendar (Spongecell list widget) and find a dozen ways to get involved throughout July, all around the globe.