Which agency will you be watching in 2007? Why?
Philalithes: Naked, New York. They took London by storm and have just celebrated their first anniversary in the Big Apple.
Horan: I will be following the changes underway at larger agencies. Agencies are evolving, and even re-organizing, to better address the interactive future of advertising, and I expect we’ll see more of this in the year ahead. How they go about this change will significantly impact the online media industry.
Cummings: I won’t. I will look for campaigns I believe resonate and follow the people that did them. Great advertising and marketing is done by people, not agencies. Certain agencies facilitate, and are organized to help create great work, but a bad team at a great agency still won’t produce anything meaningful. Follow the people.
Edwards: Universal McCann’s "Fast Twitch Media" concept -- a more structured approach to distributed, freelance creative development.
What would you like to see agencies do more of in 2007?
Coffin: Take as much risk with media as they do with creative.
Hespos: I’d like to see them concentrate more on the two-way dialogue that makes the internet unique, and finding ways to make use of that in their marketing campaigns.
Cummings: Work with publishers to develop digital tear sheets. I am tired of setting up large internet marketing programs, informing our CEO that we are running a site "x," and then having them go there and see 20 of our competitors ads show up as they constantly hit "refresh." This not only does nothing to move the perception of the medium forward, but actually hurts the internal perception. Why can’t all publishers, agencies, et cetera, just give us one link to the site in which we are guaranteed to see our ads on the site page? You have no idea how much this would actually shift budgets toward online. Never in history has the media consumption of a medium so far outstretched its proportion of ad spending -- and this is one of the restrictors. When you buy TV, your CEO watches the show and sees your ad. When you buy print, they open up their copy and boom -- there it is. But with online it’s like a fart in the wind.
Who will you watch the most in 2007? Why?
Epstein: Most of the users.
Philalithes: New CEO of the IAB, Randall Rothenberg, is a person to watch.
Cummings: I’ll actually watch Matt Flannery and Premal Shah of Kiva.org, and search for others like them. I am amazed at people I meet who believe all the good internet ideas have already been developed. Their site, and those like it, was the reason why many of us got into the industry in 1994. I will also follow Negroponte, the OLPC project and the first computers distributed. The promise of the internet from an ability to influence society in a positive way is finally being fulfilled by them and those like them.
Hespos: Don Schultz. His speech at the iMedia Summit this year released a flood of ideas in the way that a targeted brick to the forehead is apt to do.