We have a love-hate relationship with technology. It’s quite possibly the largest boon we’ve ever had as marketers in terms of making our lives so much better, easier, faster, and even cheaper. Unfortunately, it’s the “easier” and “cheaper” parts that distract us to a fault.

We look to automate.

We look to scale.

We look to simplify.

We look to reduce.

Unfortunately life itself is not simple. Relationships are not algorithms; they’re intricate bonds built and reinforced through empathy, consistency, and commitment. Trust is not automatic; it’s earned over time. Our customers are not one’s and zero’s; they’re humans just like us.

via Will the New Marketing Revolution be Automated? | TalentZoo.com.

When Monster Media recently installed four giant interactive displays at Los Angeles International Airport on behalf of JCDecaux North America, it was the first of its kind for the airport — and also the latest indication that digital out-of-home is breaking the sound barrier in the air travel space.

“We now have about 22 systems in U.S. airports, and an additional 15 to 20 will go in before the end of the year,” says John Payne, president of Monster. The company’s interactive campaigns in airports have included displays where Travelers Insurance umbrellas multiply and contract as people walk by, and where snow blows across giant bottles of Coors Lite in a similar fashion.

via OOH Takes Flight.

As the economic downturn has dragged on, we’ve grown accustomed to hearing about consumers watching their pennies as they do their food shopping.

However, survey data released this month by Context Marketing, a strategic-marketing- communications firm, points to another behavior that has been taking hold: While an interest in “ethically produced” food used to be a niche preoccupation of food co-op habitues, it has become a mass-market phenomenon.

via ‘Ethical Eating’ Goes Mainstream.

In the battle to win over consumers during difficult economic times, marketers are sending their employees to the front lines. The trend seems to be accelerating. Last week, Zappos introduced a new pitch with puppets fronting actual recordings of employee-customer service calls. Last month, Lowe’s launched a campaign with store associates advising cash-strapped DIY consumers.

Those campaigns come after several others celebrating the rank and file. Over the past year or so, Southwest Airlines, Ford, Domino’s, Bank of America, General Electric, Exxon Mobile and Verizon have featured staffers or actors playing them.

via Employee Benefits: Workers as Brand Ambassadors.

When was the last time you said “color” TV? Probably not in a while. The same thing is about to happen with the word “digital,” at least when its comes to the ad business. Right now a lot of agencies call themselves digital and many others tout the fact that they can do digital, but one day pretty soon all ad agencies will be digital and the word will be as unnecessary as color is to TV.

via Race to Relevance.

Ask any interactive shop to build a campaign and you’ll likely get a digital centerpiece that costs a small fortune, such as a mobile app for iPhones or a team of bloggers driving cross country bragging about your brand via Twitter and a microsite. This blockbuster approach appeals to both CMO egos and agency paychecks, putting the client at the center of a new communication hub.

It’s also wrongheaded because in a world of billions of Internet-enabled devices with fragmenting formats, any attempt at building a single portal will fail. The only way to succeed in our tech-morphing landscape is to treat device proliferation as a new form of media inventory, and to vastly increase placements in each category.

via Gadgets: Ad Land’s Newest Inventory.

Twitter was widely expected to take the wraps off its ad platform at the South by Southwest conference today. Instead, CEO Evan Williams threw the crowd for a loop by instead unveiling an information-sharing tool for publishers.

The @anywhere service lets publishers embed code on their sites that will turn hyperlinks of key terms on Web pages into repositories of Twitter information. SXSW’s notoriously fickle crowds lived up to their reputation, complaining via Twitter that the interview was boring with many leaving the session early.

via SXSW: Twitter’s Ad Platform That Isn’t.

On a recent Thursday afternoon in Brooklyn, six elementary schoolchildren assembled for their Junior Tastemakers class at Creative Cooks, which offers cooking classes for kids from 2-years-old through the 8th grade. In the bright storefront space, a 6-year-old with tousled blond hair named Henry cut a clove of elephant garlic with a large plastic serrated knife. Beside him a brown-haired boy, Alex, also 6, cut a green pepper.

via Toy Pitches Half-Baked?.

WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather in New York has won the Ikea account following a review, the client has confirmed. Annual ad spending is $85-90 million, per Nielsen.

The other shops remaining in the final round were the New York offices of WPP’s Berlin Cameron United, Havas’ Euro RSCG and Publicis Groupe’s The Kaplan Thaler Group.

The incumbent, IPG’s Deutsch in New York, exited just two weeks before final presentations.

via Ikea Picks Ogilvy.

Nearly a year after its resurrection, maniaTV is diving back into original Web video with a slate of new series planned for 2010.

The company, which shut down operations last spring only to be revived by original founder Drew Massey, is going back to its roots in entertainment and celebrity programming. (In the past, maniaTV has featured live talk shows hosted by former MTV regular Tom Green and rocker Dave Navarro.)

via maniaTV Preps New Web Slate.