Welcome to your Digital Classroom

All of us here at Digital hope you'll enjoy your Digital Training Academy, but we also hope you'll instantly be able to achieve more in your firm.

Learning the tools of the digital networked economy can take time, and your Academy has been created to give you a sudden boost in knowledge, and practical tips and models for how to implement it. Many of our Academy Authors have been teaching digital media and marketing for more than a decade, and by sharing our experiences we can help you learn the fast way.

This briefing tells you more about how your Digital Training Academy works, what will happen in the face-to-face part of your Academy, and what happens after graduation. Your Academy Manager will be in touch with more specific details about topics and specific learning outcomes.

A useful flowchart that shows how marketing channels have proliferated and how the role of media has changed. Produced by the Isobar agency, this simple video deals with scepticism of consumers and how people discover news through their friends and friends of friends. It shows the way the connected environment impacts on media and how conversations take place today - whether your brand is taking part or not. Although advocating social media, it still asserts a role for brand websites, but covers other aspects of the webspace from search to PR as we do in the introductory module for the Digital Training Academies. There are some implications on budget with a move from 360 degree planning to 365 day a year. If you’re joining one of our Digital Training Academies then we’ll discuss this further when we meet.

This is another video lesson for us to work up. Let's look at it together ...

This video by Michael Wesch called "a vision of students" is a great snapshot of how the world of classroom learning has changed. When you're joining us for a Digital Training Academy we hope you'll be able to complete exercises and activities before, after and during when we are all online. Take a few minutes to watch this first and let us know what it makes you think.

Each month the team at Digital publish a digest of news and research about the size of the market and the current stages of the growth of online media and marketing, and the scale of consumer activity on the internet. Digital Intelligence has been published since 2000, and here we've collated a few of the facts we've covered that underline the scale of change in behaviour.

Continue reading "Digital Market Context Academy: Understanding the scale of change" »

Whatever your involvement is in internet marketing, it’s useful to have a few great facts at your fingertips, so here are a few we put together based on the UK online media industry. Read through them and share them with colleagues. If you are taking part in a Digital Training Academy then we might have a few more for you as well. Read through them and think about additional cool facts that reflect the growth of internet media or marketing in your sector.

Continue reading "Lesson: Your Digital talking points? A few quick facts about the market" »

Back in the Autumn of 1994, HotWired.com was looking for ways to monetize their website and content. They created a graphical space at the top of the page: 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels deep. AT&T were the first to take the jump into cyberspace. It was October 25 1994.

Continue reading "Download the first banner advert" »

This great little video opens up some of the principles of web content and what they mean in practice. In other media content and form are inextricably linked together, but in digital channels, after the first generation of web pages, they were uncoupled, creating a model of flexibility in publishing that would enable the repackaging and re-purposing of content in ways never before viable. This removed barriers to design and structure. Once you’ve watched the film, think about three implications for your content. List them (quickly – the first three that come to mind), and then reflect on what they imply. Be ready to discuss with colleagues.

If you're joining one of our Academies you might like to watch this short slide show first. Switch your sound on to get the most from the content.

We’re living in exponential times. Created by a North American teacher, the Did You Know video is a marvellous way to explain to kids how society is changing and the scale of media and technology change. Sometimes in the digital media industry we are so close to the change and the technologies that we fail to appreciate the scale of the change happening around us. This little video is a great reminder of the scale of change.

Continue reading "Shift happens: Did you know?" »

When the story about the growth of technology is drawn together, it’s an incredibly powerful picture: a society tumbling into the most rapid and unpredictable change as social network explode and information travels at the speed of thought. Just think about your own life and what this could mean for you, your family, your business and the people you work with.

Pioneering days at the start of commercial television, this ‘tingling’ commercial from the SR toothpaste brand was the first to air on the small screen. Watching it today, the style grates against what we know and have grown familiar with, yet dig deeper and you can feel how that generation of creative directors and marketers were wrestling with how to use the format. This is exactly what the internet industry had to do since the web started to go mainstream in 1995. Along the way, many of the models of media were simply imported from other channels; not the digital natives of FaceBook and Google. The early generation of internet sites were analogous to the early generation of television shows: ‘radio with pictures’. Watch it and think about whether the digital communications you see are native to the medium, or modems crudely imported from other channels: the imports may work okay, but the digital natives are where communication starts to fly.

This is a quick exercise to compete before your Digital Training Academy. It's to get you started in thinking about these issues and it should only take you ten minutes. We'll be using your comments in the Academy and they'll form a resource for all of the team. This briefing gives you the details...

Continue reading "Exercise: What Rocks and Flops in online marketing" »

In this space we're listing things from the Academy that we feel 'Rock' in online advertising, and things that, if we're honest, 'Flop'. By helping our clients harness the rocks and steer away from the flops they'll produce more powerful communication and enjoy even better results. Remember, it's still a new media for many people and this can help marketers make smarter decisions...

Introducing a simple framework for best practice in online advertising and media planning. We use this model to explain the relationship between online advertising, traffic and sales. The advertising process in digital channels mirrors what marketers know from classic channels, and by unpacking the advertising effect into a funnel that describes the steps from ad attention, through advertising persuasion to sales results, marketers can better see the role advertising and the web plays in generating increased business.

Download the lesson handouts | Upcoming public training events you can join | Digital Media Planning Academy | Ask Danny a question about his talk | Ask about in-company training

TFM&A Technology for marketing and advertising 2008
Keynote lecture summary notes for participants

The rules of the marketing game have changed. The command and control television era where big brands delivered heavyweight messaging every night to the nation, has finally melted away. In its place a radically new structure has emerged that will dominate the next twenty years of marketing. Cultural evolution, catalysed by technology and typified by the web, has empowered media-savvy consumers with the tools to filter and select in a way never before possible. Customer expectations are huge and brands are failing. Trust has switched from institutions to friends, and the barriers to the flow of information have melted. The smallest of customers can have the loudest of voices. Society will never go back.

Read and download the lecture handouts | Upcoming public training events you can join | Digital Social Media Academy | Ask Danny a question about his talk | Ask about in-company training

We live in a media saturated world. Audiences have become experienced in advertising. Many media are at risk of being screened out; television commercials not seen when they are fast forwarded, sections of newspapers going unread… Yet on the web the advertising is delivered the very moment the viewer requests the next page of content. Rather than an ‘opportunity to see’ that’s a guaranteed view. This means the impact of online advertising can be that much greater.

Download a lesson from the Digital Creative Academy

Social networking is a rapidly evolving publishing model. Although its origins trace back to the early years of the internet way before the web made it a mass medium, the techniques, models and recipe for success continue to unfold. Permission models are emerging as critical for control, national differences are becoming stronger, and the barriers between the virtual and real worlds are melting away. In this seminar we review some of the key issues publishers and brands need to take on board to successfully harness social networking.

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The emergence of the digital networked society is creating radically new social and economic structures. The sudden arrival of these new spaces and places can be hugely taxing for both individuals and organisations. While the future may not be perfectly clear, there are enough strands and truths emerging in different pockets across the digital networked space, that we can confidently predict many aspects of how people will behave.

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The continued explosive growth of search is changing the landscape the marketing industry works within. The dramatic shift of customer acquisition marketing budgets into search is gives a hint of what will emerge over the next few years as search is syndicated across all platforms and into all devices. With video and image search just getting started, and mapping tools fusing the virtual and physical worlds together for the first time, the search juggernaut is speeding up rather than closing in on the point where the market matures.

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The features of online advertising are much broader than those of other media because online can combine the very best marketing approaches and formats from print, TV, outdoor and sales promotion. At Digital we think of online as being the 'sum of all other media', and while that's great news for the experienced digital marketer, for newcomers to the industry it can be quite confusing: what can online do? For media sales teams this workshop helps relate the advertising products you have to the business benefits your client is ultimately buying.

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In this one hour lecture, Danny Meadows-Klue shows how to get your analytics sorted for tracking the effectiveness of online advertising. Drawn from our full day Academy, this keynote session tackles what to count, how to count, why to count and even who should be doing the counting. Based on face to face research in Academies across Europe since late 2004, we've identified the common mistakes of publishers, agencies and advertisers. Get web analytics right and it transforms your marketing; fail to tackle it properly and you'll never know what's working. Watch the video lecture and follow the slides by downloading our PDF handouts.
Watch the presentation | Download the report | Post your questions in our Web Analytics Academy classroom

Danny Meadows-Klue discusses how Web Analytics have developed over the last few years and how online web analytics has really moved on. The incredible potential of online advertising only works when you get your web analytics right.
Watch the presentation | Download the report | Post your questions in our Web Analytics Academy classroom