One minute and fifty-four seconds of yummy rich media goodness, showcasing the IAB Rising Stars and some fabulous executions on MSN including the Filmstrip, Pushdown, Billboard and Sidekick.

Great to see there’s more on the way too!

Can’t see the video? Click Here!

I love BIG & BOLD productions and we’ve nailed one with the Microsoft Advertising Story Video featuring (the very lovely) Felicia Day.

The campaign centres around the Microsoft Advertising Story Awards which is a competition we’re running to challenge brand advertisers, marketers and agencies.

More on the competition in Richard Dunmall’s post: Challenging Global Marketers and Agencies to be Storytellers and Win a trip to Cannes! 

Check out Felicia’s teaser for the advertising awards too!

Enjoy and more coming soon!

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I love these videos the Cannes Lions chaps do. This one has Yukio Nakayama, Executive Creative Director at Dentsu giving 5 tips on winning one of the coveted awards.

Love the fact he says to keep the subtitles slow as many of the judges don’t actually have English as their first language.

Nicely edited and presented little clip too!

Now who’s going to Cannes this year?

I first met MaryLee Sachs in 2009, when she brought Twitter’s Biz Stone to the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

Working for PR giant Hill and Knowlton at the time, her team kindly let me chat to Biz about Twitter’s dizzy rise to success (worth a retrospective look at now given their current ubiquity), and then I got a few minutes with  MaryLee to get her thoughts on PR and social media, and how public relations was being seen more and more part of the marketing mix.

Fast-forward two years and MaryLee is back in Cannes launching her new book The Changing MO of the CMO which seeks to explain how, “the convergence of brand and reputation is disrupting the marketing function.”

I personally do not have a formal PR background. I fell into all this advertising/marketing/social media/SEM caper, so have been able to see things through un-fettered eyes much of the time. I had to seek out some text books to understand that PR is really about building and maintaining the long-term reputation of an organization.

That’s the end-game.

But as MaryLee was discovering – and not afraid of exploring – during her time at H&K, was that with the rapid rise of digital and social media, brands need to look at the real-time reputation engines turning the turbines of likes, shares, retweets and react more swiftly to not just positive pixel-inches, but also take advantage from a marketing and ,dare I say, SALES perspective.

In the “Changing MO”, MaryLee continues her quest to educate the industry and provide very real insight into brands from the US and UK, and even has time to include global behemoths as well.

The format is clever. She simply interviews the CMOs to understand their approaches to this new world of inextricably linked communication departments, how they are structured, where they found problems, what they did to overcome them and delve into anything unique about their operation.

The book profiles marketing leaders like Jeffery Hayzlett, formerly of Kodak (here’s a jolly interview I did with him earlier this year), Jon Iwata from IBM, Ann Lewnes from Adobe, Amy Curtis-McIntyre from Old Navy, and Harry Pforzheimer from Intuit.

In all, there are 10 profiles with org charts and all sorts of luscious data and sound-bites to keep students and budding CMOs more than engaged.

Rather like the espresso I’m supping as I write, this book is a short sharp hit with a well thought out conclusion to the PR/Social/Marketing conundrum (which includes sage advice from one of my favourite marketing gods – Marc Pritchard from P&G).

Some might balk slightly at the $40-odd price tag, but if you’re going to manage multi-million dollar budgets, it’s a small price to pay for some current thinking in a digestible form.

If you don’t have $40, then follow MaryLee on Twitter – she’s free……kind of!

One of the truly best things about my job is getting to talk to some of the biggest, brightest and best in the advertising industry.

Yesterday, IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg gave me nearly 9 minutes of his time to talk about the IAB #MIXX conference we have sponsored here at Advertising Week.

Professional Ambition Number 45 – CHECK!

Watch on…..

And after watching this video interview. Why wouldn’t you?

Next week I’ll be in New York for Advertising Week.

We have a whole team going who will be flat out covering the event with our blogs, videos, Twitter, Facebook and more.

Here’s a link to our highlights video from last year so you get a flavour what we’ll be getting up to.

Check out Baratunde from The Onion, who’ll be MCing the IAB MIXX Awards and warns that anything can happen.

It can and it will next week. So stay tuned and don’t miss out!

Quick 1 min video to share as the Microsoft Advertising UK team aired the 1st IAB Film Strip Ad on MSN yesterday with Ford Focus.

This ad format has cause quite a positive stir in the industry because of its innovation around engagement and interactivity.

It also won an award!

What do you think? Seen any other good examples of online advertising recently?

Can’t see the video? Click here!

I was a terrible tease on Twitter and Facebook yesterday but can now share that I am writing a book!

Through an incredible set of events and connections – which include a paradise island, a Mayfair dinner, my first ever interview and a pint of Tribute in SW London – I’m co-authoring a book on digital advertising, marketing, search and social media with Professor Paul Springer of Ads to Icons fame.

Published through Kogan Page in the UK, US and Asia, it’ll be a collection of stories about people in the digital industry that have done ground-breaking things to help shape it and propel it forward.

There are some very good books out there about products and services, and there are some very good books on theory and best practice. Our writing will engage with, and expose the thinking and the stories behind those people who helped conceptualize those products and services, and who were the first minds to start mapping out the theories and online institutions that make digital what it is today.

That was the news.

I’m incredibly privileged to be working with Paul and Kogan Page and we’ll have updates on the name and when and where you can pick up a copy of the book very soon…..

P.S. Follow Pioneers of Digital on Twitter.

Ever wondered whether this is the year of mobile? Listen to Jon Haber from OMD’s Ignition Factory, and tell me this form of connecting with consumers “on the go” hasn’t got a whole lot more exciting over the last 18 months!

Salivating yet?