• I just love advertising. I’ve wanted to get into advertising my whole life.
• The people at my work are amazing. They all get along so well.
• They told me that if I can work on this account, I could work on any account
• Can you believe that some brand is paying Fergie to insert their brand name into one of their songs? That’s like so crazy to me.
• I’m doing stuff like budgets, lots of creative briefs and like attending lots of meetings and taking notes and then distributing them (this is how she answered when I asked her what she was tasked with, which really means that she’s acting as someone’s secretary).

She’s just a naive girl straight out of college, but unfortunately in a couple of years she’ll be completely integrated into the system and be a part of the engine that keeps its wheels turning.

According to her, the problem at Neo@ogilvy is that aside from the fact that their name sounds like something derived from a futuresque droid movie, it takes them too long to promote people. I asked her if she thought she’d get promoted if she stayed longer. “Oh yeah,” she replied without any hesitation.

Impressions are hard to change. Sometimes, if an employer doesn’t think that you’re promotable, you won’t get promoted no matter how long you stay. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that. And I think she loves the name “Ogilvy” too much to leave.

Here comes the interesting part: I’m an employee of 3 different agencies. I have the title, online marketing manager at 2 of them, and media planner at the third. I have 3 e-mail addresses (one for each) and have to check them all. Two of them are client facing positions, where I constantly have remind myself which company I “work for.” Fortunately, I’m subcontracted out to these 2 other agencies through the one central agency, so I have to bill only one guy for all of the work.

I’ve got to say, my current situation is the best I’ve had so far in my advertising career. Next week, it should be back to working from home.

If you ask lay people to define it, you’ll find that many people don’t have a quick and dirty definition. “Unsolicited e-mail” is the one that’s generally accepted, but some people will even include e-mails from acquaintances to fit under that definition should the body contain a promotion of something that the recipient has no interested in. A subject line like, “come see me perform tonight at the Red Lion!” can often get your e-mail a ticket straight to the trash.

One of the business ventures I worked on required me to find and contact owners of very specific small businesses. The easiest way to find these businesses was through the web using search engines and directories, and then contacting them was a matter of sending an e-mail to each one of them.

I found about 100 relevant businesses and recorded their e-mail addresses. I started by sending out form e-mails to each person individually from my Gmail account, and then I got the idea of using a software to make it easier. If I could use an e-mail marketing program, maybe I could send them out in batches, have the “Dear…” line fill in dynamically and be able to see if people are actually opening the e-mails and possibly send them another, follow-up e-mail only if I found that they hadn’t opened the first one. I looked into hosted e-mail marketing services such as Constant Contact and Vertical Response. It turned out, however, that I wouldn’t be able to use these hosted services to e-mail these people because they hadn’t opted in to receive e-mail from me. What I was trying to do would be deemed spamming as far as these services were concerned. “I’m not trying to spam,” I thought. I didn’t want to send out thousands of e-mails to people who weren’t interested in what I was sending them. I just wanted to send a few hundred, and do so in an efficient manner.

Frustrated, I put up a post in one of my favorite online marketing forums, asking if someone knew of any software that I could host on my own servers to accomplish what I sought to do. I received many responses with many of them crying spam. The responses ranged from “Why do you want to break the law on purpose,” to “If one of your e-mails lands in my server, I will be sending you an injunction.”
I argued that when someone puts their e-mail address on their site, or has a ‘contact us’ form, even if they haven’t opted in to receive e-mails from you, they are soliciting them, that is, provided they’re relevant to the context of the website. However, my fellow forum members didn’t seem to understand my perspective. Harvesting e-mail addresses from websites, and sending them bulk e-mails to promote a pyramid scheme is certainly spam, there’s no doubt about that. However, what I was doing was selecting particular types of businesses and offering my services on a performance basis to help increase their sales. What business owner wouldn’t be interested in receiving e-mail communications from potential business partners? All I wanted to do was make the process more efficient. Rather than sending a form e-mail to each person individually, I wanted to be able to hit ‘send’ once, and have my e-mail go to all 100 people on the list I had compiled. However, it seemed that people thought it was spam whichever way I did it. Should I feel like a criminal every time I decide to contact a website owner for whatever reason ranging from “Hey that functionality is cool. How did you do that?” to “Can I buy a link on your site?”

I’m certainly not the only web marketer who thinks that individual, unsolicited e-mailing is not the same as spamming. There are plenty of site owners, who, like me send unsolicited e-mails to other site owners in order to promote their site and possibly receive a link and most of these people would not consider what they’re doing to be spamming.

Many of us have different definitions when it comes to spam. Although I’m walking a fine line, I believe that the CAN-SPAM Act precludes my e-mails from being spam because despite my service being a commercial one, I’m not actually advertising or promoting it, and this removes the “commercial e-mail” label. In the end, I decided not to use a software for my e-mail marketing campaign only because I couldn’t find one to work the way I wanted. However, just as you’d be hard pressed to find any sales person or small business owner who doesn’t cold call, you’d be hard pressed to get me to stop sending unsolicited e-mail.

Double commission is the practice of charging a client for commission twice. This is a fairly foreign concept to me but from what I understand, it can be done in a couple of ways. A media shop is hired to plan and buy media. That shop takes a commission off the top, then hands the work off to another media shop to do the actual planning and buying. Shop #2 creates the plan and pads the CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) to include their own commission. The client ends up paying commission twice without knowing it. The other method is where an agency tells publishers that they only want to see gross numbers of the proposal that they provide, that is, with the 15% commission already in the CPMs. The agency can then hand this off as being the net (not inclusive of commission).

That’s what double commission is.