Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Who's Making Money

Pedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.

Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.

The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.

It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.

Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

1. Be T-Shaped

Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.

“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.

Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.

T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.

Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.

2. Test, Fail and Learn

Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.

Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.

One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.

3. Leverage PR 2.0

PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.

Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?

Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.

Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.

4. Bootstrap It

If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.

Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.

As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.

5. Open Up to Feedback

Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.

Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”

John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.

This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- What’s the Value in a Brand Name?/> - HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads/> - HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence/> - Top 5 Qualities to Look for in Startup Job Candidates/> - Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline

Images courtesy of MadMenYourself & class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, jolien_vallins

For more Startups coverage:

    class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Startupsclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Startups channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

For the past decade or so Abraaj have been the money and expertise with laser precision, investing in specific startups with massive growth potential, and making some serious money during the process. They single handedly funded most of what MENA online looks like today. Well minus the forums.


So Abraaj Capital have high hopes for their platform to the extent they created Riyada Enterprise Development (RED) with a $500 million investment fund dedicated to developing SMEs across the region. Who in turn created Wamda.


Wamda.com truly is a knowledge base for revolutionaries we exclusively showcased to you back in August. A platform developed with one sole purpose in mind, and that is empowering Entrepreneurs with the knowledge they need, to succeed. Now all they need is to utilize it.


Which is where Dubai comes in, or at least is does on the 8th and 9th of this month (this week). Abraaj Capital with the help of their friends from around the region and the world have decided to through an Entrepreneurial rave they called Celebration of Entrepreneurship 2010.


The event will put more than 1,200 entrepreneurs, innovators, business leaders, finance providers and creative professionals from across the Middle East and beyond in one location to mingle. Well not only that.


The event is expected to contain some announcements, two of which include the official launch of Riyada Enterprise Development, and the ribbon cutting of Wamda.com.


The event will consist of 3 types of knowledge transfer gatherings, appropriately to: Connect, Empower, and Inspire.


The list of speakers includes the everyone who’s anyone of the MENA online web scene, and then some. I won’t get into a naming contest, you can feast your eyes on the 216 long name list here.


My only concern with the program is how rich and exciting the sessions are, yet many of which will be running in parallel making attending them all impossible. The program has been recently finalized and displayed here.


So if you’re not one of the lucky 1,200 who’ll be attending no need to worry we’ll put you there for the 48 hours where the region’s best and brightest, Connect, Empower, and Inspire.


I won’t even attempt to fully describe the event with words, the mini entrepreneur helped me out, I hope he can do the same for you.






bench craft company scam

Scripting <b>News</b>: Design challenge: River of <b>News</b> in HTML

The design challenge is this. GIven the latest HTML techniques, do a mockup of a great River of News. If it's really something new, I'll put the software behind it and make it live. Permanent link to this item in the archive. ...

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Small Business <b>News</b>: Entrepreneurs and The Economy

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are important to economic recovery. This we hear on the news regularly. But it is also important that entrepreneurial efforts.


bench craft company scam

Pedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.

Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.

The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.

It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.

Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

1. Be T-Shaped

Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.

“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.

Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.

T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.

Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.

2. Test, Fail and Learn

Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.

Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.

One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.

3. Leverage PR 2.0

PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.

Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?

Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.

Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.

4. Bootstrap It

If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.

Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.

As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.

5. Open Up to Feedback

Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.

Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”

John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.

This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- What’s the Value in a Brand Name?/> - HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads/> - HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence/> - Top 5 Qualities to Look for in Startup Job Candidates/> - Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline

Images courtesy of MadMenYourself & class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, jolien_vallins

For more Startups coverage:

    class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Startupsclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Startups channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

For the past decade or so Abraaj have been the money and expertise with laser precision, investing in specific startups with massive growth potential, and making some serious money during the process. They single handedly funded most of what MENA online looks like today. Well minus the forums.


So Abraaj Capital have high hopes for their platform to the extent they created Riyada Enterprise Development (RED) with a $500 million investment fund dedicated to developing SMEs across the region. Who in turn created Wamda.


Wamda.com truly is a knowledge base for revolutionaries we exclusively showcased to you back in August. A platform developed with one sole purpose in mind, and that is empowering Entrepreneurs with the knowledge they need, to succeed. Now all they need is to utilize it.


Which is where Dubai comes in, or at least is does on the 8th and 9th of this month (this week). Abraaj Capital with the help of their friends from around the region and the world have decided to through an Entrepreneurial rave they called Celebration of Entrepreneurship 2010.


The event will put more than 1,200 entrepreneurs, innovators, business leaders, finance providers and creative professionals from across the Middle East and beyond in one location to mingle. Well not only that.


The event is expected to contain some announcements, two of which include the official launch of Riyada Enterprise Development, and the ribbon cutting of Wamda.com.


The event will consist of 3 types of knowledge transfer gatherings, appropriately to: Connect, Empower, and Inspire.


The list of speakers includes the everyone who’s anyone of the MENA online web scene, and then some. I won’t get into a naming contest, you can feast your eyes on the 216 long name list here.


My only concern with the program is how rich and exciting the sessions are, yet many of which will be running in parallel making attending them all impossible. The program has been recently finalized and displayed here.


So if you’re not one of the lucky 1,200 who’ll be attending no need to worry we’ll put you there for the 48 hours where the region’s best and brightest, Connect, Empower, and Inspire.


I won’t even attempt to fully describe the event with words, the mini entrepreneur helped me out, I hope he can do the same for you.






benchcraft company scam

Scripting <b>News</b>: Design challenge: River of <b>News</b> in HTML

The design challenge is this. GIven the latest HTML techniques, do a mockup of a great River of News. If it's really something new, I'll put the software behind it and make it live. Permanent link to this item in the archive. ...

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Small Business <b>News</b>: Entrepreneurs and The Economy

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are important to economic recovery. This we hear on the news regularly. But it is also important that entrepreneurial efforts.


benchcraft company scam

benchcraft company scam

2009 Houston Texans Training Camp by kahl4


benchcraft company scam

Scripting <b>News</b>: Design challenge: River of <b>News</b> in HTML

The design challenge is this. GIven the latest HTML techniques, do a mockup of a great River of News. If it's really something new, I'll put the software behind it and make it live. Permanent link to this item in the archive. ...

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Small Business <b>News</b>: Entrepreneurs and The Economy

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are important to economic recovery. This we hear on the news regularly. But it is also important that entrepreneurial efforts.


bench craft company scam

Pedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.

Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.

The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.

It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.

Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

1. Be T-Shaped

Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.

“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.

Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.

T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.

Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.

2. Test, Fail and Learn

Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.

Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.

One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.

3. Leverage PR 2.0

PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.

Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?

Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.

Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.

4. Bootstrap It

If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.

Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.

As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.

5. Open Up to Feedback

Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.

Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”

John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.

This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.

Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- What’s the Value in a Brand Name?/> - HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads/> - HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence/> - Top 5 Qualities to Look for in Startup Job Candidates/> - Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline

Images courtesy of MadMenYourself & class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, jolien_vallins

For more Startups coverage:

    class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Startupsclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Startups channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

For the past decade or so Abraaj have been the money and expertise with laser precision, investing in specific startups with massive growth potential, and making some serious money during the process. They single handedly funded most of what MENA online looks like today. Well minus the forums.


So Abraaj Capital have high hopes for their platform to the extent they created Riyada Enterprise Development (RED) with a $500 million investment fund dedicated to developing SMEs across the region. Who in turn created Wamda.


Wamda.com truly is a knowledge base for revolutionaries we exclusively showcased to you back in August. A platform developed with one sole purpose in mind, and that is empowering Entrepreneurs with the knowledge they need, to succeed. Now all they need is to utilize it.


Which is where Dubai comes in, or at least is does on the 8th and 9th of this month (this week). Abraaj Capital with the help of their friends from around the region and the world have decided to through an Entrepreneurial rave they called Celebration of Entrepreneurship 2010.


The event will put more than 1,200 entrepreneurs, innovators, business leaders, finance providers and creative professionals from across the Middle East and beyond in one location to mingle. Well not only that.


The event is expected to contain some announcements, two of which include the official launch of Riyada Enterprise Development, and the ribbon cutting of Wamda.com.


The event will consist of 3 types of knowledge transfer gatherings, appropriately to: Connect, Empower, and Inspire.


The list of speakers includes the everyone who’s anyone of the MENA online web scene, and then some. I won’t get into a naming contest, you can feast your eyes on the 216 long name list here.


My only concern with the program is how rich and exciting the sessions are, yet many of which will be running in parallel making attending them all impossible. The program has been recently finalized and displayed here.


So if you’re not one of the lucky 1,200 who’ll be attending no need to worry we’ll put you there for the 48 hours where the region’s best and brightest, Connect, Empower, and Inspire.


I won’t even attempt to fully describe the event with words, the mini entrepreneur helped me out, I hope he can do the same for you.






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2009 Houston Texans Training Camp by kahl4


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Scripting <b>News</b>: Design challenge: River of <b>News</b> in HTML

The design challenge is this. GIven the latest HTML techniques, do a mockup of a great River of News. If it's really something new, I'll put the software behind it and make it live. Permanent link to this item in the archive. ...

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Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Small Business <b>News</b>: Entrepreneurs and The Economy

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are important to economic recovery. This we hear on the news regularly. But it is also important that entrepreneurial efforts.


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Scripting <b>News</b>: Design challenge: River of <b>News</b> in HTML

The design challenge is this. GIven the latest HTML techniques, do a mockup of a great River of News. If it's really something new, I'll put the software behind it and make it live. Permanent link to this item in the archive. ...

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

Small Business <b>News</b>: Entrepreneurs and The Economy

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are important to economic recovery. This we hear on the news regularly. But it is also important that entrepreneurial efforts.


benchcraft company scam

Scripting <b>News</b>: Design challenge: River of <b>News</b> in HTML

The design challenge is this. GIven the latest HTML techniques, do a mockup of a great River of News. If it's really something new, I'll put the software behind it and make it live. Permanent link to this item in the archive. ...

New Yorker&#39;s Music Critic Moves to <b>News</b> Corp.&#39;s Daily - NYTimes.com

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, will become the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation's so-called iPad newspaper which is currently in development.

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Entrepreneurs and small businesses are important to economic recovery. This we hear on the news regularly. But it is also important that entrepreneurial efforts.


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2009 Houston Texans Training Camp by kahl4


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