Bogdan Gavrila – Core Target

After Saptamana Financiara, here is the new online version of Financiarul.com

Having a .com domain (.ro is already registered to another entity) can cause confusion and related traffic issues – here is a link showing +250,5% traffic raise for financiarul.ro – interesting case study

BRAT 10 YEARS – Anniversary and party this evening at 19.00, Grand BallRoom, JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel.
This is the second event reuniting the media industry this week (IAA opened the first champagne two days ago ) and this time I do hope to meet some of the SATI members.

Special thanks to Arina – I know she’s been working afterhours (met her at least 3 times after 19:30 in the IAA House) for this event and I do hope everything will run smoothly.

See you tonight!

LATER EDIT: Silviu Ispas (ARBOmedia) is the new BRAT president (this is his third time).

It’s not official yet but I had a sneak peak into my publisher account and I saw the new function regarding “campaign reports”.
Now you can find in a few seconds vital informations about a running campaign (executive summary, performance evolution or billing & pricing) with just one click (in the previous version, there was a full journey for gathering this type of info).

This is probably the best news this month for all the planners “blessed” with the gift of reporting

Google is one step ahead as they already started today their first campaign promoting GMAIL (their ads are running on Boom, probably on other networks too).

Yahoo, on the other hand, already reached their critical mass of heavy users and now focus on research.

Big budgets involved. More to come (all the Internet players entering Romania will spend 3-3,5 million eur in online advertising only for the beginning – this is something out of the blue for the agencies: their plans were for 2008 were looking good with the olympic/football games and elections coming up but the extra +3 mil won’t bother anybody).

IAA Excellence Awards + the biggest marcomm party in Romania – tonight Becker Brau Live Music. Hope to meet you guys there.

Ramona was seeding virals this afternoon. Since I love Joe, here’s a link for their new special project (1st of April).

YP and our plans for students explained here.

If you have a nice website with a growing audience, I’m buying and financing (I’m also interested in partnerships).

Neogen more popular than Yahoo in Bulgaria.

Saptamana Financiara has a new layout (Gamulescu behind the scenes).

ADC*RO has its first students.

Cosmote moves to MindShare Media (GroupM / WPP).

Olimpiadele comunicarii – coming up.

Yahoo is focusing on their e-mail ads. They started to do… stuff

CareerBuilder is here (I gave you a clue here) – they already have a person for Romania.

4/5 planners seem to care about Feminis (have a strong opinion on the matter).

Val Voicu told me Feminis was a great viral project.

4/5 planners have complaints when working with ARBOmedia.

I’m very busy these weeks.
The sun is shining over Romania

Dan Petre (IAA Senior) was invited to speak at The Money Channel this evening about the new YP chapter. I joined him as a member of the new board and we presented the opportunities and challenges for this organization together with some of our short-term plans.

This Monday we had our first interviews with the first applicants and if you’re interested to join IAA YP, just give me an e-mail and I’ll tell you more.

a really great party…
- Magda came with the gurlz.
- Fusu was in a great mood, really impressed me. Fake Fusu wuz undercover
- Vlad has very cool guys in the group.
- Alin added to his messenger list with at least +20 ppl.
- Now I have a face for nwradu
- Diana was happy
- Orlando made me think of 2009 instead of 2010
- Zoso picked up all the girls.
- Sorin now has a brand new twitter account;
- Luke is now also known as “The Godfather”
- Ionut talks passionate about wines.
- Olympus cameras are good – I saw the first football game played with a digital anti-shock camera (Adobe guys) – not to mention the resistance to still water
- Nihasa had the best party t-shirt;
- Piticu is really a giant – Innocente confirmed.
- Gramo came without gramo kid
- Bobby is not backpacking around the world.
- we decided that Ramona has secret plans;
- Mihnea was the other IAA YP board member to join the party;
- I met all the cool bloggers in the room (I hope to link them quite soon);
- my best wishes go to Dragos Novac, the man behind roblogfest 2008.

Boom announced a few days ago a new premiere for their ad server regarding demographical targeting.

The system is based on cookies and profiles provided by Belgian company InSites and the advertising is served by the new and improved Softure ad server. My sources told me that the investment in the new Softure software was huge and there is a special team at Boom developing the product and introducing new features almost every semester. The results are quite amazing (I have 2 Softure accounts and 2 bbmedia accounts and as a publisher I must say that this is probably the most efficient ad server software running on Romanian websites to serve such a big network).

The competitive advantage Softure has is the local team developing the product (other solutions on the market are either rented, bought or under slow development) and I remember at least two times last year when they listened to my suggestions and publisher needs and implemented new features.

Since people started to call me after a press release yesterday in MEDIAFAX and today’s article in Media&Advertising, I’m happy to announce that it’s true: the first targeted campaign based demographical data profiles will target young professionals and due to a special partnership we have with Boom, JOBfest 2008 will be the first event to run a web 3.0 campaign.

I remember a long time ago having a talk with two seniors, Dan Petre and Sorin Tudor about the future of advertising: in the ideal world, ads will be served to every individual according to his needs and socio-demographic profile. That time has come – now, it’s history in the making!

LATER EDIT
PS: I don’t work for Boom, they are just too damn good. True.

According to “Leading Brands by Romanian Internet Users” (Gemius & Evensys), Dacia is the most powerful Romanian brand to hit the Internet. Although I had many questions regarding the results presented by Gemius, I had the chance to find out more about the study from Catalin Emilian (the Operations Manager of Gemius Research Romania) in a private meeting we had earlier this week. His point of view encouraged me to study how Dacia is perceived in the online environment and thanks to Catalin I had some new insights

Dacia Sandero was launched this week (Salon Auto de Genève) and probably you had the chance to see the photos of the new model. Here are the first TV commercials:

ARBOmedia
- facing serious pressures due to their Hi5 deal (their target is very hard to achieve in a market where the term “social networking” is not very convincing for planners);
- after signing the deal with Hi5 they had some serious issues in the market: Google AdSense is still implemented on Hi5 and offers better CPC deals;
- they signed a new deal with Slovak company Etarget for contextual advertising and maybe hoping to replace AdSense with ETARGET in order to limit their primary loses;
- ARBOcontext is dead.
- although things are not looking good, Calin is still in great shape and maybe his positive attitude will take Arbo back on the right track. I wish ‘em good luck!

HyperActive – new full service interactive agency
Alex Visa and Dorin Boerescu decided to launch HyperActive and plan 800.000 EUR deals in 2008. That’s a healthy target and I hope to see it happen!

Ironic or not, Alex Visa was the man to set up ARBOmedia’s interactive division in 2001 and the one who did their first sale.

BOOM
- they seem to have second thoughts about the contextual partnership signed with ETARGET;
- many of their websites also use Google AdSense and this means they lose some precious bucks;
- they test their own contextual service (Gabi reveals a sneak preview);

Ironic or not, the team working at Boom were the ones to develop ARBOcontext. Their experience will probably help them create a better product, suitable for the 2008 market.

GOOGLE Romania
- their growth was so discreet and innocent so that all the players seemed to be asleep in 2007; after their first million drawn from the websites contracted by the main advertising players, questions began to pop; running AdSense on almost 400 websites (from top 1000) seemed to be a good start for Google;
- for the first time their position is threatened due to the contracts the sales agencies have with the publishers; the in-house contextual tools could replace Google AdSense and I wonder how Google will react to this.

Ironic or not, because the sales agencies focused only on CPM budgets, the advertising agencies started to skip their services and buy directly from Google although Google was running their scripts on websites already contracted by the sales agencies.

AdEvolution – Eastrolog, Feminis and their boiling point
- a new scandal erupted this week when Marius Pahomi wrote a post about Val Voicu and his new project targeted on women; the main issue is related to the audience both projects share;
- the subject started to boil last December but everyone kept cool until now (there were other parties interested in this matter);
- this is a very interesting subject to follow; there are reactions predicting new vulnerabilities in some interactive companies.

- 1 giant global player prepares to enter Romanian market (you can start searching for clues here) – both btl and online components;

- 1 giant European player entered Romania – very discreet, represented by a local company, aiming very high;

- 1 giant investment fund is ready to invest few millions in Romanian online projects – Tiger’s investment was just peanuts money compared to this; this move marks the first fund to come in Romania and focus only on Internet;

- 1 new product from Google – Google sites;

- 1 new record from Boom – their adserver pumped over 30.000.000 banners on Valentine’s Day;

- 1 new interactive agency: Zenith Media, part of Publicis, launched Zed Digital in Romania (clients like Bayer, Baxi Group, BRD-GSG, Bunge, Caroli, Carrefour, Electrolux, Interstar, ING, L’Oreal, Nestle, Parmalat, Policolor, Reckitt Benkiser, Toyota Romania, Ursus Breweries, Vincon Vrancea):

- 1 new study – Gemius + Evensys – results here [Save Target As...]; made me think of some… questions;

- 1 offer – 10 mil. EUR for Vodanet (NCH);

- 1 demanding sales target for AdEvolution and Realitatea Catavencu – 4,5 to 5 mil EUR from online advertising in 2008 (AdPlayers);

- 1 new fun jobbing website from Alin looking for gurus, masters and signers;

- 1 interactive event – Digital Marketing Forum – couldn’t make it but Alex did;

- 1 step closer to the moon

I was away (isolated regions, no Internet, no GSM signal) for almost 2 weeks meeting volunteers from several NGOs. I’m not training people for a living but I had a great feedback from all the participants. I focused on neuro-linguistic programming (there is a small psychotherapist in me) and also on emotions, leadership, media, branding, economy and global players. We had incredible results and I’m eager to see how the world will change

Back with great insights as we also had long talks about Internet, online advertising, social networking, instant messaging and more.