Bogdan Gavrila – Core Target

I had a short phone conversation today with Bobby Voicu and I was surprised to find out he was leaving Yahoo (beginning with 2008, Bobby was Community Manager at Yahoo Romania).

Yahoo.ro was scheduled to launch last November in Romania but financial crisis and internal problems seem to have delayed the project and its future is quite uncertain right now.

Mediacafe will remain the agency to represent Yahoo in Romania but they had to make a compromise this year and quit their publishing activities in order to avoid possible conflicts.

Bobby Voicu will probably focus on personal projects and entrepreneurial initiatives. A few months ago he sold monden.info to Orlando Nicoara and made history as the first blog to be sold in Romania.

Good luck Bobby with your new challenge!

Optimistic design can encourage spending. Here is a fun idea presented by 5 Romanian designers (via StiuPeCineva).

Caught my attention last week, before Valentine’s Day:

The website: www.tecombini.ro – client: Vodafone/Agency: McCann Erickson Romania

You probably already know that James Blunt prepares a real treat for its Bucharest audience (four trucks packed with technical equipment, two busses, one for the production team and one for Blunt and his band).

The concert is this Saturday (21st of February) beginning with  20:00 at Sala Polivalenta in Bucharest and the bad news is that all the tickets are almost sold out – the good news is that INTACT Interactive is the online interactivity provider for the event and we can bring some of our friends to the concert.

If you want to see James Blunt live in Bucharest this weekend, you know how to find us

Tonight, starting with 20:00, the International Advertising Association (IAA Romania) will host its anual Excellence Awards at Fratelli Studios.

It’s the only party during the year where you can meet all the Romanian marcomm industry under the same roof… so if you’re doing media business in Romania, this is the place to be tonight (I gave up my Vonda Shepard tickets for this event ).

In the last 2 weeks there were several scandals regarding Romanian SATI figures (online monitoring and auditing) and the numbers gathered using Google spam.

Several big Romanian online publishers started to use artificial solutions in order to rise their traffic and their market share. Their plan was to report a bigger market share in order to increase their revenue share in 2009 and to negotiate bigger budgets with media agencies.

For the first time, Google spam became a serious problem in Romania as visitors are hijacked and advertising money are spent on sour apples.

One thing Romanian online publishers don’t know is that planners and agencies are not blind, nor deaf and their strategy will only make them lose money.

After all, it’s just fraud and this is the typical “lose – lose” situation.

Of course, not everything is “black” in Romania, there are also success stories and websites doing things the right way – PROTV, MediaPro Interactiv, Gazeta Online, Ringier or Antena3 are strong publishers competing fair play.

This morning I was reading Sorin’s post regarding their online business in 2008.

GSP.ro key figures last year:

• 60% traffic growth (ian-dec 2008);
• medium traffic – 1.1 million unique users;
• 1.4 million absolute unique users in all their network (SATI);
• 2.1 million EUR turnover and 20% profits;

Here is a studycase for sociology and advertising:  two posters, two different countries, two presidents, two success stories, two copywriters, two different schools, 18 years between them, same target, same learning books.

The copywriter has ultimate responsibility for the advertisement’s verbal or textual content, which often includes receiving the copy information from the client. wiki