No, it’s not Bing.

Yahoo? Nah.

It’s YouTube. Yeah, really.

Did you know that almost half of search results yeild video thumbnails? And as you might guess, those thumbnails tend to get clicked on.

Is it time to get serious about video? You bet.

With the explosive growth in tablets in the last year it’s safe to say it finally, truly was the year of mobile.

Transitioning to video business this year and creating a start-up video business in September, I can also say that online video is truly on the minds of everyone in the marketing, interactive and advertising businesses. Creating video content for audiences now interacting more often on less work related devices that are more suited for video content, I believe will fuel more growth in video next year.

Internet TV has received a fair amount of buzz this year. GoogleTV has popped up on lots of new devices and Netflix has had some major success and failures. I think IPTV is definitely the wave of the future as it is in phone technology. We should see continued growth here.

QR codes of course have also been all over the place this year. Here’s to hoping they get more thoughtful next year.

Location based apps have become ubiquitous — well, for anyone owning a smart phone. I have to say folks, I’m about sick of seeing you check into work, lunch, and then work again.

Probably the best part of the year has been that people are starting to understand social a little better. Fewer blank stares in meetings and also less reliance on the guru types. Social is also no longer the thing for the intern “cause they’re young and they understand that stuff.”

I haven’t seen any overall statistics for the year yet but just from what I’m hearing and seeing is a lot of pain in the small to mid-sized ad agencies while the larger ones doing better this year. But not nearly as well as the larger interactive shops. This is also a trend I think will continue until traditional small ad agencies find a way to make themselves relevant again or the economy shifts dramatically.

2011 has truly been a mixed bag — lots of cool tech but stagnate growth. Here’s to 2012 being a little more positive on the growth side.

What’s a marketer, an agency, or a content producer do? Discuss maximizing the production before the cameras roll or even the script is finished. A small investment in a longer shoot day or an extra shoot day can yield a campaign that works on four screens instead of one. On a television, YouTube, iPad, mobile device. One that works on a homepage and not just as a 30 second spot.

Making great content for an iPad isn’t just encoding an mp4 of your TV spot. Consideration should be given to the media in the creative process.

Things to keep in mind:

Wide shots feel epic on a 50 inch plasma but just small on a mobile screen. Get lots of footage at various focal lengths and consider using multiple cameras to maximize your production time.

You often have longer to tell a story online, so make sure you get longer takes and give your actors time to breathe. It’s often more convincing in the end too.

Your brand’s engagement most likely isn’t an interruption if it’s on YouTube or your home page. Treat your audience with respect and make sure the content is actually entertaining.

The online environment has so many different platforms it can confuse even the oldest hats. Make sure you work with people who know a codec for a file container.

Unfortunately this is often the world where the best talent operates. One where the client is stuck in video village, isolated from the process by a 200-foot video cable, multiple layers of producers and an elitist attitude.

For those that have been trying to ignore the stock market, whose pagers keep buzzing with calls to work as 4th assistant to the assistant on a beer commercial, it’s time to wake up. Clients don’t need to put up with the old model anymore. I suggest you stop making fun of the kid with the 7D and consider buying one yourself.

Thirty years ago we were here in print technology. Every major city had specialized type houses, photo labs, and pre-press shops. There were teams of people who perfected the building and delivery of print ads to newspapers and magazine ads. They were staffed by talented professionals with a high degree of skill. Most of these places don’t exist anymore.

Today we have digital presses and software that enables one person to do it all on the same desktop. But we also have digital cameras that shoot cinematic images at native 800 ISO and products like Adobe CS Production, Apple FCP Suite, and Autodesk Smoke that can potentially complete post production from a single desktop.

This means leaner and meaner crews, no film developing and transfers, and a more integrated production process. It also means that it’s feasible for a single organization to possess the ability to script, produce, direct and complete post production without being a massively expensive company to operate and hire. This is where Fluid Films comes in. Welcome to the future.

Over the last couple years my professional direction has changed slightly. No longer just writing copy for ads and social media, I began editing and then shooting video. Which isn’t all that crazy since during the time I was working in Los Angeles I was directing commercials as well as freelance copywriting.

It was inevitable that this transition was coming from copywriter to writer/director. And with the rapid rise of web content and shrinking advertising budgets there’s no better time to embrace the change with my full attention, passion, and on my own terms.

I’ll be blogging about what exactly this means over the next week.

Most large ad agencies are like Major League Baseball teams. I don’t mean creative boutiques, design shops, and interactive shops. I mean big, lumbering, traditional ad shops that are often owned by publicly traded holding companies. Here it goes:

You’ve got your CEOs and presidents, they’re the team owners. But they still have to answer to the League and the commissioner that tell owners how much money they should spend and then help them slice up their media revenue. In the ad world, these folks are called holding company boards and CEOs. Though not all powerful, these the agency president/team president usually has enough gravitas to not be the one out on their ass after a loosing season. (We’ll get to who is in a minute.)

Then you have the front office. These would be the folks who’s responsibility it is to bring revenue in and maintain business relationships. In advertising, we call these people AEs. This is a high pressure job but is more stable than that of a player or coach since client relationships can be fragile.

Most ball clubs have a GM. This guy is in charge of managing the on-the-field pay roll, prospects, and setting a long term strategy for success. At big shops this guy might be called a Chief Creative Officer. He’s usually in a lot of meeting and new business pitches and not down in the trenches doing the day to day creative work.

This brings us to the managers or in advertising, creative directors. They’re in the thick of it with clients, account service, and jr creative teams. Motivating, selling and making sure the work is great and profitable. When things are going well they get glory, perks, and fat contracts. When things got to hell, they or the CCO usually take the blame. It’s actually fairly rare to see the president get the blame first.

Of course the manager has his coaches — pitching coach, batting coach, third base coach. These would be your Group CDs or ACDs. In a large part their success is tied to the manager’s success. If things don’t go well, a new manager (CD) might be brought in and they could all be replaced with his guys. After all, why would a new manager field exactly the same team that got the last guy fired.

Now the players/creatives. You might think these are the most important part of the team. They actually produce the product (or play the game) but most of them are seen by management as interchangeable parts. And frankly some team presidents don’t even care about winning (garnering a gold pencil or Cannes Lion) the game. As long as they field a team, they’re collecting TV revenue (media dollars) and gate receipts (billable hours).

But there are a few players/creatives who do make an impact with management — these are your franchise players who are there to please the fans/win awards. You know who they are. The guy who gets a pencil and then agency hops for a big salary bump but always seems to be liked by the industry press, and management. Sometimes these guys make management and themselves sometimes they flame out by 35 or 40. It’s not easy being a star in the big show.

Most creatives are just journeymen players though. They’ll play for a team for a season or two then get cut in a management shakeup or a client loss or maybe even sent to the minors (a small town, healthcare or tech agency) for a stretch. They keep plugging away through till they’re in their 40s hoping they’ll make creative director. They know the business better thank anyone, they have a passion for it. Heck, they deserve a shot to be the CD. Maybe they even get a shot in a second tier market. But most end up looking for exit plan by age 50.

Maybe the old reliever becomes an announcer (45 year old freelance copywriter doing voice over work). Or maybe they become a scout  (40 year old former agency art director working as a head hunter). Or heck, maybe they even play in Japan for a few years hoping to make a come back (take a agency network job in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or Southeast Asia.)

So that’s how the ad life is like pro baseball. Agree?

OK, so I left media out but that most of that job has been farmed out to a holding company arm any way. I don’t mean to be glib in this analogy. I suspect that people who’ve been around the industry will both find fault in it and a little truth.

But that’s all changed. An art director is now expected to know how to program flash and an a account man better know more than a little bit about testing and measurement. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at a job posting for an Art Director these days. It’s not uncommon to see 10 different programs that they are required to know.

Technical knowledge is a good thing. The more you know the better, right? Well, not if we’re now evaluating professionals based on technical knowledge when it’s not their primary job.

I’m not saying this as a technophobe. For a creative, I am actually pretty technically capable. But a great creative or AE, is someone who can think generally about a problem and come up with solutions across multiple disciplines, many which even aren’t considered marketing or advertising. And that’s just not how most technologists think. In the end, generalist thinking is way more valuable to a client than knowing how to manipulate a timeline in Adobe Flash Professional.

Fortunately Bill Bernbach and the creative revolution came along and showed us a better way in where the consumer was treated as an intelligent human being who appreciated entertaining and thoughtful communication.

Not only have we seen a rise of technology in the marketing industry, there’s been serious discussion whether technology is now more important than creative. In fact, I’ve have read columns and articles positing that ad agencies should be run more like software companies.

The idea probably comes from a belief is that technology is now king  in our industry like it already is in many others. That today the real ideas in advertising are technological.

Trouble is people don’t really interact with technology. They interact with each other and maybe sometimes the media in which the interact is considered tech.

Understanding technology is crucial to success these days.  And it’s unbelievable how many senior executives still don’t understand how many social technologies work. But the only thing that’s going to make the tech compelling to an individual is creativity employed in making it compelling. Example of this would be the Old Spice campaign that uses social technology including YouTube.

OK. You still don’t believe me. Let’s look at popular technology. One could argue that iPhone and iPad were technological breakthroughs. Wrong. They were creative breakthroughs. The difference between them and what was developed elsewhere is that at Apple the designers are in charge.

The designers took mostly existing technology, even bought parts from other manufacturers,  assembled them together, created a great user interface to made something beautiful, compelling, and even groundbreaking. That’s what creative people do – not technologists.

And that’s also exactly what your advertising should do.

Just a week earlier, the top spot (says USA Today) in the Super Bowl also went to an upstart. A web designer and former film school student who wasn’t able to break into the film business the traditional way. Now he’s done what so many of us in the industry still hope to do one day.

We’ve all been hearing for years about the collapse of the record business. As a consumer of music, it’s been a great time for diversity talent. There’s a lot of great music out there for people who are actively looking for it. And of course, there’s a lot of mainstream crap for people who are looking for that too. But for the industry, times are tough. Apple is making a fist-full of money, but there’s certainly less to go around at the labels and for the artists.

The same thing is happening in advertising. There are a lot fewer creatives supported by the agency structure with more pressure for the creative to  generate ROI while clients are getting limited, but some really good results with user generated content.

This means more than no more drinks at lunch, no more cappuccinos at edit session and no sushi on your expense report. It means your job could be crowd sourced and that you may be a end up working as permanent freelancer with no prospect of a 401k or health benefits.

Don’t believe me? Then why is this place thriving? Why are people lining up to use and be used by CrowdSpring? Why are so many really talented professionals finding it so hard to find permanent gigs? And why do you have twice the workload you did ten years ago?

This article isn’t about bashing do-it-yourselfers or the wisdom of crowds. As a teenage punk (and still one at heart) “DIY” and “down with the corporate structure” are ideas I can get behind. Rather, the point I’m attempting to make is the good old days of having the time, and the opportunity to do something really creative may not happen that often anymore on the clients dime. Rather now is the time to make it happen for yourself.

DIY may not just be a punk motto anymore.

Well, what do I have to say for myself? Some of the predictions were wrong, some were right, and some were easy.

Let’s start with the easy. “The kids will still text at an alarming rate.” Duh. But I guess I had to give myself a couple easy ones.

The right? I’ll stand by most of this list as pretty solid. I think I could tweak this list slightly and make it a 2011 list. In fact, number 13 on the list has been what I’ve been living underneath for the past four months and the reason why my blogging has dropped off to a trickle.

The wrong? I don’t think social media has made as much progress in B2B as I had hoped. I think there is opportunity for B2B marketers that hasn’t been fully realized.

I think big agencies are doing even better than I thought they would. They’ve done a good job of consolidating resources and delivering on client expectations. However, this doesn’t mean I think it’s a bed of roses out there. Tough times are still ahead for everyone.

Although I didn’t state it outright, I believed that interactive agencies would be doing even better. Still, I have seen anecdotal cases of quite a bit of organic growth. But I thought we’d see more cases of interactive shops taking the lead.

Stay tuned for my 2011 predictions. And, hey, happy new year. Fingers crossed.