2. “Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65% use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends.” (TVGuide.com study via TVNewsCheck.com)

3. “Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.” (Pew Internet via Social Media Club)

4. “22% of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable. The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn.” (Mashable via Social Media Today)

5. “In the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly.” (comscore.com via Mashable)

6. “The ‘Weinergate’ scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal ‘the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.’” (VentureBeat via Marketing Pilgrim)

7. Instagram “currently has a user base of 4.25 million in only seven months, with ten photos being posted a second.” (prsarahevans.com via TechCrunch)

8. “It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity.” (Ning via TheNextWeb)

9. “Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.” (Pew Internet via prsarahevans.com)

10. “In the last election Google was the largest player — the Obama campaign directed 45% of its online campaign dollars to the search site.” (Advertising Age)

11. “59% of adult Facebook users had “liked” a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in this rise.” (eMarketer)

12. “In 2010, 29.3 million readers read some 270 million pages of Post journalism each month, a record for The Washington Post. Of that, 28.1 million did so online and, while [Washington Post] brought in 4.2 million new readers on average each month compared to the previous year, [they] also lost some 35,000 print subscribers in 2010 alone.” (Forbes)

13. “25% of hotels [are] still ignoring social media.” (TravelClick via Econsultancy)

14. “Businesses are paying Twitter $120,000 to sponsor a promoted trending topic for a day. [...] That’s up from $25,000 to $30,000 when the feature was launched in April 2010.” (via Poynter)

15. “AOL’s newsroom is now bigger than The New York Times’.” (Business Insider)

16. “Mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 40% of U.S. mobile subscribers regularly browsing the internet on their phone and a projected 12.5% of all e-commerce transactions going mobile by the end of the year, it’s a channel that you need to be aware of. According to Google, mobile web traffic will surpass PC traffic by 2013.” (60 Second Marketer)

17. “Twitter is 6-7 times smaller than Facebook.” (via Social Media Today)

18. “There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.” (AllThingsD)

19. “130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks.” (AllThingsD)

20. “Users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.” (NYTimes.com)

21. “Nearly half (42%) indicated that if they’ve already allocated a portion of their marketing spend to social media, they would increase this spend over the course of the year. Only 8% of those surveyed indicated that they would decrease social media spend.” (The Next Web)

22. “13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.” (Pew Internet)

23. “According to HubSpot, small businesses plan to spend 19 percent of budgets on social media vs. only 6 percent in larger businesses. A similar gap is shown for blogging with 10 percent of budgets for small business vs. just 3 percent for large.” (Hubspot via ClickZ)

24. “33 percent of its worldwide traffic is inside the United States.” (Problogger)

25. “Facebook has three times as many accounts as Twitter, and 20 percent of Twitter’s users produce at least 80 percent of the site’s content.” (Problogger)

26. “In early March, Google removed from its Android Market more than 60 applications carrying malicious software. Some of the malware was designed to reveal the user’s private information to a third party, replicate itself on other devices, destroy user data or even impersonate the device owner.” (Network World)

27. “Groupon is on track to bring in between $3 billion and $4 billion in revenue this year alone. Facebook’s 2010 sales were reported to be only around $2 billion in its sixth year of existence.” (Knowledge@Wharton via MSNBC)

28. “A study of 24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more ‘prosocial’ than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions.” (TheNextWeb)

29. “99 percent of Android devices are vulnerable to password theft.” (MobileCrunch)

30. “Recent estimates put less than 10% of the population using Twitter, far less than other social sites.” (Advertising Age)

31. “More than 3.34 million mentions were recorded over a one-month period of people making social asks.” (PRsarahevans.com)

32. “David Poltrack, CBS Corp., announced that, based on a new research study, ‘age and sex don’t matter when it comes to increasing TV ad effectiveness.’” (Forbes)

33. “An average of 40 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites comes from outside referrals, the study found, with Google Search and, to a lesser extent, Google News the single biggest traffic driver.” (via AFP)

34. “Almost one-in-four South Africans use social media as a tool to look for work, but are concerned about the potential career fallout from personal content on social networking sites.” (Kelly Group via BusinessReport)

35. “The percentage of US parents who allow their children between ages 10 and 12 to use Facebook or MySpace more than doubled from 8 percent a year ago to 17 percent now.” (via NY Post)

36. “33% of Facebook posting is mobile.” (Dan Zarella)

37. “Fully 69% of visitors to news.google.com ended up 3 places: nytimes.com (14.6%), cnn.com (14.4%) and abcnews.go.com (14.0%).” (Journalism.org)

38. “85% of media websites now use online video to cover news.” (SocialTimes.com)

39. “”Social media advertising spending will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion by 2015.” (BIA/Kelsey via Direct Marketing News)

40. “Facebook is approaching 700 million users and Google handles over 11 billion queries per month. World-wide there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers (9 out of 10 in the U.S.) and every two days there is more information created than between the dawn of civilization and 2003.” (via Lee Odden, TopRank)

41. “Twitter reported that the network saw more than 4,000 tweets per second (TPS) at the beginning and end of Obama’s speech [re: death of Osama Bin Laden]” (AllTwitter)

42. “65% of all social media related to the royal wedding has come from the U.S. in the past month [April]. The U.K. has been responsible for just 20%.” (USA Today)

43. Re: the Royal Wedding: “911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days. That’s about 30,000 per day and accounts for 71% of all social media.” (USA Today)

44. “According to NPR’s internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps’ content. On average, audio streamers rack up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4 for the text-only crowd.” (Nieman Journalism Lab)

45. “Twitter penetration rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, according to new data from online tracking firm comScore Inc., which suggests that nearly one in five Canadian Internet users over the age of 15 regularly visit Twitter.” (via Financial Post)

46. “Traffic from social media has highest bounce rate. [...] If you’re looking for ‘hyper-engaged’ readers, those that click through five or more pages on your site, forget the guy who came from Twitter. A link from another content site is three times more likely to be engaged, and someone coming in from search, is also above average.” (Marketing Pilgrim)

47. “”Digital services accounted for an estimated $8.5 billion (28%) of the $30.4 billion in 2010 U.S. revenue generated by the 900-plus advertising and marketing-services agencies that Ad Age analyzed.” (Advertising Age)

48. “Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2010: $41,390. Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2011: $230,000″ (Huffington Post)

49. “Nearly seven in 10 tablet owners reported spending at least 1 hour per day using the device, including 38% who spent over 2 hours on it. And while just 28% consider it their primary computer, 77% are spending less time on desktop or laptop PCs since they got a tablet.” (eMarketer)

50. “According to a Network Solutions survey, the use of social media among SMBs has grown over the years, rising from 12 percent in 2009, to 24 percent in 2010 to 31 percent currently.” (Search Engine Watch)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Evans is owner of Sevans Strategy a public relations and new media consultancy. She blogs at PRsarahevans.com and hosts the #journchat Twitter chat for journalists and PR professionals.

Google today posted full specs for the phone on a YouTube channel, dedicated to Nexus S, the successor to the questionably successful Nexus One launched one year ago. That handset was manufactured by HTC, while the Nexus S is a Samsung phone that comes with a new Android operating system, code-named “Gingerbread.” The idea behind the new device is that it’s unadulterated Google, free of the apps and features loaded by third-parties and carriers.

As for its carriers, the Nexus S will be available through T-Mobile.

The branding of the phone and the marketing campaign to promote it, dubbed “Pure Google,” was done by California-based Muhtayzik-Hoffer. The shop is a recent addition to Google’s growing roster of mostly small creative boutique agencies. The creative work launches today with a short film aimed at Google fan boys and mobile geeks, filmed in Brooklyn with the help of 1stAveMachine — the same production company that helped bring Google’s first Super Bowl spot to life.

The film shows demos of the Nexus S’ navigation, translation, picture-taking and voice-activated capabilities, as well as Google Street View and the recently released Google sky map application. One thing it doesn’t show? The phone’s tap-and-pay capability. Last month at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the phone comes equipped with chips that enable users to use their phones instead of credit cards.

That feature could be promoted in future videos down the road. The “Pure Google” campaign after today is expected to unfurl into a set of digital banners and point-of-sale work that will appear at Best Buy, which Google tapped as its retail partner to help launch the phones amidst the holiday shopping blitz.

We put the question to our friends at Visible Measures, and the answer surprised us. It turned out the No. 1 viral campaign of all time is a consistent sleeper hit, not often among the weekly top 10 on Ad Age’s Viral Chart, and not connected to a big, well-heeled brand or fancy creative agency. Rather, it’s a cool gimmick that consistently delivers laughs along with cringe-inducing voyeuristic destruction.

The No. 1 video advertiser of all time is Blendtec, whose “Will It Blend” series has been around in the same form for four years, accumulating 134.2 million views. The key? The brand found what works and stuck with it. Each of the more than 120 original clips has the same kitschy music, the same tagline, variations on the same stunt and the same host, Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson.

While brilliant, Mr. Dickson has to thank Steve Jobs for Blendtec’s biggest hits, including laying waste to an iPhone in 2007 and an iPad in April.

What’s remarkable about the top 10 is that viewers would voluntarily watch an ad 100 million times, let alone 23 million times. Not surprisingly, given the recent growth of web video, most of the entrants are recent campaigns, launched within the last year or two. All but one, Pepsi’s “Gladiator,” came after the launch of YouTube in 2005. (The ad, starring Britney, Beyonce and Pink, appeared on TV in 2004.)

In addition to Blendtec, Evian and Pepsi, the list includes two Old Spice campaigns (including the newly famous “Your Man” Isaiah Mustafa), Microsoft’s Xbox Project Natal, Dove’s “Evolution,” DC Shoes’ “Gymhana Two,” and “T-Mobile Dance.” While the chart stops at No. 10, special honorable mention goes to Nike, which holds the No. 11 spot for its “Write the Future” campaign, as well as the Nos. 12 and 13 spots for early viral efforts starring Kobe Bryant and Ronaldinho.

While great creative is the key to keeping interest and generating pass-along, time also helps. It took Evian and Blendtec more than a year to get to 100 million views. The next campaign to do it will probably feature Old Spice’s Isaiah Mustafa, not for the original “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” TV ad, but the “Responses” campaign, where Mustafa recorded customized replies to folks like Kevin Rose, George Stephanopolous, Gizmodo and Biz Stone.

	Brand	Campaign	Agency	All Time Views*	Launch Date	Watch the Spot
1	Blendtec	Will It Blend?	In-house	134,256,499	10/30/06
2	Evian	Live Young	BETC Euro RSCG	103,867,704	6/4/09
3	Old Spice	Responses	Wieden & Kennedy	57,132,669	7/12/10
4	Pepsi	Gladiator	AMV BBDO	46,742,892	1/1/04
5	Microsoft	Xbox Project Natal	World Famous	42,698,599	6/1/09
6	Dove	Evolution	Ogilvy & Mather	41,100,418	10/1/06
7	T-Mobile	T-Mobile Dance	Saatchi & Saatchi	35,487,575	1/15/09
8	Doritos	Crash The Super Bowl 2010	Goodby Silverstein & Partners	34,168,845	1/5/10
9	Old Spice	Odor Blocker	Wieden & Kennedy	33,986,750	3/31/10
10	DC Shoes	Gymkhana Two	In-house	32,872,531	9/3/09
Source: Visible Measures *The Visible Measures Top 10 Viral Video Ad Campaigns Chart focuses on brand-driven viral video ads that appear on online-video-sharing destinations. Each campaign is measured on a True Reach basis, which includes viewership of both brand-syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements. The data are compiled using the Visible Measures Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing repository of analytic data on more than 100 million internet videos across more than 150 video-sharing destinations. Note: This analysis does not include Visible Measures’ paid-placement (i.e., overlays, pre-/mid-/post-roll) performance data or video views on private sites. This chart does not include movie trailers, video-game campaigns, TV show or media network promotions, or public service announcements. View-count results are incremental by week. To notify Visible Measures of an upcoming video ad campaign, or for an end-to-end assessment of your campaign’s overall performance, please contact Visible Measures directly.

The most mentioned brands on Twitter tend to be there because they are part of constant daily conversation, not because of anything the brand is or isn’t doing on Twitter. That’s one of the conclusions of a six-month analysis of the service’s ubiquitous 140-character messages conducted by digital agency 360i and released today.

Despite marketers’ embrace of the medium, brands are finding themselves on the outside of the conversation. Of the 90% of Twitter messages sent by real people — the other 10% come from businesses — only 12% ever mention a brand, and most of those mentions are of Twitter itself.

Further, only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand are part of an active conversation with that brand, meaning marketers are, for the most part, conducting one-way conversations — the opposite of the way consumers often use Twitter.

The most mentioned brands on Twitter tend to be there because they are part of a constant daily conversation, not because of anything the brand is or isn’t doing on Twitter. The most mentioned brands on Twitter are, in descending order, Twitter, Apple, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Blackberry, Amazon, Facebook, Snuggie, eBay and Starbucks.

Embedded in the culture
Snuggie is the surprise brand on the list, but that appears to reflect the brand’s place in the culture, not its own Twitter activity. Official Snuggie profile @OriginalSnuggie has just 591 followers and @WeezerSnuggie, an account set up to promote the once-popular Weezer video, has just 693 followers and has been dormant since November.

After spending six months going over a statistically significant sample of 1,800 tweets, 360i Senior-VP Sarah Hofstetter was struck at just how mundane and personal they were. “They’re mostly doing what people mocked Twitter about in the first place, as in, what I had for lunch.”

The vast majority of real people’s tweets, 94%, are personal in nature. Most tweets, 85%, are original and not re-tweets of other messages. They’re also very often conversational: 43% of tweets begin with an “@” sign, meaning they’re directed at another user, not the sender’s followers at large.

While marketers such as Dell, Comcast, Ford and Starbucks have been, at times, clever participants on Twitter, the majority of marketers use it as a mini press-release service. Only 12% of messages from marketers are directed at individual Twitter users, meaning marketers still see it as a broadcast medium rather than a conversational one.

Showing up isn’t enough
“There is still a misperception that if brands show up, people will listen to them, kind of like Facebook a few years ago,” Ms. Hofstetter said. “Twitter can be used as a promotional RSS feed, but that’s not going to establish a relationship with anybody.”

The study was conducted before Twitter took any advertising, from October 2009 through March 2010. Twitter has since rolled out a series of ad units including promoted tweets and trends. Ms. Hofstetter said the ads are great to help boost things already popular on Twitter. “They are only going to work if they are relevant in the first place,” she said.

Twitter posts are intrinsically navel-gazing, conversational and personal, but they aren’t predominantly self-promotional. Depending on your circle of connections, it can certainly feel, as Wired’s Evan Ratliff noted, that “self-aggrandizement” is “standard fare” on Twitter. But the 360i study found only 2% of tweets were professional updates or career-related.

What do Twitter users talk about? Beyond the 43% of individuals’ tweets that are conversational, 24% are status updates, 12% are links to news or comment on current events, and 3% are seeking or giving advice.

The good news for brands is that when a consumer does mention them on Twitter, they’re usually not complaining about it. Only 7% of tweets mentioning brands indicated negative sentiment, 11% positive and an overwhelmingly 82% neutral.

Third-place wireless carrier Sprint is hoping for a comeback with the launch tonight of Evo, the first 4G smartphone, which runs off its high-speed network.

No. 1 carrier Verizon and No. 2 AT&T support 3G data. While those carriers are still developing new high-speed networks, Sprint 4G is already available and could stand to bolster the brand that has suffered from years of technical and customer service problems.

The Evo spot from Sprint agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, kicks off marketing for the handset tonight in prime time. The first commercial, “Firsts,” will be a significant launch for the carrier and positions Evo (an Android device from handset manufacturer HTC) as the latest technological first along the spectrum of previous innovation landmarks, starting from the wheel through the space shuttle and mobile phones. The integrated campaign also includes national print across newspapers and magazines; outdoor; online; and experiential components. Sprint would not disclose media spending. Its media agency is Mindshare.

In the tradition of recent blockbuster launches for Droid and Palm handsets, the Evo spot is more of a branding commercial than a product demonstration, a strategy Apple notably utilized for launching the iPhone. This first spot focuses on Sprint’s heritage of firsts — for example, it was the first to offer digital landline service — rather than phone features or the network’s speed, but commercials describing Evo features will launch in coming weeks.

“To really differentiate from every other product launch out there, we had to emphasize the strategy of firsts,” said Mike Goff, Sprint’s VP-corporate marketing.

Great expectations
As the only U.S. carrier in the market offering 4G, Evo could revive Sprint, which has picked up slightly after years of steady decline. Sprint’s first-quarter revenue was down, but showed improvement over past quarters. Sprint also lost fewer subscribers last quarter, marking its best subscriber results since late 2007.

In the first quarter, Sprint had more than 47 million subscribers vs. Verizon’s 92 million and AT&T’s 86 million, according to the carriers. The two leaders added subscribers during the first months of this year, while Sprint lost a small fraction. Its average churn rate is also double that of the market leaders.

The company has been marketing its high-speed network with a “What can you do with 4G?” campaign over the last few months, primarily around its Wi-Fi hotspot device. That campaign laid the foundation for Evo, said Mr. Goff, and that’s why the carrier can lead this handset launch with a brand-centric campaign, rather than one that explains the benefits of a faster network. The 4G network is currently available in 33 markets, including Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston. It’s expecting to come to New York and San Francisco later this year.

Sprint’s campaign will also support a social-media component wherein users can post their firsts on the Evo phone to social networks. Users will earn Foursquare-like badges for completing firsts on the phone, from the first person to purchase to being the first to upload a video of a baby’s first steps.

“Badges take advantage of the notion that Foursquare has recently developed,” said Rob Smith, group account director and associate partner for Goodby. “It’s not the same exactly, but it ties into that mindset that people like to be somewhere first. … It returns Sprint to a tech leadership position, and we now have the technology and device to back it up.”

The last major smartphone launch on the Sprint network was for Palm, which Hewlett Packard has since purchased, after the company reported dismal earnings and sales that some say were due to poor marketing, timing and distribution. Palm and its then agency Modernista led communications for that device, while Sprint will lead for Evo.

Heineken USA’s sales dipped nearly 11% last year, a reflection of a difficult economic climate for pricey imports as well as erratic and ineffective marketing on its flagship lager brand.

The No. 2 importer’s total sales declined 10.7%, worse than the 9.8% drop for the total imported beer segment as well as the 6.8% decline posted by its chief rival, Corona marketer Crown Imports.

The biggest culprit: a 10% decline in Heineken Lager, the No. 2 imported brand. (The importer’s other Dutch brands, Heineken Premium Light and Amstel Light, also saw steep declines.)

Those struggles prompted Heineken to change creative agencies last year, as the marketer dumped Wieden & Kennedy for Euro RSCG, which became its fourth creative shop since 2006.

In its earnings release today, Dutch parent Heineken NV cited the “decline in the import segment and price competition” as a factor in its U.S. struggles, but the phenomenon didn’t seem to slow the marketer’s Dos Equis brand down at all.

Despite the sales declines, Heineken did manage to boost its earnings in the U.S., saying key drivers were the price increase across the Dutch portfolio implemented at the end of 2008 and lower marketing rates. The Dutch parent did not break out specific earnings numbers for the U.S.

Dos Equis, sold at a similar price point to Heineken, saw sales jump 20% during 2009, fueled by increasing distribution and the marketing phenomenon that is Euro’s “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign.

Heineken USA also saw a 14% gain on Tecate Light, an economy brand.

That’s what Yahoo is going to be asking in the coming months as it integrates the micro-blog service into nearly all of its products and pages, including Yahoo Mail, Sports, News, Finance and Search.

It’s the latest step in Yahoo’s latest strategy, which is to integrate the world’s most popular social networks into the Yahoo environment rather than try to compete with them. The pact is similar to a deal with Facebook announced in December, allowing users to import their connections and update their status through Yahoo.

The deal will give Twitter a vast new distribution to 600 million Yahoo users, and something else it has found scarce: revenue.

Distribution and revenue
Like the search deals with Microsoft’s Bing and Google struck earlier this year, Yahoo will be paying Twitter for its data. Yahoo will start indexing Twitter updates in search immediately, and will integrate the Twitter service throughout its properties over the next several months.

Twitter is in the enviable position of having most major media entities on the web, as well as TV, stumbling over themselves to promote the service for free as they implore viewers to “follow” them on Twitter. Twitter is also famously open with its technology, allowing others to build applications to access the service on PCs and phones, which in turn has helped power its growth. But those relationships don’t provide Twitter any revenue, nor do any of the ad platforms that have been built on Twitter.

Twitter is, however, charging a fee in these deals for what one exec described as the “fire hose” of data, which includes 50 million bursts of text or “tweets” per day.

Ad platform coming
Twitter is also said to be working on its own ad platform. Head of Twitter monetization, Anamitra Banerji, told the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference on Monday he is concerned that some of the external Twitter ad platforms may be doing damage to the Twitter experience.

Jim Stoneham, Yahoo VP-communities, said the integration with Twitter, like the deal with Facebook, would operate on the “plumbing level” and is designed to make sharing Yahoo content from news stories to fantasy football trades seamless. Users will be able to log into Twitter using their Yahoo ID and view all their social communications in one interface.

“We’ve spent a couple years building up social on Yahoo so anything you do on Yahoo can be shared out,” Mr. Stoneham said. “It’s aggregating a network of networks to increase reach for Yahoo properties.”

Mr. Stoneham said there is 88.4% overlap between visitors to Twitter.com and Yahoo properties. Visits to Twitter.com is an inexact proxy for Twitter users, because many use the service through third-party applications, but the overlap statistic is still a sign that most Twitter users also frequent Yahoo sites.

“The information in one single tweet can travel light-years farther with this Yahoo integration,” Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, said in a statement. “Tweets in more places brings relevance where and when you need it most.”

Any ad agency will tell you the loss of a lucrative account is like a punch in the gut. Losing your founding client — that’s devastating. But that’s precisely what happened to McGarryBowen in 2007 when Verizon whittled its ad agency roster from 38 agencies to eight. The marketer’s move eliminated shops not linked to the biggest chunk of what was then a $1.2 billion and growing marketing budget: wireless.

So what did John McGarry do? He took his former client to lunch.

“He is a class act and consummate professional,” said Verizon’s exec VP-chief marketing officer, John Stratton, of Mr. McGarry, who is renowned in the business as the epitome of the courtly, old-school account man. “He worked for two and half years to maintain the relationship, despite what were probably hard feelings. … John really understands how to manage relationships well. It’s not overbearing, but he doesn’t fall off the radar screen long enough that you forget about him and his company.”

Yet when a trio of 50-something ad guys flung open McGarryBowen’s doors less than a decade ago, off-the-radar was where Mr. McGarry was headed. He was part of a group that exited Young & Rubicam after its 1998 public offering with wallets full and little need to confront the harsh new realities of the agency business. Madison Avenue’s halcyon days of easy 15% commissions were fading, bean-counting procurement execs were ascendant, and digital was becoming the name of the game.

McGarryBowen powered on though, with Mr. McGarry using old connections to bring in clients like Marriott and Chevron. And while the agency still leans heavily on its founder’s expansive Rolodex, in 2009 it demonstrated an understanding of what many of its peers are fast forgetting: for all the ways the ad business is forever changing, certain fundamentals — like sound account management — never change.

‘Old World’
Dana Anderson, senior VP-marketing at Kraft and a former agency executive herself, calls McGarryBowen’s service and attention to the client relationship remarkable in a way that’s “almost Old World.”

“Sometimes things move so fast, that falls to the bottom of the list [with agencies],” said Ms. Anderson, who was quick to note that the “Old World” does not mean the shop isn’t in-step with today’s rapidly changing business. “The ‘new world’ part is that they are transparent and collaborative. You’re invited to come down and look at work, they’ll bring you into the music studio to listen to 26 different tracks. It’s a new way of doing business that’s open and refreshing.”

That way of doing is business is why, when most agencies were chasing shrinking slices of accounts to stay afloat in a bad economy, McGarryBowen was grabbing giant chunks of blue-chip business in virtually every category. In 2009, McGarryBowen turned in its best year, with revenue up a jaw-dropping 25% thanks largely to a haul of $600 million in new billings. Kraft moved a slew of accounts, from Oscar Mayer to Philadelphia Cream Cheese to even Maxwell House — considered David Ogilvy’s prized client — to McGarryBowen. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer handed the agency work for its Chantix smoking-cessation drug in the early part of 2009, then returned with ad duties for its biggest consumer brand, Viagra. And of course that lunch paid off as Verizon returned for the launch of Droid.

It wasn’t just the account-centric approach that delivered — so did the work. For Chase, McGarryBowen repositioned the brand in the middle of a financial crisis to give consumers web tools to better control debt; for Disney it used promotions like free birthday admission to turnaround a tourism slump and boost attendance at parks by 10%; its work for Crayola delivered a 20% retail boost during the holidays.

The creative and strategic thinking has improved, too. For the first time, McGarryBowen, best known for sentimental TV commercials, showed it had the chops to take on sophisticated, high-tech assignments like Droid.

Right notes
Going into the pitch, the agency lacked category experience and was considered the underdog. “I told John this was a-one-in-a-million shot,” said Mr. Stratton. “We gave them some background, but what we didn’t give them was time.” In a matter of one week — that’s right, seven days — McGarryBowen delivered a bold name, logo and a product personality to appeal to the 15- to 40-year-old target that heavily skewed male.

“They went to school on the whole thing, spent a lot of time on the blogs and got a sense of how that segment thought about [mobile] products,” Mr. Stratton said. “I was pretty much sold right away. … I remember I put my pen down, sat back, just listened to the pitch and let it wash over me and thought, ‘This feels exactly like what we were looking for.’”

The campaign started with a teaser ad that drove watchers to a website. Sales, which analysts estimate were over 600,000 units in 2009, exceeded the company’s expectations, with the Droid becoming a popular alternative to the iPhone.

“Losing Verizon and having it coming back again was the thrill of a lifetime,” Mr. McGarry told Ad Age. “The power of our model is in the strength of our relationships, which allow us to do great work. Other people’s models are about being disruptive … but not about the relationships with clients. Closeness to clients is something you have to earn, and ask for. We are close to our clients at the marketing level, and every level.”

That closeness to clients permeates throughout the agency and seems to go both ways, exhibited by the willingness of heavy hitters such as Hewlett-Packard CMO Michael Mendenhall and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to participate in a monthly speaker series at the agency and regale McGarryBowen staff with personal stories. McGarryBowen execs were even consulted by Chase in the run-up to the 2008 purchase of Bear Sterns.

Dentsu
It wasn’t long before those tight client relationships became the envy of the big holding companies. The independent shop has been courted by every major holding ad conglomerate, but McGarryBowen caught the adworld by surprise when it struck the deal to be acquired by Dentsu in late 2008.

“McGarryBowen chose Dentsu more than the other way around,” said Tim Andree, president-CEO at Dentsu Holdings USA. “The opportunity to have that kind of vast talent pool and a client roster that complements our great Japanese brands has helped raised our overall presence in the U.S.”

At McGarryBowen’s Manhattan offices — with its high ceilings and sweeping Hudson River views — an antique Samurai warrior jacket hangs in one of the glass conference rooms, a gift to Mr. McGarry from Gordon Bowen, one of the agency’s three partners and its chief creative officer. The jacket symbolizes a toast given by Dentsu colleagues in which Mr. McGarry was dubbed one of the “last great Samurais of Madison Avenue.”

“There’s not a phony bone in his body,” said Mr. Bowen about his colleague. “He genuinely cares about his clients and their business.”

“The hallmark of their advertising is that they seem to be able to capture the essence of our brand while sending a straightforward retail message,” said Marty Muller, senior VP-global marketing, global creative Disney Destinations Marketing. “We get a lot of response to their advertising on our blogs.”

Sentimental?
“In a market that was brutal to everyone last year, our holiday business was up over 20%,” sad Sharon Hartley, exec VP-marketing and sales at Crayola, a pretty remarkable feat when you consider Crayola’s products, though evolved from simply crayons and markers, are all gender-neutral, non-violent and not as exciting as video games.

McGarryBowen’s work has gotten a tad edgier with stuff like Droid, but it’s still pretty easy to spot one of the shop’s ads, with its trademark tug-on-the-heartstrings themes. That trait is also what has some in the ad community under the false impression that the shop doesn’t understand how to do anything else.

John McGarry’s son, who works at the agency, puts it this way: “People don’t know because we’re not out there banging the drum about it. … Any agency nowadays has to have digital chops; it’s not a differentiating factor. It’s a fundamental competency.” The younger John leads McGarryBowen’s digital practice, Continuity. The group has small projects of its own, like digital work for Martha Stewart, but the majority of is for McGarryBowen clients.

It seems like a long way from when the shop flung open its doors, but McGarryBowen feels like it’s just gotten started. “We continue to pinch ourselves here,” said Mr. McGarry. “We continue to feel we’ve just begun, as we are defining and redefining ourselves with our clients.”

But of course one thing remains the same: The client, as always, is in the center.

Cadbury “Gorilla”
Agency: Fallon, London
Director: Juan Cabral

No swirling fabrics, no dreamy ladies, no satisfied young snackers, no … chocolate. “Gorilla” didn’t contain the same ingredients as many chocolate ads before it. Instead, it contained a grape purple backdrop, a gorilla, a set of drums and a few key moments from a monster ’80s track. When it debuted in 2007, “Gorilla” engendered a fierce debate amongst industry types about what exactly has become of advertising. To fans — and fans were many: The ad has been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube, inspired a host of tributes and captured the Film Grand Prix at Cannes — it was an exemplar of the new branded storytelling. Detractors, of course, asked what any of it had to do with chocolate. Fallon’s Juan Cabral (author of Sony “Balls”), who wrote and directed the spot, answers the question “Why?” simply: “It kind of makes sense to be honest. It’s a very powerful drum solo. So a gorilla has to play it.”

Sony Bravia “Balls”
Agency: Fallon, London
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig, MJZ

A bunch of colorful balls bouncing through the streets of San Francisco. Like Fallon London’s other big spot of the oughties, the genius of “Balls” was hard to convey on paper. But in the hands of director Nicolai Fuglsig, the idea resulted in two and a half minutes that could only be called art. Mr. Fuglsig, a former war photographer from Denmark, is known for his attention to detail — he regularly makes physical models of his sets before shooting — and he knew going into “Balls” that he would be conjuring the ball bonanza 100% in camera. Mr. Fuglsig marshaled 12 air-powered mortars to fire 250,000 balls into the air, adding tiny touches like a frog jumping out of the way of balls dropping through a drainpipe, and setting the artful imagery to a Jose Gonzalez cover the The Knife’s “Heartbeats.” The ad was by far the best ad of 2006 and one of the best of the decade.

Skittles “Touch”
Agency: TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York
Director: Tom Kuntz, MJZ

Singling out one of the Skittles spots produced under Gerry Graf’s reign at TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York, is sort of silly. It’s like, well, no, it is choosing between a candy-eating beard, a physically and emotionally wounded papier mache office worker and a singing rabbit (the agency’s dancing lad for Starburst probably belongs on this list too). All the Skittles work created by Mr. Graf, executive creative director, Group Creative Directors Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone, and the creative team of Eric Kallman and Craig Allen deserves (and got) praise for reinvigorating the once mighty ad form called the TV spot. If Skittles work pre-2004 was all candy deluges and magic realism, Mr. Graf’s work was more grounded in everyday reality. A hilariously weird, sometimes troubling version of everyday reality. In 2007, “Touch” added a touch of melancholy to the hilarity with Tim, a video-store employee with a candy version of King Midas disease. Like all the Skittles spots, it proved that you could put the product front and center and still create something striking, entertaining and effective.

Nike “Move”
Agency: Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Director: Jake Scott, RSA

Nike has been setting new standards for spots since 1982 and a new century brought a new string of classics. Nike and Wieden kicked off the new millennium with one of its best efforts ever — the wry “Morning After,” directed by Spike Jonze, which showed us a man sticking with his morning run against a backdrop of every paranoid Y2K nightmare come true (the spot technically broke at the end of ’99). Among the many other ’00s highlights are “Tag,” the 2002 Cannes Film Grand Prix winner directed by Frank Budgen, and, more recently, David Fincher’s stunning “Fate.” “Move,” released ahead of the 2002 Olympics, is essentially a series of intimate athletic moments woven together against a piano and strings track. It sounds simple — and it is. But the agency’s creative rigor, Jake Scott’s direction, Adam Pertofsky’s editing finesse and a truly stirring original track from Elias made “Move” one of the more unforgettable embodiments of the Nike ethic.

Apple iPod “Hip Hop”
Agency: TBWA, Los Angeles
Director: Dave Meyers, @radical.media

The dancing silhouettes are what most people think of when they think of iPod advertising. But the very first iPod commercial looked very different. It showed some dude grooving in his apartment and transferring a track to a futuristic looking white device. Not an embarrassing effort, certainly. But … this was the iPod, one of the most ground-breaking, industry-shattering gadgets of this or maybe any decade, the product of Apple’s legendary design ethic. In 2003, TBWA regrouped and created a series of spots based on a print and outdoor campaign. The spots depicted black silhouetted figures busting a move against vibrant backgrounds, with the only visible detail the bright white device and ear buds of the iPod. Music video director Dave Meyers translated the concept with style, using, in this case, “Hey Mama” from the (then good) Black Eyed Peas to drive the visuals. The white buds became epochal and the campaign one of the most recognizable — and parodied — of the ’00s.

Got Milk? “Birthday”
Agency: Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco
Director: Noam Murro, Biscuit Filmworks

Like a few other advertisers on this list, the California Milk Processors Board had an almost crushing creative legacy to live up to when it entered the ’00s. “Got Milk?” was created by Goodby in 1993 and the campaign birthed one of the most famous American commercials of modern times, the Michael Bay-directed “Aaron Burr.” The “Got Milk” theme was adopted nationally in 1998 and spawned hundreds of print ads featuring mustachioed celebrities. In 2003, Goodby did “Aaron Burr” and the mustache proud with a tale of a creepy clairvoyant kid and dark events at a birthday party. Director Noam Murro delivers a lush and genuinely eerie cinematic experience, channels ’70s horror classics such as “The Omen” and coaxes a brilliant performance from the kid and his father. Goodby has gone on to further “Milk” triumphs in the digital space, but “Birthday” stands as a testament to the agency’s legendary zeal for advertising craft.

Honda “Grrr”
Agency: Wieden & Kennedy, London
Director: Smith and Foulkes, Nexus Productions

Can hate be good? Can hate be great? What an absolutely nutty thing to be asking in a commercial. And yet the provocative question formed the basis for one of the freshest spots of the ’00s and surely one of the most memorable ads ever for a diesel engine. Legend has it that Honda engineer Kenichi Nagahiro hated the noise and dirt associated with diesel technology and insisted on starting from scratch for Honda’s eventual entry into the category. The idea of hatred as a creative motivator was translated by the team of Sean Thompson, Michael Russoff and Richard Russell, under the direction of Executive Creative Directors Tony Davidson and Kim Papworth, into a catchy tune. The lyrics were sung and spoken by Garrison Keillor in a sweet animated spot full of woodland creatures and flying diesels. The spot, which won the Cannes Grand Prix in 2004, was part of Wieden’s “Power of Dreams” campaign for Honda, which included another decade-defining spot, “Cog.”

Coca-Cola “Happiness Factory”
Agency: Wieden & Kennedy, Amsterdam
Director: Psyop

Released in 2006, “Happiness Factory” marked the return to form of one of America’s iconic, but creatively lapsed and internally struggling brands. After seemingly losing its way on the ad front for several years, Coke dug deep and, in 2005, sought a creative partnership with Wieden & Kennedy, in Portland and Amsterdam. The “Coke Side of Life” campaign from Portland yielded such gems as the Cannes Gold Lion-winning “Videogame” and the superb 2008 Super Bowl entry “It’s Mine.” In Amsterdam, meanwhile, “Happiness Factory” grew out of the “Happiness in a Bottle” theme that the agency had been working on. The agency partnered with animation wizards Psyop to bring to life a magical world inside a Coke vending machine. The ad went on to inspire a suite of “Happiness Factory” projects, including a charming behind-the-scenes film that featured interviews with animated versions of real Coke employees.

Fox Sports “China”
Agency: Cliff Freeman & Partners
Director: Traktor

“China” was part of a series of spots from Cliff Freeman & Partners promoting Fox Sports’ regional coverage. Creative director Eric Silver teamed up with Traktor to create depictions of ostensible sporting events from around the world. In “China,” we see the ages-old tradition of tree cathing; in “India,” we are witness to the solemn sport of blind clubbing; “Turkey” brings us professional dirt diving. The grainy footage and deadpan style made these absurd activities seem perfectly real, all the better to deliver the underlying message, that no matter what your arcane athletic interest, Fox Sports is on it. The campaign earned the Cannes Film Grand Prix in 2001 and was a classic example of the dear departed agency’s oeuvre.

E-Trade “Monkey”
Agency: Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Director: Bryan Buckley

One of many Gerry Graf/Bryan Buckley collaborations, “Monkey” is perhaps the ultimate spot symbolic of the go-go dot-com days. We could go on, but instead we’ll turn it over to Mr. Graf: “Here’s my favorite story about shooting the monkey: The day of the shoot … Bryan goes up to the monkey trainer and says, ‘In one take, I want the monkey to come out of the car, shut the car door, run up the sidewalk, jump over the boombox, turn around, bend down, turn the boombox on, climb up on top of the trash can, start clapping, and when I say ‘Cut,’ have the monkey stop clapping.’ The trainer is like, ‘OK, give me 45 minutes.’ Then Bryan goes to the two actors and says, ‘All you have to do is, when the music turns on, start clapping, when the music turns off, stop clapping.’ So the trainer is ready. OK, action. So the monkey jumps out of the car, shuts the door, runs up the driveway, jumps over the thing, turns it on, jumps on the trash can, starts clapping, Bryan yells ‘Cut’ and he stops clapping. And the two fucking guys are still clapping.”

Get ready for Starbucks Holiday 2.0. The brand is going big in social media this year, having learned that its consumers want to participate in a variety of ways. So Starbucks is pulling back from its Thanksgiving TV buys of the past two years to focus on where its customers already spend time online and drive them into stores.

Starbucks is spreading the love around, advertising on websites from NYTimes.com to Meebo; partnering with Pandora to offer branded holiday playlists; and encouraging participation in social and owned media to get consumers in the holiday spirit. The chain is continuing its partnership with Red, launched last Thanksgiving, by offering a free “All You Need Is Love” CD, with tracks from U2, John Legend and the Dave Matthews Band, when consumers spend $15. Additionally, Starbucks will give $1 to fight AIDS in Africa. There are also a variety of holiday-themed “Red” products for which Starbucks will also make the $1 donation with a customer purchase. This represents a stepped-up version of last year’s offer, which was a five-cent donation made when consumers bought a holiday beverage such as a peppermint mocha.

“It’s like we’ve taken the version 1.0 of last year and now we’re really doing it at scale and going to a lot more places where our customers already are,” said Chris Bruzzo, VP-brand, content and online at Starbucks. “People are saying this is going to be a big year for social media and we’re a microcosm of that. Whereas last year it was a curiosity, this year it’s a core part of the program.”

Multiple touchpoints
Mr. Bruzzo said the brand has learned that different people want to connect in different ways, so Starbucks is offering a variety of touchpoints. “Of our 5 million [fans] on Facebook, not everyone is going to want the same thing,” he said. For instance, last year Starbucks encouraged consumers to stop in, buy a holiday beverage, take pictures of themselves inside Project Red’s logo parentheses, and upload their pictures to a Red holiday microsite. To make it easier, this year Starbucks is hosting a Flickr page where consumers can upload pictures of themselves with their holiday paraphernalia. They can also do so on Facebook, where fans can also send their friends red Starbucks cups. Mr. Bruzzo said the Starbucks shutterbugs are among the chain’s biggest fans, valuable evangelists for the brand who educate friends and family about what’s new at the chain.

For music lovers, Starbucks is partnering with Pandora in the hope that consumers will be thinking about Starbucks while listening to music, and perhaps will be more likely to pop by for a gingerbread latte. Mr. Bruzzo said the branded playlist on the music site is designed to get consumers into the store to spend $15 and get the “Love” CD. “We get the appeal of do good, feel good,” he said. The Starbucks’ integration includes Pandora’s iPhone app, and Starbucks is paying Pandora for ad placement. BBDO, PHD and Blast Radius worked on the campaign.

Starbucks has also found a faster and easier way for consumers to get involved, even if they’re not yet comfortable in social media. “There are some ways that take a lot of energy but make [consumers feel] vulnerable and scared, and only the hardcore people online will go through such incredible content submissions,” Mr. Bruzzo said. For these less-comfortable folks, Starbucks created the “love drawing,” at StarbucksLoveProject, for visitors to create a digital drawing using different paints and colors. For each of the first million drawings, Starbucks is donating 5 cents to Red.

“We’re already up to a couple thousand on the site with people just coming in,” Mr. Bruzzo said of the site’s first day. “It takes a minute and it’s a fun, engaging activity.”