Everybody is in a frenzy to check out Google+ this week. I have only been able to see it from afar—Kasey, Traction's receptionist (and so much more), got a prized invite before tthey closed the beta so I looked at it over her shoulder. And yes, it does look like a clone of Facebook.

Around the advertising landscape today, we are seeing the gloves come off. And everything else coming off too, for that matter. 

Is it time for you to stop being a fucking prude and toss a some tits, ass and dirty words into your advertising?

There is "innovation" (i.e. how do we use this new augmented reality technology to create an app where we hold up a sneaker to our web cam and it shows the user running in a marathon?) and there is innovation (i.e. how do we drive our business forward in an unexpected way?).

I just wrote an article on Mashable called "HOW TO: Gamify your marketing" that outlines what "gamification" is and some case studies and best practices for effectively applying it to your marketing programs. 

Each year, BtoB Magazine publishes the "Who's Who in BtoB," a list of the top 100  most interesting and influential people in business-in-business marketing. Adam Kleinberg  is one of fifteen agency pros to have made the list.

There has been a growing trend in advertising over the last year that has been a little hard to miss: Vaginas are popping up everywhere. Perhaps some think it is edgy or liberating or educational. Or maybe they believe that referencing them liberally makes ads more current and viable. Anyway you slice it, the vagina is here to stay...

Traction is honored to be included on the iMedia 2011 list of key West Coast agencies that are pushing the boundaries of digital media. It's a thrill to be in the company of other agencies of such high caliber and to be recognized by a publication that we respect so much.

Targeting is getting pretty advanced these days. Where you used to just target people by buying sites (or groups of sites through ad networks), now you can just target people by their IP address—and all the associated data that has been gathered in relation to that IP address. 

Site-side personalization is an opportunity to harness the power of targeting on your own website.

If your job is to manage your company's or your client's Facebook and Twitter feeds, there are a whole new crop of (reasonably priced) tools to help you make smarter decisions about what kind of posts actually work.

This week, I had two friends in the industry show up at Traction to show me a couple of these tools—Doug Schumacher of Zuum Social and Chase McMichaels of InfinGraph.