We’re happy to announce the addition of Laura Farnham to our work family. She has joined us as an account executive, working directly with clients like Huntington Learning Center and Mr. Beams, as well as helping on other key accounts. She’ll also be an important part our new business ventures. Laura brings agency, marketing, and graphic design experience, as well as event planning, media buying, and sales skills.

Laura graduated from West Virginia University where she majored in Journalism. She calls herself an “army brat,” and has lived in 7 different states, as well as Germany. Now she lives in Annapolis, where she is obsessed with things like sushi, WVU football, Bravo TV shows, and Pinterest. Bonus fun fact: Laura is almost half Native American – Tuscarora nation of the Iroquios tribe.

Welcome, Laura. We’re excited to work with you in the coming year.

Well, it’s 2012, folks. As we look back on 2011, aka The Year That Whizzed By, some of us at TCA wanted to share our most favoritest ads of the year with you. Spoiler: Google pretty much wins.

Jocelyn Rimbey, Digital Marketing Manager: If you don’t love Darth Vader Kid, you have a cold, cold heart.

Danielle Ali, Social Media Coordinator: I like this spot for the UK retailer John Lewis because it manages to be clever without being snarky, and touching without being cheesy – a big deal for a holiday ad. John Lewis sales were up £600million this holiday season, so I’d say it was a success.

Darren Easton, Vice President & Creative Director: My favorite print ad. Love it when one can dramatize an ad message so well that is based on a simple fact — which usually lends itself to a mundane execution.

Christina Drews-Leonard, Art Director & SEO Strategist: The Google+ Hangout Ad with the Muppets makes you wish more people were actually using this feature…

Tessa Carroll, Account Coordinator: I’m not sure what it is, whether it’s the relevance of the subject matter or the way it’s so eloquently put together, but the Google Chrome “It Gets Better” spot was definitely my favorite commercial of 2011.

Laura Farnham, Account Executive: What does chucking wood really mean? I like this commercial because its literal and makes me laugh every time… I like the little woodchuck hands too.

Anna Forbes, Account Executive: I don’t just love this because it’s a well executed spot that tells a story and made me super emotional. I love it because the “big bad Google,” was able to turn cold technology into the inspiring notion of how the digital world is part of who we are as people.

What was your favorite ad of 2011? Let us know here or on Twitter – there’s still room for honorable mentions!

I feel like there are two kinds of people in the world – people that appreciate good ice, and people that don’t. Good ice can come in different varieties, but the key to good ice is that it is easily chewed. Even if you aren’t an ice chewer (I’m not really, though I dabble), ice aficionados understand that good ice has the potential to be chewed. It is never awkwardly shaped or in huge, stuck-together clumps.

The best ice of all, my friends, is nugget ice. Ever had those delectable little balls of ice that are almost like crushed ice, but much more symmetrical, adorable, and so, so chewable? Perhaps from Sonic, or Jimmy Johns? This ice, my friends, is the. best. ice. ever.

Here at TCA, many of us feel very strongly about nugget ice. There’s a Jimmy John’s just around the corner, and sometimes we hit it up just for drinks. We are hooked on that nugget ice! And as marketers, we are really loving this new campaign for Scotsman Nugget Ice – apparently THE Original Chewable Ice – “Luv The Nug.”

Luv The Nug boasts a super fun, unbranded microsite, complete with a Nugget Locator and an iPhone app. They’re even giving away a nugget ice machine! But best of all… wait for it… there is a Nug Truck. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he gave all ice lovers something very special this year.

What say you? Are you an ice lover? Not so much? Take your side!

Traditionally, if someone wants to see content on the web, they visit the site that holds this content. If I want to read an article from The New York Times, I go to The New York Times’s website. The website is the hub for the content and users pass in and out of it when they want to interact with the content. However, sites like Pinterest, Instapaper, Gimmebar and Svpply are disrupting this model. They’re giving users a way to liberate content from it’s original context and aggregate it in their own collections. This is causing a shift.

Gimmebar is a web application that gives users the ability to capture content from almost anywhere on the web. Pictures, videos, tweets and words can be torn out of their original website and saved into Gimmebar. It doesn’t just bookmark the content either, it actually copies it from its original context to Gimmebar’s servers, available forever. It’s a fascinating concept and I’ve been happily using Gimmebar for the last few months. Anything I want, saved for all eternity in my own curated collection. Why am I talking about this on a marketing blog? Because when content is pulled out of its original site and shared around the web, the advertisements don’t follow it.

Right now, most websites monetize by placing advertisements around their content and trying to get as many eyes to see those ads as possible. This photo of Steve Jobs on Apple Insider is a good example. Notice all the flashing ads around the page? However, if I save that picture into my Gimmebar and share it from there, it looks like this. Apple Insider isn’t making any money off the people viewing the photo from inside my Gimmebar collection. Are you starting to see the implication here? The more ubiquitous content liberation tools become, the harder it is going to be to monetize that content.

I’m not writing this to offer a solution to the problem of monetizing content removed from its original website because well, I don’t have one. Nor does anyone at this point. Video could be done by embedding ads into the file, however once that file gets passed around, you have no way to know how many people have seen it. Photos could possibly be watermarked with little advertisements, but that’s a terribly inelegant solution. What about articles? Do we hide little text ads within the article itself that will follow the article even if it gets copied? This could get messy, fast. There are two things I know for sure.

1. Attribution is key for monetizing content after it has been liberated from its original context. Now matter where content ends up, it must remember where it came from and who created it. If this is lost, the creators receive no compensation or credit for their work.
2. We can’t ignore this trend. No matter how hard content providers try, they’re not going to be able to stop users from liberating and sharing content. The key now is not to fight it (are you listening RIAA?), but to figure out how to monetize within the new model.

As advertisers and marketers, some of the burden is on us to figure out new ways to promote in an increasingly unstructured internet. No pressure, right?

This font. And it’s free.