Dynamic Logic Inc. Online Research Blog » Mark Blei

Meet Mark Blei

Mark Blei — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:30:00 +0000

This week we begin a new feature where we introduce you to a few new staff members at Dynamic Logic every week . Here they will discuss their specialties, new challenges they may have faced and how the challenges were overcome, interesting projects they have worked on and new things that they have learned.

We hope that it will serve as a vehicle to allow you to get to know us better and through this to have a better understanding of our capabilities and the types of unique challenges we meet head on everyday.

Since there is no better way to start than with yourself I invite you to

Meet Mark Blei -Global Business Development and Marketing

My name is Mark Blei and I’m involved in Sales and Marketing. I work out of the New York City office and live most of the time in Southern Ontario in Canada.

The most interesting project I’ve worked on recently was a custom project for a client that had both good Organic and Paid Search results but didn’t know how to maximize their engagement or how to study it.

Working in collaboration with Millward Brown we created a mock search environment and studied the actions and preferences of targeted participants.

We combined the observed behavioral data with standard AdIndex brand metrics like Awareness, Association, Favorability and Intent. .

Our research findings changed this client’s digital marketing strategy for both Search and Banner Advertisements.

It was fascinating because I got to see firsthand how effective our custom research group is at creating methodologies that work alongside our standard approach to ad effectiveness measurement. Methodologies that are easy to implement but also answer complicated questions. This project also opened my eyes to the wealth of knowledge within the Millward Brown family of companies.

Our research findings changed this client’s digital marketing strategy for both Search and Banner Advertisements.

In my spare time I enjoy ocean cruising I have been on over 160 cruises which adds up to over two years of my life at sea! The picture to the right is of me on my last cruise in St. Thomas. I recently got married and was worried that my new wife wouldn’t enjoy cruising. Luckily she loved it.

If you are interested in how Dynamic Logic can help your company overcome its challenges, or if you know where a guy can get a balcony cabin without spending his retirement fund- I invite you to call us at 212-844-3700 or email us at answers (at) dynamic logic (dot) com. Tell them that you read about us here!

In Other Industry News Today

Mark Blei — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:37:00 +0000

Yahoo finally Announced it would close their Geocities service and close out all Geocities websites. Giving current customers the option to upgrade to one of the Yahoo! small business or other paid non Geocities accounts- See their press release HERE

MarketingVox had an interesting article on a study by Forrester Research saying that Interactive Advertising is still growing- See Their Article HERE

Research firm ComScore was downgraded from a buy to a hold position by Needham, based on valuation and a high YTD Churn rate or the rate of which customers unsubscribe or leave. This according to briefing.com, will most likely to affect their Q2 revenue results as the ComScore model had predicted a slight improvement. See MSN article HERE

Possibly in light of the fact that analysts like Zenith Optimedia are predicting that newspaper in 2009 may well see a loss of nearly 12% in print advertisements See HERE the New York Times is once again considering a paid subscription model in order to bring up revenue. NYT Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seemed to suggest to shareholders at its 113th annual meeting Thursday the advertiser-supported online model is not going to change soon. See Both Marketingvox and Adweek covered the story See Adweeks coverage which I quoted from HERE

By Mark Blei compiled by various sources.

Exclusive Dynamic Logic Group on LinkedIn

Mark Blei — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:57:00 +0000

Just a reminder that Dynamic Logic Inc. has a group on LinkedIn. This allows the 20,000,000 members of LinkedIn who choose to join the Dynamic Logic Media Forum access to newsletters, white papers, new product releases and case studies, immediate access to query the team at Dynamic Logic, and a place to discuss media measurement as a whole on an online forum that is exclusively being set up for members of the Dynamic Logic LinkedIn Group.

Plus you get this nifty badge for your profile .

You’re invited to join the Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum Group on LinkedIn. Joining will allow you to find and contact other Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum members on LinkedIn. Other benefits of joining this group are to help members:

Reach other members of Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum
Accelerate careers and business through referrals from Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum Group members
Know more than a name – view rich professional profiles from fellow Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum Group members

Here’s the link to join:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36056/6212487BCCC2

Look forward to seeing you there!

Mark Blei

P.S: If you want to link to me personally my LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/markblei

This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in Global Business Development& Marketing for Dynamic Logic Inc and an administrator of this blog and author of this post . None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.

There will be no blog postings until Mid Agust

Mark Blei — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:51:00 +0000

I’ll return from vacation august 11th and resume posting then.

Mark

We are restructuring- reorginizing and making a better blog

Mark Blei — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:17:00 +0000

This blog was started as an internal experiment which took directions that none of us expected. It’s proved a valuable resource, but not so much in the way we thought it would.

So what are we going to do? We’re going to use this device in the way that will most beneficially effect the vast majority of the people who are actually using it. That means I’m going to take a break from posting on it until we can retool it to serve our and your needs better.

Is it going away? Nope, not that I know of. It’s just going through a rehab and come back in a different and better form. Keep checking back and or sign up for the free email updates from Feed burner over in the side bar. You can unsub anytime you like and we don’t keep any sort of record of who’s subbed or not so no unsolicited mail will come your way.

What if I want to get mail updated from you?- Great we would love to keep you updated on our goings on, take your browser over to the Dynamic Logic web page at http://www.dynamiclogic.com and go subscribe to our Beyond the Click Newsletter

And if you have a jones for some good media based Blogging then head on over to Nigel Hollis’s great Blog HERE Nigel is the Chief Global Analyst of Millward Brown the Parent company of Dynamic Logic .

Look forward to seeing you upon our return!

Mark Blei
Global Business Development
Dynamic Logic Inc. a Millward Brown Company

Real Advertising in 2008?

Mark Blei — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:04:00 +0000

.
By Mark Blei

While looking at my Blogroll today I noticed that Giles Rhys Jones of Ogilvy London had been over taking a peak. Giles has a really excellent blog himself called Interactive Marketing Trends that I highly recommend. As bloggers are wont to do, I scanned over some of his content and found two great clips, one of them a funny little clip about WPP which I would post but won’t for fear my boss will steal my shoes when I’m wondering off for coffee, and then I caught this great video that was done by a group called Improv Everywhere.

Which Giles said and I agree was a great example of what he calls “real advertising” and compared it to the Sony Bravia Ad recently . It’s interactive clips like this that also bring the audience into the making of it, and by showing the crowd reaction from the perspective of the makers of the film, make it even more engaging to the viewer as they feel like they are part of the process of the creation of the art and less a passive viewer.

He also pointed out that 2008 could be the year that this new field of reality advertisement takes hold, which Giles postulates and I agree is a great way to spread both WOM and Viral advertising and shows how people can use sites like YouTube as a vehicle for their advertisement and both entertain and keep viewers engaged and looking for more.

Well done Giles! My curiosity however is peaked, and I must ask what Nick at Dartington meant when he commented on the WPP clip’s relevancy being due to the fact that he actually had an exotic dancer on stage recently.

Tell Nick to call me about any openings he might have in whatever department requires exotic dancers. I’m obviously in the wrong end of this industry .

This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in Business Development for Dynamic Logic Inc and the author of this blog. None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.

Now Microsoft Wants To Be In The Advertising Business Because Google Is In The Advertising Business.Or How I Woke Up To Realize That Googles PW3NES Me

Mark Blei — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:50:00 +0000

By Mark Blei

Microsoft wants to be in the advertising business because Google is in the advertising business. Meanwhile, it can’t do its real job.

Thats the part of John Dvorak’s latest post on PC magazine’s website that grabbed hold of me. How much suckage are we forced to take from Microsoft’s bureau of paranoia before we start to demand better service from our providers? And are we in fact on the Vista Death Watch ?

I or anyone who had the experience of buying a PC when Microsoft ME (or as it’s better known “The Mistake Version“) was the standard OS that was coming with new computers would say yes, and gladly.

Bitter me? Why yes I am thanks- I still recall the glee I had when buying my first real powerhouse PC with what was in 2000 was mind crushing speed and more Gigs of space then any human could ever conceive of using ( that would be all of 46 gigs, with my current Itunes collection in 2007 now at a conservative 270 gigs, ). I now have USB disks with more gigs then that original computer but when I bought it she was the dream system of any Griefer Gamer, Troll, or your average PC nerd. Imagine my horror when I took this other-worldy PC (which I think was also the first time I ever spent more then $50 online ) out of its box to find that the OS on it was a horrible mess of bad reg codes, wizards that popped for no reason, drives that would never see a full defrag and and Genuine ME identification codes that Microsoft wouldn’t accept as valid.

Microsoft ME has the distinction of being the cause of first time I was ever happy to get a Dell product that failed to work out of the box. Why? Because it gave me the opportunity to beg and plead with the folks at Dell to “downgrade” me to Windows 2000, which they did and for which I’m very grateful and which worked fine on my computer for near 7 years without ever giving me a BSOD notice and made me a Dell loyal customer to this day. By the way, I’m still using that box today and have XP on it so my kids can play the latest Sims. Part of me still wants to go and toss off XP and reinstall the Win2K on that system ..just in case.

Anyway, the benefit of Dell granting me the favor of “downgrading” me to the most stable version of Windows ever produced meant that by the time I was forced to buy a new box and move to XP, XP had time to get through it’s growing pains and I did not have to go through the pre-security package nonsense. If you ask me Vista is and should be another doomed MS product.

Quoting Dvorak

So what went wrong with Vista in the first place? Let’s start off with the elephant in the room. The product was overpriced from the outset. Why was it so expensive? What was special about it? All the cool and promised features of the original vision of Longhorn were gutted simply because it was beyond Microsoft’s capability to implement those features.
This failure to deliver what was promised—even after several delays in the product’s release, by the way—did nothing to excite anyone. It made the company look bad. It directly resulted in a no-confidence vote that was manifested in a lackluster reception and low sales. Microsoft should have scrapped the project two years ago and instead patched XP until it could deliver something hot.
To make things worse, there are too many versions. Exactly what is the point of that? Don’t we all just want Vista Ultimate? The other versions seem like a way to maybe save money for some users who cannot afford to get the real thing. You can be certain this version glut results only in complaints about what each variation is missing.
Microsoft’s initial approach to marketing this turkey was obviously going to be to put it on just new machines, which would eventually saturate the market, but the PC manufacturers squawked and demanded the continuation of XP sales. Though there is some chatter about how Linux could use this lull in the Microsoft juggernaut to make some real headway onto the desktop, this is unlikely to happen. But Microsoft, with all its paranoid thinking, might have believed it to be possible. So XP is still with us and will be until deep into next year.
I should mention here that much of this mess, I strongly believe, is due to Microsoft’s recent obsession with Google and online search. Now Microsoft wants to be in the advertising business because Google is in the advertising business. Meanwhile, it can’t do its real job

Read the rest of this great article HERE.

And while we’re on the subject of The Microsoft Google Cluster…

Google managed apparently to slip one by almost the entire universe the other day when they rolled out IMAP support on their popular mail product. Do not mistake me IMAP is not in and of itself a bad thing. The roll-out however happened in such a way that many of us found out that Imap was a supported system when for many of us our gmail stopped downloading from the POP Interface and was suddenly defaulted to the IMAP supported one. It was weird..I woke up yesterday morning to discover that 2 of my gmail accounts stopped popping,gmail which was up until yesterday actually my most dependable service provider and suddenly started working with all the grace of Joe Cocker after a Brain embolism . They all stopped forwarding, and they all were on the newer version.

IMAP is great but creates an issue if you work with more than one account that is POP oriented. I have two primary accounts that I use and then some sub-accounts that I use for subscriptions, blogs etc..I have many accounts that I own through Godaddy that POP, and suddenly two of my three gmail accounts decide they don’t like POPing anymore and want to be an IMAP account.

The havoc that this creates is when you’re trying to view both POP and IMAP mail. Outlook or at least the 2003 version of it that I use won’t allow you to view them both or mix the inboxes, so you end up having to tab through both the accounts which if you don’t remember to do can get you into some trouble.

Gmail is supposedly offering to allow people to use the old POP supported system but I spent most of last night trying to get that to work after deciding that the IMAP migration was one I would prefer to avoid. Eventually Gmail agreed to start popping again , after I downloaded the GMail Pop Troubleshooter application which kindly caused my Outlook to have a seizure and took an hour to rebuild itself, and at last update of this post which was updated at 3:00PM the last two hurdles to getting popping back was two updates from Microsoft that caused my Genuine Advantage Validation thingy to die, and then as a last kiss before giving me back control of my system Gmail insisted on re-downloading every email I have ever gotten on this machine duplicated 27 times. Thats 6000 emails times a factor of 27 bringing my total deletions by the end which I mercifully hope will be today (because gmail is where I have my work email forwarded to when I’m not in the office in New York and I’m not in NY much these days) to a modest 162,000 em
ails, which is more than enough to kill Outlook permanently if I’m not fast on the delete.

It seems to me that in the end Google’s going to make it hard for you not to IMAP .It’s supposedly part of their new Social Networking strategy (I’ll simply be happy if this new network doesn’t argue with me in Portuguese, about why my countries politics are flawed anymore). Hey man , you don’t have to tell me why my country is flawed. I’m married to a Canadian- if I want to hear about why my country is so flawed I only have to sit down for dinner.

Regardless, I prefer more choice in my Gmail but this is what you get when you buy into free unlimited email.

Remember, with Gmail you’re not a Google customer, you’re using a free Google product under their terms and they own you. For those of you who are dependent on a gmail free account for your primary email the question is- are you ready to migrate all those accounts you have spread through the web and are now your primary account because Google wants you to IMAP and you want to POP?

I just want to add that the irony is not lost on me that as I write this Fear Of a Black Planet started kicking on my Itunes ( it’s 5Am on a Thursday, what did you expect Chopin?) I remember all the discussions about possible theories of what life would be like under the rule of our new Google overlords . Should we be in Fear of a Google Planet? Frankly I’m more afraid of a Microsoft based planet OS then a Google one. At least a Google world would be more secure and Google doesn’t yet seem like they aim to lay claim to any of my media rights, and that’s certainly been an issue with Vista as well . I suppose all except the media which I get from YouTube or Google Video but I don’t view those as mine really- it’s theirs for as long as they choose to lend it to me.

So now the question I ask is -Can the brand that is you withstand an email address change? 10 years ago that question would have been a joke but now it’s a deadly serious question . So what is your answer…are you going to change your primary email address or are you going to learn to IMAP?

Thats right baby- we are all PW3ND by Google and we walked right into it, so you might as well just roll with it because if you are at all Gmail reliant you are already on the train .

This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in International Business Development for Dynamic Logic Inc and the author of this blog. None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.

Facebook has started banning people for using pseudonyms

Mark Blei — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:16:00 +0000

By Mark Blei

Facebook banned political satirist Jon Swift for doing what writers have been doing for centuries- using a pen name .

Given the rash of people who have been fired for having had their employers see pictures,opinions or content of them that are less then flattering, Facebook had better look at giving people more privacy options as opposed to less. People with a well-known industry specific name find that it is important to have a Facebook presence for social networking reasons, and also possibly another one for business.

More and more people are drifting away from the more standardized business networking platforms in search of warmer platforms with decent API applications , something Facebook has been innovating. Users should either be allowed to set up accounts in ways that allow them to show specific content to specific groups. I think that you will find that even now , you’re going to have a large percentage of people who have a both public and personal Facebook presence.

Facebook is in the unique position of having an opportunity to not only be a social network but a business network, displacing such mainstays as LinkedIn . Facebook needs to see the possibilities of such a movement and provide appropriate tools for both groups to use the interface.

New Exclusive Dynamic Logic Group on LinkedIn

Mark Blei — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:00:00 +0000

By Mark Blei

Last week Dynamic Logic Inc. was recognized as a group on LinkedIn. This allows the 20,000,000 members of LinkedIn who choose to join the Dynamic Logic Media Forum access to newsletters, white papers, new product releases and case studies, immediate access to query the team at Dynamic Logic, and a place to discuss media measurement as a whole on an online forum that is exclusively being set up for members of the Dynamic Logic LinkedIn Group.

Plus you get this nifty badge for your profile .

Reach other members of Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum
Accelerate careers and business through referrals from Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum Group members
Know more than a name – view rich professional profiles from fellow Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum Group members

Here’s the link to join:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36056/6212487BCCC2

Look forward to seeing you there!

Mark Blei

P.S: If you want to link to me personally my LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/markblei

New Exclusive Dynamic Logic Group on LinkedIn

Mark Blei — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 02:08:00 +0000

By Mark Blei

Today Dynamic Logic Inc. was recognized as a group on LinkedIn. This allows the 20,000,000 members of LinkedIn who choose to join the Dynamic Logic Media Forum access to newsletters, white papers, new product releases and case studies, immediate access to query the team at Dynamic Logic, and a place to discuss media measurement as a whole on an online forum that is exclusively being set up for members of the Dynamic Logic LinkedIn Group.

Plus you get this nifty badge for your profile so you can show the other kids how L33T you are!

Reach other members of Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum
Accelerate careers and business through referrals from Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum Group members
Know more than a name – view rich professional profiles from fellow Dynamic Logic Media Measurement Forum Group members

Here’s the link to join:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36056/6212487BCCC2

Look forward to seeing you there!

Mark Blei

P.S: If you want to link to me personally my LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/markblei