Lots of interesting things for Brand Managers and Marketers to keep an eye on these days in the world of digital.  Here are just a few of things that I found interesting in recent weeks:

Massive teams with ComScore to verify how well in-game ads work: Now can argue that gaming is big business.  And in recent years, advertising in video games has started to become big business as well.  Now two of the industry leaders will try to fuel that growth by connecting the ads that consumers see in games with the actions they take to buy or view products and services afterward.

Location is everything – Foursquare API is proof: API is a term that is often misunderstood in marketing circles.  But you can make the case that a large part of Twitter’s success was because it opened up its API.  The same could soon be true for Foursquare, especially for businesses & brands where location has always been extremely important.

25 things you need to know to become a New Media Mogul: Great points from Ken Auletta, author of “Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.”  I’m personally trying to take these points to heart, especially my favorites of:

• #1 – Passion Wins
• #14 – Digital is Different
• #19 – Paradox: The web forges both niche communities and large communities

The future of gaming – 5 social predictions: After Electronic Arts (EA) purchased social gaming company Playfish, Mashable took a stab at predicting what the combination of video gaming and social gaming might mean.

1. There Will Be More Social Gaming Acquisitions
2. EA Will Find New Ways to Monetize Social Gaming
3. Virtual Goods Will Become Even Bigger Business
4. You Will See a Wave of Social Gaming on the Console
5. EA and Others Will Make Even Stronger Moves on Mobile

Lots happening in the world of digital and I have been negligent in sharing the news / posts that really caught my eye lately.  So with that, here’s my latest weekly (better called monthly) update:

Breathing New Life Into Virtual Worlds – PR 2.0:  Virtual World membership grew by 39% in the second quarter of 2009 to an estimated 579 million with Youth driving most of that growth.

Four Questions for Successful CPG Social Media Marketing:  Great post from the Google CPG Blog, which is a must read if you don’t subscribe to it.

Why Teens Don’t Tweet:  Only 16 percent of Twitter users are under 25.  More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

Why We Need Marketing General Contractors – The Toad Stool:  Another great post by Alan Wolk.  I frequently use his term “NASCAR Blindness” and now I think I might be using “Marketing General Contractors” as well.

Best Buy’s CrowdSourced Job Posting is Live:  I’ve said it before, but this is one reason Barry Judge is a CMO that just plain gets where marketing is headed.

6 Lessons from the Best Marketing Campaign Ever – Rohit Bhargava:  At the Cannes Ad Festival this year, a single marketing campaign took home a Grand Prix award in three categories simultaneously–direct, cyber and PR– something that had never happened before in the 50+ year history of the show.  And the campaign was from a Tourism Board…not a Fortune 100 company or brand.

If Twitter had 100 People…:  5% of the people create 75% of the Tweets

While summer is upon us, there is plenty of news happening in the world of Digital Marketing.  Here are some of the articles / pieces of news that jumped out to me in recent weeks:

Team Wins Netflix $1 Million Crowdsourcing Prize:  For several years, Netflix has had an open challenge that whoever improved their recommendation engine by 10% would win a prize of $1 million dollars.  This has always been one of my favorite examples of Crowdsourcing in business and it looks like someone is finally going to claim the prize.

Panera Adds Community Service:  I love the simplicity of MeetAtPanera.com.  It’s a easy way for Panera to deliver brand utility by allowing people to set up a meeting at Panera.

Online Advertising hits a rough patch, while Google and Digg release new ad units:  With the economy putting a pinch on advertising, digital marketers will need to turn to innovation to win new ad dollars.  Google and Digg are doing just that with the introduction of new ad units that give interesting options to Brand Marketers.

Dunkin Donuts Creates Innovative Facebook Campaign:  I love this campaign by Dunkin Donut to its fans into brand advocates.  Simple, straightforward…and effective promotional campaign.

Five Leaders in YouTube Marketing:  Lots of brands are trying to figure out how to best use YouTube for their marketing efforts.  While this post highlights 5 examples, Home Depot is far and away my favorite example.

Facebook Talks about Payments Across the Web:  Micropayments continue to gain traction and Facebook Connect is appearing on more and more sites.  Combine these two things and Facebook might be onto something very interesting as it explores ways to build revenue.

Ever since I added the delicious “What I Am Reading Lately” widget to Hard Knox Life, I have been slacking on writing Weekly Round-Ups as actual blog posts.  I wanted to take the chance to see if people actually miss these posts or if I should just keep using the widget.  Any thoughts from my readers?

In the meantime, here are the posts from around the blogosphere that caught my attention:

• Can a NFL Team reach the Super Bowl with a simple brand logo change? – Over at EyeCube, Rick Liebling changes this very question from the WSJ.  If there is any truth to this, I really hope the Bengals hire a new design agency fast.
• David Armano has a killer job in Amersterdam – Adidas has formed a new type of agency backed by Critical Mass and RIOT, leading to the hunt for a Social Media Director.  Here’s the job description: “The Social Media Director is part strategist, part director, part sports enthusiast and will lead a team of seeders and conversationalists who will actively participate in various forms of social media on behalf of RIOT’s adidas client.”  Sounds like a killer job to me.
• Hey companies, where are your iPhone Apps – That pretty much sums it up.  Companies need to wake up to these mobile opportunities for brand building.   And oh yeah 500 million iPhone apps have already been downloaded.
• Peter Kim writes a manifesto for Social Business to get off their ass – It’s not quite Jerry Maguire style of “who’s coming with me” but Peter Kim makes a good point when he says the blogosphere is lacking original content lately and that “the reverb in the echo chamber has become deafening.”  I might not be helping with the Weekly Round-Up post but Peter’s words are ones we all need to read.
• Brands that Twitter: A Complete List – This has to be the most comprehensive list I have seen of brands using Twitter.  Though they did miss my guys at Tag Records.  I also liked the Mashable in-depth look at 40 brands on Twitter.

As I was catching up on my RSS reading, two posts by Seth Godin and Fred Wilson really caught my attention as inspiration for the New Year.

In the first, Seth Godin posed the question, “Do ads work?” In particular, Seth is asking about digital ads where he feels the mindset of marketers should be “We have an unlimited budget for ads that work.“  In his own words:

Digital ads are different (or they should be). You should know cost per click and revenue per click and be able to make a smart guess about lifetime value of a click. And if that’s positive, buy, buy, buy.  And if you don’t know those things, why are you buying digital ads?

Seth goes on to give the example of Amazon during the Dot Com boom of the late ’90’s.  He says that during this time, the mantra at Amazon was $33. “They would buy unlimited ads, of any kind, as long as they generated new customers for $33 or less each.” Was $33 too high of a number to be sustainable?  Possibly.  But their internal ROI showed that $33 was the magic number and there was unlimited money to buy ads under that figure.

In other words, don’t use the excuse that you don’t have the budget.

Any idea that you have proven will build your sales and share should be invested in…and it should be invested in at the expense of ads that aren’t proven.

In the second thought-provoking post, Fred Wilson talked about creating a great business team in “Putting the Band Back Together.” Fred has noticed that as times get tough, many successful serial entrepreneurs are rejoining people they have worked with in the past.  Or as he puts it, “they are getting the band back together for awhile.”  Fred sees this as an encouraging sign because:

Teams that have worked together successfully before know the strengths and weaknesses of each other and they know how to get along, make hard decisions, and move the ball forward each and every day.

I think this is a brilliant insight and one that most businesses don’t think about often enough.  Think about your own brand team at work.  How long has the most junior person been on the team?  Or how long have the most senior members worked together?  What about your agency?  Have the same people been on the account as long as the Brand Manager or Marketing Director?  I’d be willing to bet that there has been considerable change over on both sides.

I think more brands need to follow the advice of Fred and “get the band back together.” 

If you have a successful brand and agency team, then practice continuity and keep them working together.

Business is a game of teamwork and it takes time to develop good working relationships.  In sports, All Star games are boring because the best players don’t practice together every day.  So when you throw them together, they don’t know how to work together.  Just look at what happened to the USA “Dream Team” in 2002 – 2004 when we lost to teams that had played together for years.

The same thing might be happening to your brand when you change the players every year.