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As befits a performer whose following is concentrated so much among young people, the campaign to promote Girlfriend, with a budget estimated at $20 million, is focusing on social media like Tumblr and Twitter. Mr. Bieber’s Twitter feed is followed by almost 22.9 million people, and he has close to 44 million “likes” on Facebook.

The new media aspects of the campaign will also touch on the ads appearing in traditional media. For instance, Mr. Bieber is going on Facebook and Viddy, a mobile video sharing service, this week to invite fans to enter a “sing-off” on Tumblr to help create a 60-second television commercial for Girlfriend.

The agency working on media planning for the Girlfriend campaign, Media Kitchen in New York, part of the Maxxcom Global Media division of MDC Partners, also handled those duties for the Someday campaign.

The number of presentations has continued to grow, with over 70 events held this year, according to the firm. The addition of the NewFronts, digital video's attempt to steal some ad dollars from TV budgets, has significantly crowded the calendar.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on upfront events… What's interesting to see is just how useful they are and how much they affect marketers and buyers decisions," said Bob Flood, VP-media consultant at Advertiser Perceptions.

With the end approaching for this year's upfront talks, where networks secure commitments for ad time in the approaching TV season, research firm Advertiser Perceptions asked over 300 marketers, agency executives and media buyers about the dog-and-pony shows that kick off negotiations. More than half -- 61% -- said attending the presentations didn't affect their decisions about allocating ad dollars.

What are the advantages of crowdsourced research? Cost-effectiveness –- Comparatively speaking, crowdsourced research can be done at a fraction of the cost of traditional research. Quick Turn Around –- The time it takes to gather, execute, and analyze is shorter thanks to a purely digital foundation. Flexibility –- As trends emerge in findings, researchers can easily adjust their strategy to catch any shifts or “surprises.” Collaboration –- Crowdsourced research allows brands to collaborate easily with customers to ideate or improve upon products, to test concepts, ads, and experiences, and to continue the conversation over a longer term. Velocity –- Crowdsourced research can travel at the speed of digital, allowing for real-time consumer behavior analysis and insight for new technologies, memes, trends, and conversations. Marketing and Marketing Research –- Even though it’s frowned upon and often times refuted in traditional research, the nature of crowdsourced research implies there will be some form of marketing intertwined as consumers share their stories, insights, and ideas for brands they support.

Crowdtap, which is still in beta, is a tool that fills the gap between traditional research and digital, and helps with insight gathering, customer empowerment and influence. At my company, we use Crowdtap to augment our research activities, especially when time is of the essence (i.e. new business pitches, client presentations, low-budget projects). Brands and agencies can leverage Crowdtap to target questions (polls, discussion topics, and open-ended queries) to a certain demographic profile subscribed to the tool.

Even before a major communication channel comes of age, it is immediately invaded with advertising. And so much media has proliferated in just the last 22 years that it’s mind-boggling to think about it taking us nearly 400 years to emerge from a print-dominated media landscape, and 48 more years to emerge from period of pre-digital platforms such as TV and radio, to finally arrive at the disproportionately short two-decade span where digital now dominates most advertising budgets.

From the moment printing became possible with the invention of the printing press way back in 1440, advertisers began plastering posters on walls and doors within their communities. The first poster ad in English is placed on church doors in London in 1492! Over the next 400 years, ads would find their way into newspapers, magazines, and other print media.

When you allocate that across the 2.4 billion internet-connected persons on the planet, it means there are 417 web pages and 2,502 display ads for each! It's simply bonkers to think pumping more interruptive ads into the internet is going to work. Want some more reasons why? Here, lemme tell you: In 1920, there was 1 radio station. In 2011, there were 14,700. In 1946, America had 12 broadcasting TV stations. In 2011, there were over 1,700. In 1998, the average consumer saw or heard 1 million marketing messages – almost 3,000 per day. It’s even more than that now. Just imagine how many Facebook posts or tweets you scroll past every day. Each of those are messages, and now, oftentimes ads. 

By 2017, 85% of the world will be covered by 3G mobile internet and half will have 4G coverage, according to Sony Ericsson. Three billion smartphone users will contribute to data traffic that's 15 times heavier than today's. For more and more consumers, the most important screen will be the tiny one in their pocket.

To put it bluntly, there needs to be more ad spending on mobile, which now comprises only about 1% of budgets, according to a recent study from the consultancy Marketing Evolution. Based on ROI analyses of smartphone penetration, that figure will be about 7%. In five years' time, that number will need to be in excess of 10%.

USER EXPERIENCE IS THE NEW 30-SECOND SPOT User-experience design is too often thought of as a digital-marketing task, ensuring that website and app development meet and ideally exceed usability standards.

Inside a giant tent at New York’s Lincoln Center in May, Phil Robertson strolls onstage. He’s wearing camouflage pants, wraparound sunglasses, and a solid-black long-sleeve shirt that accentuates his signature beard, which is off-white, unruly, and of ZZ Top proportions. Before him are a multitude of linen-draped tables, where media buyers from advertising companies sip wine, nibble on plantain chips, and listen to yet another pitch on how they should spend their clients’ budgets. This is advertising “upfront” season in New York, and Robertson, a cast member on A+E Networks’ runaway blockbuster reality program Duck Dynasty, is one of the stars of tonight’s show.

The final episode of the show’s third season, which aired on the A&E channel on April 24, was watched by 9.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen (NLSN), beating everything on both cable and broadcast television that night in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic, including the NBA playoffs and Fox’s American Idol.

Upfront season is a festive, testy time of year when every TV network (and, these days, a handful of businesses with large, online video operations such as YouTube (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO)) throws a lavish self-congratulatory party, rolls out its programming lineup for the coming season, and tries to sell ad space in advance. This past season, the proliferation of choices for consumers took a major toll on the traditional broadcast networks, which collectively lost a sizable portion of their viewing audience. “The math says that broadcast erosion is throwing over a billion dollars up for grabs in this year’s upfront,” Berning tells the ad buyers. “If you’re tired of paying a failure tax, we have lots of successful programs for you to invest in.”

Reach: Addressable ads are currently available in up to 42 million households through live TV and video-on-demand. The pool is expected to reach 50 million households by the end of this year.

Measurement: Nielsen is not the currency. Operators typically use Rentrak or Kantar Media for audience measurement.

How it works: Marketers pinpoint their target audiences and create a household profile using data such as income, ethnicity, children in the household and car leases set to expire. They then work with cable operators to determine the number of addressable-enabled households that fit their target and serve commercials to just those homes.

Category: Best Use of Social ($2 million - $4 million) Few marketers, especially beauty brands, have made it their mission to improve their consumers' self-esteem. That's what Unilever brand Dove has done, making inroads since 2004 with its "Campaign for Real Beauty." But a lot can change in a decade. "In 2004 women were fundamentally benchmarking themselves against the images in a magazine," says Cindy Gustafson, managing director of the invention studio at Mindshare. "And in 10 years there's been an incredible seismic shift because of the advent of social media and technology. The fact is this is where women are now taking their self-esteem cues from." Mindshare analyzed 18 million tweets and found that a third of them contained negative beauty or body image content, and women were 50 percent more likely to tweet negatively about themselves. Dove decided to change the conversation and partnered with Twitter for the #SpeakBeautiful campaign, which encouraged women to use social media as a tool for body and beauty in a positive way. Given the image-conscious nature of awards shows, Dove launched #SpeakBeautiful during the Oscars' Red Carpet and published tweets every 30 minutes. It also sent 800 personalized messages to women during the event, hoping to inspire them to send positive messages. The results were impressive: The campaign scored almost 6 million tweets, over 800 million social impressions and reached a unique audience of 13 million. Compared to the Oscars in 2014 there were 30 percent fewer negative tweets and 69 percent more positive tweets about self-beauty. It helped Dove's brand perception, too. Among people who engaged with the campaign, 27 percent had a higher intent to purchase Dove products, according to Nielsen; brand sentiment also increased 17 percent, according to Twitter. —Kristina Monllos

Category: Best International Campaign ($1 million - $5 million) No one can dispute the success or ubiquity of Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign, which substituted the iconic Coke logo with people's names in a bid to personalize their carbonated experience. But how to keep it bubbly? Coke and MediaCom U.K. planted the flag for Year 2 of the campaign in England, giving viewers of Channel 4's 4oD digital catch-up TV platform (now called All 4) a chance to see their own names on bottles—a potential reach of 11 million. Led by Chris Binns, managing partner and head of engineering, MediaCom U.K. latched onto 4oD subscribers' sign-in names to create personalized ads for each viewer, ending the messages with the tagline "Share a Coke With …" followed by the viewer's name on the bottle. In total, the effort generated 4 million dynamically generated, highly personalized TV ads. And 4oD subscribers carried the effort one step further, with many taking to Twitter to register their happiness at seeing their names on the small screen. ("How did the 4oD Coke advert know my name and put in on a can? I'm so confused and happy!" tweeted @remzitomlin.) The effort, says Binns, "delivered that moment to millions of consumers in their own homes, in a natural way while they were doing something they loved [watching TV], rather than … hoping that they would find their bottles on store shelves." Furthermore, campaign awareness in the U.K. rose 17 percent, while ad recall jumped 71 percent and purchase intent gained 24 percent. —Michael Bürgi

Category: Best International Campaign (less than $1 million) To give fashion fans a sneak peek at the Alexander Wang x clothing collection at the department store H&M, media agency UM turned to Twitter as "the key to unlock the mysterious box of Wang." The IPG shop aimed to show fashionistas around the world that its client had the most exclusive apparel from a leading designer, and it built buzz (while downplaying competitors' campaigns) by focusing on bloggers and social media influencers in the high-fashion vertical. First, the client created a literal box that appeared in London's St. Christopher's Place. Curious fans could only view the fashion-forward contents of the box by tweeting the campaign's hashtag, and H&M followed by sending both personalized tweets and images/videos of the Wang items in question to these aficionados. Using this strategy, UM was able to create significant hype around the collection's release, despite having a smaller budget than previous campaigns. UM creative director Marcia Siebers says the campaign was "a direct consequence of our unique relationship with H&M," adding that the live personalization "built anticipation for everyone who got involved" and delivered a unique experience to both those who visited the physical site and those who watched online with "the speed that our fashionista customers demand." The campaign led to a 32 percent increase in positive mentions among influencers when compared to the client's preceding launch. It also facilitated a 179 percent monthly bump in Twitter mentions, with 80 percent of users tweeting about the collection more than once. Most significantly, all six London H&M stores sold out of the collection within 24 hours. —Patrick Coffee