SM: Hi, I’m Simon Mainwaring and I’m here at the IVOH Summit , and I have the great pleasure of being here with Mark Woerde who has just written a fantastic book called How Advertising Will Heal the World and Your Business. Advertising seems to be self-serving, yet you’re talking about healing the world and your business. Just to give you a figure, each year 450 billion US dollars are spent on advertising, and we only need 6 billion to get rid of something as stupid as malaria, or 11 billion to stop starvation. That’s a big shift for many advertising professionals. MORE >>

Whether you’re anxious to get started marketing on Facebook, already there but looking for better results, or not sure if Facebook is right for your company (despite the eye-popping audience numbers), you’ll find guidance here in some of the best posts on Facebook marketing so far in 2010: tips, tactics and best practices for building Facebook pages, growing your fan (or “like&# ) base, advertising, optimizing for search, using Facebook apps and tools, and more, from experts like Mari Smith, Lisa Barone, Ching Ya, John Haydon, Brian Carter, Marty Weintraub and Shel Holtz. MORE >>

The following post by Cheryl Burgess ( @ckburgess )  was initially published as a contribution to T he Wharton Future of Advertising Program’s Advertising 2020 Project. Your mind wanders in the silence of the night, and you begin to reflect on how lucky you are to still be a cutting-edge advertiser in a cutthroat world.  Gone will be the days of interrupting consumers’ lives with didactic demands to buy some magical new wonder product. The one-way street model of advertising has never been ideal, but today it’s poised for a precipitous collapse.  MORE >>

It used to be all we had to worry about was advertising, public relations, and direct marketing. If you don’t, buy a social media book (such as Groundswell ) and learn how to set one up. I’ve been reflecting recently on the changes that have happened to the public relations industry in the past few years. We’ve seen more technological advances in the past five years than we’ve seen in the last 50 combined. Then we added websites and email marketing. Now we’re told our websites are about our customers, not about us, so the content has to be revised. MORE >>

T here’s a decades old saying in advertising that bears repeating: “People don’t read ads – they read what interests them. Sure, we all fell in love with the Old Spice guy , and the Most Interesting Man in the World campaign has played on giddy repeat for years. Traditional advertising is less so. Content is more effective than traditional advertising, because: People  seek out  content. Content is the “there, there” (h/t  Mike  and  Kim ) and advertising is the “it happens to be there.” Sometimes it’s an ad.” Sometimes. MORE >>