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Social shopping is a buzzword that has been gaining momentum over the past few years, but just what does it entail?

What is Social Shopping?

Social shopping is the combination of social media and e-commerce. In essence, it is taking all of the key aspects of the social web -- friends, groups, voting, comments, discussions -- and focusing them on the world's favorite activity -- shopping -- to create social shopping.

Social shopping can take on many forms like ThisNext, a social network devoted to shopping, or ProductWiki, a wiki devoted to product reviews and price comparisons. The common denominator is you. Instead of just looking at some Nine West pumps or some Ed Hardy T-shirts, you are actively participating by voting on the best style or writing reviews.

What is social shopping? It is like bringing your friends with you on the web while you shop.

What Are the Benefits of Social Shopping?

Social shopping beats old-fashioned web shopping because it brings all types of products into one place. No more skipping around from site to site searching for that hard-to-find item.

Social shopping also has advantages even over going to an actual store to shop. With social shopping, you are one click away from comparing prices, and you can easily find out what other people are saying about that Fossil watch or that Alexis Bittar necklace.

Best of all, it's fun. If you like shopping, then you will love social shopping.

I'm Convinced. Lead Me to the Essential Social Shopping Sites

Convinced? Try out some of these social shopping websites:

MyItThings. A fashion magazine created by the community, MyItThings goes beyond social shopping by giving you a virtual closet to show off what you have bought.

ProductWiki. A wiki centered around product reviews and price comparisons, every social shopper should have ProductWiki saved as one of their favorite bookmarks.

View the entire list of essential social shopping sites.

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What is Social Shopping and What Are the Benefits?

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Social shopping is a buzzword that has been gaining momentum over the past few years, but just what does it entail? Social shopping is the combination of social media and e-commerce. In essence, it is taking all of the key aspects of the social web -- friends, groups, voting, comments, discussions -- and focusing them on the world's favorite activity -- shopping -- to create social shopping.

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An article about the impact of social media on advertising led by individuals.

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Pretty product pictures have spawned a social shopping frenzy. These sites prove social shopping is not just a fad.

PCMag reviews products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use.

With the help of Pinterest, which now integrates browsing and shopping features, social shopping has progressed from a fad to a legitimate way of buying online.

Mainstream marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Newegg, and dozens of retailer sites are our go-to online shopping destinations. Rather than spending a day walking around a mall, many people now spend hours on visually pleasing product sites that make wish-listing easy and rewarding.

The Wordless Web of Pretty Pictures and Social Reassurance
Social shopping sites integrate social aspects, such as product sharing and front-facing user engagement. But social shopping as we know it today wasn't always as straightforward. A mere five years ago social shopping usually meant a brand had a Facebook page, Twitter handle, and sharing buttons on their retail website. Now it's much more.

Social shopping fills a fundamental desire for social interaction and decision reassurance, and helps you mitigate the isolation inherent to most online activities. For many, shopping from a screen simply isn't as rewarding as walking into a store and making a purchase, so social shopping aims to recreate the best parts of in-store shopping.

At a social shopping site, you browse product feeds curated specifically for you, and the process of collective shopping helps to reaffirm and guide your purchase decisions.

Social shopping sites are constantly launching in the hopes of becoming the Next Big Thing. But the most successful ones don't actually make social buying aspects prominent, focusing instead on making shopping seem fun and buying and sharing seem natural. Shopping sites fall into informal categories based on their product offerings, including one-stops-shops such as Fab.com or fashion-based stores such as Polyvore. Certain social shopping sites create unique ways of combining social buying with online shopping but do not fall into any specific category, such as Ownza.com. Here's our list of the top 10 social shopping sites right now.
Continue Reading: Wanelo to Fab>

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Pretty product pictures have spawned a social shopping frenzy. These sites prove social shopping is not just a fad. PCMag reviews products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use.

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An article about the impact

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Pretty product pictures have spawned a social shopping frenzy. These sites prove social shopping is not just a fad.

PCMag reviews products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use.

With the help of Pinterest, which now integrates browsing and shopping features, social shopping has progressed from a fad to a legitimate way of buying online.

Mainstream marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Newegg, and dozens of retailer sites are our go-to online shopping destinations. Rather than spending a day walking around a mall, many people now spend hours on visually pleasing product sites that make wish-listing easy and rewarding.

The Wordless Web of Pretty Pictures and Social Reassurance
Social shopping sites integrate social aspects, such as product sharing and front-facing user engagement. But social shopping as we know it today wasn't always as straightforward. A mere five years ago social shopping usually meant a brand had a Facebook page, Twitter handle, and sharing buttons on their retail website. Now it's much more.

Social shopping fills a fundamental desire for social interaction and decision reassurance, and helps you mitigate the isolation inherent to most online activities. For many, shopping from a screen simply isn't as rewarding as walking into a store and making a purchase, so social shopping aims to recreate the best parts of in-store shopping.

At a social shopping site, you browse product feeds curated specifically for you, and the process of collective shopping helps to reaffirm and guide your purchase decisions.

Social shopping sites are constantly launching in the hopes of becoming the Next Big Thing. But the most successful ones don't actually make social buying aspects prominent, focusing instead on making shopping seem fun and buying and sharing seem natural. Shopping sites fall into informal categories based on their product offerings, including one-stops-shops such as Fab.com or fashion-based stores such as Polyvore. Certain social shopping sites create unique ways of combining social buying with online shopping but do not fall into any specific category, such as Ownza.com. Here's our list of the top 10 social shopping sites right now.
Continue Reading: Wanelo to Fab>

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Pretty product pictures have spawned a social shopping frenzy. These sites prove social shopping is not just a fad. PCMag reviews products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use.

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Ad agency Jung von Matt/Neue Elbe and directing duo Alex & Steffen stage an orgy of CGI insanity, referencing various effects-driven fantasy blockbusters from the past 20 years, in this lighthearted yet heart-pounding German spot branding Fanta as "The official sponsor of FANTAsy." When a giant Transformers-type cyber-terror lays siege to a desert castle, a pro wrestler gets catapulted into the fray, bouncing harmlessly off the bot's metal hide, and a plucky princess slides down a saurian's back to save the day. Turns out the action-superbly staged and worth several viewings-is taking place in the imagination of a little girl at a family picnic. The intricate sandcastle they've built sits nearby, its parapets manned by action figures. Some might say it's a sad commentary that a kid's imagination is fueled by soda-pop-culture/Hollywood hype, though in our media-saturated age, this seems about right, and the melee she envisions provides more thrills than most mega-budget flicks can manage. Good thing they didn't probe her brother's imagination. That little devil would've used the robot to conquer the world and hogged all the Fanta for himself!

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Fanta Defeats the Robotic Forces of Evil in Child's Sweet CGI Dreams

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Ad agency Jung von Matt/Neue Elbe and directing duo Alex & Steffen stage an orgy of CGI insanity, referencing various effects-driven fantasy blockbusters from the past 20 years, in this lighthearted yet heart-pounding German spot branding Fanta as "The official sponsor of FANTAsy."

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Can I go on a date with an Assassin or an Astronaut. Thanks. I love this site.

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Do you find yourself wishing your dates were like romance novels?

If so, you might enjoy BBDO Toronto's latest ads for Canadian romance publisher Harlequin Books, which match a pair of contemporary women with two fictional objects of desire-a cowboy and a Viking. Their nights on the town were filmed with hidden cameras to capture the authentic reactions of unsuspecting folks nearby.

First, let's check in on a nearly 7-foot-tall rugged stud from way up north ... and we don't mean Saskatoon. He's a Viking, who takes his date to a bowling alley, of course:

Hey, did you see him mow down those pins! Judging from his companion's face-sucking reaction, he won't be striking out later on back at the ol' ... condo? Or wherever Vikings live these days.

"It was really all about how to leverage the most exciting element of the brand experience-the Harlequin heartthrobs-in the most provocative way," Chris Booth, BBDO associate creative director, tells Adweek. "We stumbled across the idea of bringing the readers' fantastical experience with the book to the real world."

As for the broader strategy, "the core readership for Harlequin is women 40 and up from medium-sized towns in middle America," he says. "They spend a relatively smaller amount of time online, but are engaged with social networks and love to share. So keeping our execution simple in terms of interactivity was important. Video is easy to consume and easy to share, so it was the natural answer."

Next, fresh from the dusty trail, an amorous cowboy transports his date to a trendy restaurant atop his trusty stallion. (Guess they don't have Ubers out on the range.)

Those chaps! That lariat! Our lovebirds are in for a wild ride back at the ol' corral. Eeeeha!

"Both women are actors with strong improv backgrounds," says Booth. "So, while there was a framework and loose script for their roles, they had a lot of freedom to ad-lib and make the characters their own. They did such an incredible job of contributing so many additional moments of humor."

Indeed, these ads are amusing, if a bit counterintuitive. Aren't readers supposed to escape into wonderful, wicked worlds with Harlequin, not incorporate goofy elements from the books into their ordinary lives? (Actually, casting Fabio as a burly buccaneer taking his gal to see a pirate movie at the local multiplex would've rocked. Yarr!)

Also, the spots, which are a follow-up to last year's "Romance When You Need It" campaign, seem a tad tame-but there was a reason for that.

"It was incredible at the cowboy shoot how respectful people were trying to be," Booth recalls. "We kept having our actors doing more and more ridiculous things to generate reactions, but leave it to polite Canadians to try not to stare or look too much."

CREDITS
Client: Harlequin Enterprises
Creative Director, Romance Fiction: Tony Horvath
Senior Director of Marketing, Series & Digital Publishing: Farah Mullick
Director, Romance Publicity & Events: Michelle Renaud
Brand Manager, Retail Marketing: Beth Witkowski

Agency: BBDO Toronto
SVP, Executive Creative Director: Denise Rossetto
SVP, Executive Creative Director: Todd Mackie
VP, ACD, Art Director: Joel Pylypiw
VP, ACD, Copywriter: Chris Booth
Broadcast Producer: Tracey Azzopardi
Account Director: Paul Forrest
Account Supervisor: Zach Kula

Production Company: Circle Productions
Executive Producer: Andria Minott
Director: Timothy Hamilton
DOP: Doug Koch
Producer: Erica Parks
PM: Warren Milando

Post House: Saints Editorial
Executive Producer: Stephanie Hickman
Editor: Stephen Sora

Audio House: Grayson Matthews
Producer: Kelly McCluskey

Casting: Shasta Lutz, Jigsaw Casting

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Harlequin Brings Its Romance-Novel Hunks Into the Real World, With Hidden Cameras Rolling

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Do you find yourself wishing your dates were like romance novels? If so, you might enjoy BBDO Toronto's latest ads for Canadian romance publisher Harlequin Books, which match a pair of contemporary women with two fictional objects of desire-a cowboy and a Viking.

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The latest version of the World Cup of Hockey has meant the return of this competition 12 years after it was last played, with ESPN's coverage of the games featuring NHL players, and USA coach John Tortorella's outspoken approach to a number of issues on and off the ice. The World Cup of Hockey has also introduced a novel concept that could fundamentally change sports sponsorship. ESPN, which has exclusive rights to the two week tournament, has been using "fancy CGI" ads that cover up the logos of corporate partners on the dasher boards around the ice with their own logos of television partners during game broadcasts.

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) ads with partner logos are not new in sports, and especially when it comes to hockey. Several broadcasts have used CGI logos behind the glass of the nets and sometimes there are specific dasher boards that are left blank for CGI logos and/or dynamic signage that changes throughout the game. However, the idea of replacing the logos seen by fans in the arena with different logos seen by television viewers is a new activation.

The positive to these CGI logos is that they provide broadcast partners with new revenue streams. Media partners often feature the dasher boards prominently throughout their hockey broadcasts. Yet, the partners make little if any revenue from displaying these ads. In virtually no other advertising channel would displaying ads result in that little revenue for a broadcast partner. Being able to use CGI ads would enable media partners to monetize this television viewable signage while still enabling teams, leagues, and / or events to sell the dasher boards to advertisers to gain exposure to fans in the arenas.

However, hockey teams often use the television viewable signage as a vital activation element for a partner purchasing a dasher board. In particular, corporate partners looking to maximize brand awareness and exposure buy dasher boards from teams specifically because these boards are frequently viewable during broadcasts. If that is no longer the case, then hockey teams may have a much more difficult time selling their dasher board inventory.

CGI ads will likely not only impact hockey. Basketball, baseball, and golf are among the sports where media viewable signage is a major source of corporate partnership revenue. However, media partners may start to demand the ability to use CGI signage to help increase the profitability of sports broadcasts given the prices they are paying to broadcast games.

This outcome can be viewed as a feature instead of a bug of the system. More specifically, there has been a concern in the sports industry that fans will not continue to pay for increases to their cable, satellite or telco provider to see sports broadcasts. Therefore, sports properties need to need provide avenues for broadcasts partners to monetize their investment to increase or maintain rights fees in the future. Having CGI ads provides that opportunity.

This does not mean that dasher board or signage near the playing surface will not be valuable. Thousands of fans in venues across the world will still be able to see these signs throughout the entirety of competition (often two hours or more at a time). Sports properties can still sell dynamic signage that changes logos that are visible to the fans in the venue. Being able to advertise to fans in an environment that often enhances a company's brand perception is usually one of the primary goals of corporate partners.

However, increasingly the largest revenue stream for sports properties are their media rights deals. Creating new revenue streams for media partners during game broadcasts is in the best interest of sports partners and broadcast partners. Use of CGI ads is one interesting way to achieve this goal that needs to be examined by teams, leagues, and events going forward.
Adam is the CEO and Founder of Block Six Analytics. He is also a lecturer for Northwestern University's Masters of Sports Administration and the co-author of The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders For A High-Performance Industry

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ESPN Changes Sports Advertising Signage With CGI During World Cup Of Hockey

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The latest version of the World Cup of Hockey has meant the return of this competition 12 years after it was last played, with ESPN's coverage of the games featuring NHL players, and USA coach John Tortorella's outspoken approach to a number of issues on and off the ice.

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Basically a good start that may help form some ideas.

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This might be able to help you identify an area of focus.

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Digital advertising has a lot of potential. When done correctly, this type of outreach initiative can help drive plenty of qualified traffic to your website and increase conversions for your brand. However, if digital ads are created poorly and without the right optimization, they can be a waste of budget and time.

Digital advertising is not something that fits into the "one size fits all" category. There are tons of different platforms, channels and segments that make up the online ad space. You could be serving targeted customers with an ad as they scroll through their Facebook newsfeed, or re-targeting website visitors when they consume content on a news outlet later that day. That being said, although each type of digital advertising channel has unique attributes that should always be considered, there are several simple, yet effective techniques that could help improve results and are easy to implement.

1. Limit ad text.

It's tempting to use a lot of copy in your online ads. Seemingly, a lot of brands believe that providing the user with as many details as possible would result in more users clicking on the ads and eventually converting on your website; however, this typically isn't the case. Too much copy can easily bombard the user and distract them from the real message that your ads are trying to convey. Generally speaking, users don't want to read a lot of text-they want the simplest experience possible. The most successful digital ads are usually concise and succinct while still displaying a clear value proposition.

2. Switch up your call-to-action.

What's the goal of your ad? Whether you're trying to drive potential customers to your website to learn about a particular service or encourage users to buy a product, you need a strong call-to-action built into the creative of your ad.

Since the media is already oversaturated and users have become familiar with near-constant promotions on a daily basis, a good way to help your brand stand out is with a CTA that is out-of-the-box and not exactly "the norm." Using a CTA such as learn more or buy now isn't very compelling and isn't unique to a certain industry-it's quite generic. Leveraging creativity and simply switching the language you use for your CTA to something more enticing can really pay off.

3. Personalize ads as much as possible.

For most digital-ad platforms, especially with retargeting, leveraging list segmentation can be incredibly beneficial. You don't want to serve the same exact ad to a wide audience, or it won't be likely to resonate well. Instead focus on who the users are that you're targeting and what captures their interest.

If you think about this logically, it should come as no surprise that ads with a bit of personalization can reap greater results than a generic ad. If website visitors scanned through your product pages, looked at your outerwear products and then left your site, serving them with an ad that showcases winter coats, scarves or gloves is likely to be much more effective than serving them with an ad that showcases all of your products or simply is an image of your logo.

4. Understand the power of landing pages.

As mentioned above, you want to serve users with ads that are relevant to their interests. If you're using retargeting lists and are advertising to customers that viewed a particular product already, the advertisement should click through to that item's landing page-not just your homepage. This makes the user-experience much better and makes it much easier for the user to move further down the funnel, closer to a conversion. Even if you aren't using retargeting, this holds true. Whatever you're advertising for your brand, ads should be directed back to landing pages that house specific information related to each ad.

5. Monitor and edit accordingly.

One of the most important things to remember with digital advertising is the importance of monitoring. Check the performance of your ads on a regular basis to understand what's working and what's not so that you can identify clear areas for improvement, or elements that are generating the best results.

A/B testing is incredibly important with advertising, and should play a role in the approach your brand uses. Is there a certain time of day you serve some campaigns resulting in poor performance? Specific copy or imagery resulting in impressive click-through-rates? Don't be afraid to examine certain campaign elements and optimize or make changes accordingly.

Photo: iStock

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5 Simple Techniques That Might Improve Your Digital Advertising

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Digital advertising has a lot of potential. When done correctly, this type of outreach initiative can help drive plenty of qualified traffic to your website and increase conversions for your brand. However, if digital ads are created poorly and without the right optimization, they can be a waste of budget and time.

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Modern Warfare 2 - Mapathy DLC Infomercial Trailer | HD

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Modern Warfare 2 offers a stimulus package to treat its many users stricken with Mapathy. ORDER the GAME at Amazon: http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B002GHB2OI?ie=UTF8&tag=xboxviewtv-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B002GHB2OI DOWNLOAD the DLC only on Xbox Live Marketplace!

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I'M SHOOK.

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One day this fall, thanks to an Internet rabbit hole I happened to tumble down, I saw an Audi commercial, "Birth," which had come out six months earlier. That's dog years in today's world, so why did this particular ad stop me cold? Because a few days earlier, a somewhat similar commercial, "Fireflies," for Tesla, had been released. And to me, the story of these two spots perfectly defines how the landscape of marketing continues to radically evolve.

Let me back up. Last spring, "Birth" was released by a great agency, working with a terrific production company in "creative consultation" with a hugely successful filmmaker, and was directed by a talented graphics artist who partnered with one of the largest, best effects house in the industry. It is a good car ad, and notable because it was made completely in CG. Plus, the score and SFX are suitably imposing. It got more than 800,000 plus views on YouTube in five months.

But here's the thing. If you don't know the all-CG part, the story isn't very intriguing. The concept is fine-one car giving birth to another-but it certainly isn't deep storytelling; it's two minutes of a visually sexy assembly line that shows off an effects team's capability. Most importantly, it doesn't have a lot to do with Audi. The ad could be for BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Acura, Cadillac, you name it. And I'm guessing it was very expensive to bring to life. Credits via one industry magazine, where it was an Editor's Pick, list 19 creative and production leads (no space to name the worker bees) for the five companies involved in bringing it to life.

That's one highway to take. But I want to applaud a different path-the one taken with "Fireflies." Also an all-CG auto ad, this beautiful, one-minute film was made by a small, nimble production company, ParachuteTV, and was the brainchild of one person: visionary director Sam O'Hare, someone most people in the industry haven't heard of. It was created as a spec spot for the love of the brand. There is a clear story at its heart, brought to life brilliantly and driven home in a smart and strategic way, and it only could have been made for one company: Tesla. And a handful of people touched the entire process-as in, you can pretty much count them on the fingers of one hand.

In a few days, the spot had more than 200,000 views on Vimeo (with zero paid media), was covered by the Huffington Post, Fast Company and many other outlets (including Adweek), and was tweeted about by the founder of TED. A different path for sure.

I'm excited. There's clearly a new direction we should celebrate and explore. One that truly brings directors and production companies into the full creation process (and, heretically, might even allow them to come up with ideas); pushes for interesting ways to collaborate and make things happen for less money; uses film as a means to continue a story that goes beyond the spot; and aims to get an actual message out, one that resonates deeply with an audience who cares about the thing they like more than they care about who brought a commercial to them and how.

To be clear, I'm not saying this new route is the only way, or the best way. I'm just saying it ain't Robert Frost-there isn't one road, there are many. And some of the branches are the ones I want to head down to see where they go. Most likely, they lead to interesting, unexpected places.

So here's to Sam. And the team at Parachute. Thanks for showing us an off-ramp from the highway of just plowing ahead.

Nick Childs (@NickChilds) is the CCO of Initiative.

This story first appeared in the Dec. 14 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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Marketers Should Look Beyond the Dazzle of CGI and Embrace Storytelling

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One day this fall, thanks to an Internet rabbit hole I happened to tumble down, I saw an Audi commercial, "Birth," which had come out six months earlier. That's dog years in today's world, so why did this particular ad stop me cold?

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In 1935, he wrote his first advertisement, for a stove; by 1948 he had formed Ogilvy & Mather, now an international empire with global billings of nearly $8 billion last year and a unit of WPP Group P.L.C.

Along the way he took a series of side roads, from salesman to Pennsylvania farmer to diplomat and pollster, before advertising captured his undivided attention.

''He had a tremendous impact on the business,'' said Allen Rosenshine, the chairman and chief executive of BBDO Worldwide.

He met Mr. Ogilvy only once but refers to his writings as ''a bible of what constitutes good and bad advertising.''

Mr. Rosenshine added, ''He showed that you can approach the art of creativity with a certain amount of science and right-brain thinking.''

Though Mr. Ogilvy prided himself on perfecting the information-laden but painless print advertisements, he was perhaps even more famous for finding the character or symbol that turned a product into a brand, and a brand into a byword.

To that end, his advertisements featured interesting-looking people and symbols, like the Schweppes board member whose bewhiskered Englishness so entranced Mr. Ogilvy that he persuaded him to appear as Commander Whitehead -- the last name was real -- in ads for Schweppes beverages that summed up the product as having ''Schweppervescence.'' (The model for the original ''man in the Hathaway shirt,'' in 1951, was a Russian baron.)

''You cannot bore people into buying your product,'' Mr. Ogilvy once concluded. ''You can only interest them in buying it.''

He created successful campaigns for Shell Oil, Sunoco, Dove soap and Sears, Roebuck as well as for the Puerto Rico Tourist Board and Merrill Lynch.

For Puerto Rican tourism, his approach was to change the image of the island, selling it as a tropical paradise.

He created the first Pepperidge Farm bread commercial in 1956, a campaign he said he literally dreamed up. In his memoir ''Ogilvy on Advertising,'' he told of a dream in which a baker drove his horse-drawn wagon down a country road. The bread commercial used just that script, creating an image of hand-made tradition for a mass-market bread.

In 1959, his agency won the Rolls-Royce account, for which it produced Mr. Ogilvy's favorite campaign. The headline of the print ads read: ''At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.''

This relatively small effort paved the way for other accounts with major billings, like Shell. He later resigned the Rolls-Royce account at a time when he felt that the quality of the cars, which he liked to drive himself, was not up to speed.

A witty, well-traveled sophisticate, Mr. Ogilvy began his working life in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic in Paris soon after cutting short his education at Oxford. The kitchen was run by a quick-tempered Monsieur Pitard, who one day dismissed a junior chef whose bread had not risen properly. Mr. Ogilvy would later note that the chef's hard treatment of the subordinate lifted the morale of the other junior chefs, making them feel that they were working in the best kitchen in the world.

A few years later, he was selling the hulking furnace-like Aga English stoves, door to door in England. He left the company in 1935, but not before writing a sales manual for successive generations. His first advertisement, in fact, was for Aga, and featured a reproduction of Manet's ''Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe,'' an interesting choice since the painting includes a nude, possibly the first to appear in an advertisement for a consumer product, he later said.

''It was a mistake,'' he wrote sternly in ''Ogilvy on Advertising,'' the 1983 installment of a series of books in which he set down his thoughts on the industry. ''Not because it was sexy, but because it was irrelevant to the product.''

David MacKenzie Ogilvy was born June 23, 1911, in West Horsley, England, the youngest child of John and Dorothy Ogilvy. His father, a stockbroker, suffered a financial crisis when David was very young, and the boy attended an Edinburgh public school, Fettes, on a scholarship. He also won a scholarship to study modern history at Christ Church College, Oxford, but was, in his own words, a ''dud'' who could not pass his exams there. He left after just two years.

His first advertising job was with the London agency Mather & Crowther, where his older brother, Francis, worked. For David Ogilvy, advertising became a passion that consumed most of his time. ''I loved advertising,'' he wrote. ''I devoured it. I studied and read and took it desperately seriously.'' In 1938, he persuaded the agency to send him to the United States for a year; at the year's end, he resigned and joined George Gallup's National Research Institute, which he later called ''the luckiest break of my life'' because, he said, he learned a great deal about the United States, its people and its preferences, and because he also learned how to do research, on which he placed great reliance in advertising.

During World War II, Mr. Ogilvy served in British intelligence in the United States from 1942 to 1944; in 1944 he became second secretary at the British Embassy.

After the war, he and his wife moved to Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, where many of the farmers were Amish, to try to make a living raising tobacco. Although they loved the region, he wrote later, it was physically and economically impossible for the Ogilvys to succeed. So in 1948, he set up his advertising agency, with, as he recalled, ''no credentials, no clients and only $6,000 in the bank.''

One advantage he did have was a British accent, which -- clued in to advertising's wiles -- he used to ''differentiate me from the ordinary.''

The tweedy, pipe-smoking Mr. Ogilvy wrote the copy for some of his agency's best-remembered ads. It was he who, almost on a whim, stopped and bought the eye patch that was to become identified with the fortunes of a small shirt company named Hathaway. And it was he who wrote the headline for the Rolls-Royce ad, which he insisted was one of the best ads of all time.

Mr. Ogilvy, not someone with a tendency to underestimate himself, wrote of these early successes, ''I doubt whether any copywriter has ever produced so many winners in such a short period.''

He was an early advocate of so-called long copy advertising, meaning advertising that used many words rather than few, and of what he called factual and informative advertising.

For many years he opposed the use of humor in advertisements or commercials and also long held out against singing commercials in the belief that they did not work.

Besides ''Confessions of an Advertising Man'' (1963), which sold more than 600,000 copies in 11 languages, Mr. Ogilvy also wrote a 1978 autobiography, ''Blood, Brain and Beer.''

''Confessions'' was very much a how-to book, although entertaining enough to appeal to an audience outside the advertising industry. It was stuffed with such crisp maxims for success in advertising as: ''Unless your advertising contains a Big Idea, it will pass like a ship in the night'' and ''Advertising should be true, credible and pleasant. People do not buy from bad-mannered liars.''

One chapter promised to explain ''How to Write Potent Copy,'' and began: ''The headline is the most important element in most advertisements.'' Mr. Ogilvy, a lean, handsome man who retained that crucial British accent all his life, was noted for the literacy of his agency's productions, and he was always interested in star power. At one time, he persuaded Eleanor Roosevelt to appear in a television commercial for margarine. He could be completely hardheaded about advertising's ultimate aim: profit.

''When you advertise in local newspapers,'' he wrote in ''Ogilvy on Advertising,'' ''you get better results if you include the name of each city in your headline. People are mostly interested in what is happening where they live.'' (He once spent $1,300 on ads in his neighborhood newspaper to find his own lost dog. It worked.)

In his chapter on making good TV commercials, he wrote: ''Start selling in your first frame and never stop selling until the last.'' And: ''The purpose of a commercial is not to entertain the viewer, but to sell him.''

He also wrote in ''Confessions'' about his relationship with his clients: ''I buy shares in their company, so that I can think like a member of their family.''

And he said: ''I always use my clients' products. This is not toadyism but elementary good manners. I also resign accounts when I lose confidence in the product.''

A lover of the landscape, he had a lifelong and violent aversion to one form of advertising: the billboard. ''Where every prospect pleases,'' he said, ''man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard.''

Mr. Ogilvy was married three times, first to Melinda Street, then to Ann Cabot and finally to Herta Lans, who survives him. He is also survived by his son by his first wife, David Fairfield Ogilvy of Greenwich, Conn., and by three stepgrandsons. No members of his family remain with the agency.

In writing about himself for the agency's house organ in 1980, he confessed that he was ''candid to the point of indiscretion''; that he had a ''low threshold of boredom,'' and that he was too impressed by physical beauty.

He worked for many causes and cultural institutions, including the New York Philharmonic, the World Wildlife Fund, an antilittering campaign in New York City and the United Negro College Fund. In 1967, Mr. Ogilvy was made a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth, and in 1990 the French Government named him an officer in its Order of Arts and Letters.

Mr. Ogilvy was chief executive of his agency until 1975, when he stepped down and moved to France. He remained active on several boards and as titular head of some Ogilvy operations until recently. In retirement, he worked tirelessly on his gardens; for his 80th birthday the agency presented him with a hybrid rose named David Ogilvy.

In a 1986 interview, when asked what had eluded him in his life, Mr. Ogilvy replied: ''Knighthood. A big family. Ten children.''

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David Ogilvy, 88, Father of Soft Sell In Advertising, Dies

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In 1935, he wrote his first advertisement, for a stove; by 1948 he had formed Ogilvy & Mather, now an international empire with global billings of nearly $8 billion last year and a unit of WPP Group P.L.C.

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Don't let the button-down shirt and the rep stripe tie fool you-Bill Bernbach was an aesthete, not an Establishment Man. The Creative Revolution that Bernbach led-which came to define the 1960s for baby boomers as much as rock 'n' roll did-was about originality in thought and design in service of pushing product.

"The difference between the forgettable and the enduring is artistry" was how Bernbach himself put it.

Before Bernbach (whose 100th birthday would have been Aug. 13), Madison Avenue-and the ads it produced-was Ivy League and WASP. Its preferred method in the '40s and '50s was the boring repetitiveness of the "universal selling proposition" propounded by Ted Bates CEO Rosser Reeves. Art, when used, was expected only to support the drumbeat of the copy-"Melts in your mouth, not in your hand" was a Bates line.

Doyle Dane Bernbach, on the other hand, which Bernbach co-founded in 1949 with partners Mac Dane and Ned Doyle, came to be defined by its ethnicity ("two Jews and an Irishman" went the joke), the freshness of the language it used, and by Bernbach insisting that ads look as striking as they sounded. An oft-cited example-for good reason-is the "Think Small" print ad for the Volkswagen Beetle, in which art director Helmut Krone placed a shrunken photo of the Bug against a vast white background.

Bernbach also pioneered the concept of combining copywriters and art directors into teams of creative equals. Those teams weren't producing art for art's sake. While Bernbach famously rejected his contemporary David Ogilvy 's devotion to data ("I warn you against believing that advertising is a science" is just one of Bernbach's aphorisms on the topic), he wanted his advertising to be efficient. He just thought that indulging the divine spark was the best way to save a buck. "Properly practiced, creativity can make one ad do the work of 10," Bernbach said.

Or maybe that was the best pitch he could come up with to break into categories previously dominated by the Establishment WASP firms. Jewish agencies had long been confined to working with Jewish clients, which meant, for the most part, the Garment District and its retailers. (Bernbach made his reputation in the '40s at the Jewish-owned Grey working on the Ohrbach's department store account.)

Bernbach's message about creativity has lasted longer than the maxims of Reeves or Ogilvy-more than 50 years at this point-and been spread not only through the many agencies built by Doyle Dane Bernbach alumni (e.g., Wells Rich Greene; Grace & Rothschild; Goldsmith/Jeffrey; Papert, Koenig, Lois), but through the long line of creatively driven shops that have dominated the industry since, from Chiat/Day to Wieden + Kennedy.

Oddly, the one place where it's hard to see Bernbach's legacy as clearly is at his old firm, which dispensed with the Doyle Dane Bernbach brand when, after Bernbach's death from leukemia in 1982, it fell on hard times. A merger with Needham Harper and rollup into Omnicom followed; along the way the iconic names were dropped in favor of the anodyne initials DDB. (Meanwhile Ogilvy, whose style Bernbach subsumed and surpassed, still has his name and logo on the agency he founded.)

Bernbach, perhaps, wouldn't have minded, having issued his own warning about what would happen when the revolution burned out. "I fear all the sins we may commit in the name of 'Creativity,'" he once said. "I fear that we may be entering an age of phonies."

1. American Airlines

2. The Volkswagen ad that defined the Bernbach style.

3. The American Tourister chimp; as indelible as any sitcom character.

Continue Reading

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Don't let the button-down shirt and the rep stripe tie fool you-Bill Bernbach was an aesthete, not an Establishment Man. The Creative Revolution that Bernbach led-which came to define the 1960s for baby boomers as much as rock 'n' roll did-was about originality in thought and design in service of pushing product.

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An animated wonderland inside a vending machine. A squirrel-filled dreamworld of stout drinkers chasing the meaning of life. A centuries-old monster infiltrating the modern world to sell the newest of technologies.

Scott Carlson, co-founder (with actor Liev Schreiber) and chief creative officer of boutique New York agency Van's General Store, recently sat down with Adweek for our ongoing "Best Ads Ever" video series. Asked to name his favorite ads, Carlson picked three spots that all have wonderful, fantastical elements to them.

All three are beloved, beautifully crafted spots from major brands. And they all show how inventing richly imagined worlds-and introducing an element of wonder-can take brand storytelling to the next level.

Check out the video for more, as Carlson also tells us about the interesting and varied work Van's General Store has been doing lately, and what inspires him creatively outside advertising.

And see all three of Carlson's best-ads picks in full below.

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Coca-Cola, Guinness, Apple: The Art of Building Fantasy Worlds in Advertising

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An animated wonderland inside a vending machine. A squirrel-filled dreamworld of stout drinkers chasing the meaning of life. A centuries-old monster infiltrating the modern world to sell the newest of technologies. Scott Carlson, co-founder (with actor Liev Schreiber) and chief creative officer of boutique New York agency Van's General Store, recently sat down with Adweek for our ongoing "Best Ads Ever" video series.

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The new Dell ad: it relies on technology to sell technology

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The new Dell ad: it relies on technology to sell technology

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Digital martketing statistics from Adweek that provide some interesting insight into social media's influence on advertising.

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Digital martketing statistics from Adweek that provide some interesting insight into social media's influence on advertising.

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There's been a ton of research come out this week around social media marketing and mobile topics. Check out the eight digital marketing stats this week that grabbed our attention.

1. Snaps first
According to research by student loans company LendEDU, 58 percent of the 9,381 millennials it polled said they typically open up a Snapchat before Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

2. Many, many, many ads
Instagram, the app that Gen Y and Gen Z loves to the tune of 600 million monthly users, now has more than 1 million monthly advertisers and greater than 8 million business profiles on its platform.

3. Older people dig them, too
Well, brands that buy Instagram ads may be effectively targeting an older demo than they would anticipate. Per a report from Influence.co, folks aged 65 through 74 are the group most likely to search out products after seeing Instagram promoted posts. Read more about the study here.

4. Twitter and the tube
Twitter users are 33 percent more likely than the average internet user to be on another device while watching TV, according to new findings from GlobalWebIndex. Check out the study here.

5. Social ads rise
Sixty-one percent of advertisers plan to spend more on Facebook, said ClickZ Intelligence. And the web publisher found that investment in Twitter is expected to increase by more 25 percent.

6. Millions like iHeart
Music app iHeartRadio this week said it has surpassed 100 million registered users, after revealing it had reached 90 million users seven months ago. For comparison, Spotify exceeded 100 million users last summer.

7. Fetching international research
Fetch surveyed over 16,000 adult smartphone owners worldwide and found that Indian consumers are twice as mobile-first in their usage compared to Indonesians. Check out the full global report from the Dentsu-owned company here.

8. March Madness?
Research firm Taykey found that the social media sentiment around the NCAA men's basketball tournament was down 45 percent year over year going into this weekend. UCLA, which plays Kentucky tonight to advance to the Elite 8, has been the most positively discussed and most talked about team, Taykey said.

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8 Digital Marketing Stats From This Week That Caught Our Eye

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There's been a ton of research come out this week around social media marketing and mobile topics. Check out the eight digital marketing stats this week that grabbed our attention. 1. Snaps first According to research by student loans company LendEDU, 58 percent of the 9,381 millennials it polled said they typically open up a Snapchat before Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

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Adweek magazine: targeted at advertising professionals, but interesting reading!

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Adweek magazine: targeted at advertising professionals, but interesting reading!

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TED Talk: Has social media changed the way advertisers use gender demographics?

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TED Talk: Has social media changed the way advertisers use gender demographics?

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Johanna Blakley: Social media and the end of gender

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Media and advertising companies still use the same old demographics to understand audiences, but they're becoming increasingly harder to track online, says media researcher Johanna Blakley. As social media outgrows traditional media, and women users outnumber men, Blakley explains what changes are in store for the future of media.

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Business Insider article on technology's influence on advertising.

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Business Insider article on technology's influence on advertising.

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The Economist

A FEW MONTHS ago Progressive, an insurance company, ran a video ad on Facebook featuring a grown man who acts like a baby and is carried around in a sling. The ad urged youngsters to "act your age" by renouncing their parents' car insurance and buying their own.

When Facebook employees chuckled about it during a meeting, David Fischer, the firm's 41-year-old head of marketing, wondered why he had never seen it. He was too old, his colleagues said. Progressive was trying to appeal to young drivers, so it served up the ad only to them.

In 1963 David Ogilvy, the father of Madison Avenue and author of a classic business book, "Confessions of an Advertising Man", wrote: "An advertisement is like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping."

Half a century later advertisers are at last taking him at his word.

Behavioural profiling has gone viral across the internet, enabling firms to reach users with specific messages based on their location, interests, browsing history and demographic group. Ads can now follow users from site to site: a customer who looks online for flights to Frankfurt will be inundated with German holiday offers.

Conversant, a digital-marketing firm, uses an algorithm to deliver around 800,000 variations of an ad to its big clients' prospective customers to make it as irresistible as possible. Kraft, a food company, monitors online opinions on its brands in an office which it calls "the looking glass".

Extreme personalisation in advertising has been slow to come, except in search advertising, where Google, Yahoo and other engines have been serving up ads tailored to users' interests for years. But now it has arrived in earnest. According to one poll by Adobe, a software company, most marketers say they have seen more change in the past two years than in the previous 50.

In the classic advertising model, firms used to place ads with media that brought together the audiences they were after. They would go for business executives in the Wall Street Journal, for example, or youngsters on MTV. But now advertisers no longer have to rely on media as proxies for consumers, because they have more tools and data to target precisely the people they want to reach.

The world wide web turned 25 in March, and the first banner ad on it ran 20 years ago, but until a few years ago advertising on the internet did not add up to much. That has changed. Last year online advertising made up about a quarter of the $500 billion global advertising business, and it is rising fast. Some of the 21st century's most powerful companies, including Google, emerged on the back of it.

Companies that used to flourish in pre-digital advertising have struggled to keep up. "Media used to be based on scarce distribution," says Dave Morgan, an internet veteran and the boss of Simulmedia, a television-advertising company. By contrast, online advertising space is unlimited and prices are low, so making money is not as easy as it was in the offline world, even for digital natives such as Yahoo.

The Economist

All the same, new entrants continue to join the fray, enticed by the big opportunities they see as well as by the falling cost of starting digital-media businesses. According to eMarketer, a research firm, Americans spend over 12 hours a day consuming media (sometimes concurrently), and digital media account for around half of that total.

Digital advertising is being buoyed by three important trends. The first is the rise of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, which began when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. Now more than 1.7 billion people (around 20% of the world's population) use smartphones.

Mobile devices, which are intimately connected to their owners, have changed the way in which people travel the internet. Users now prefer apps (self-contained programmes on smartphones) to websites' home pages, and in America they are spending less time on desktop computers. "It took 150 years for the newspaper industry to contract," says Meredith Kopit Levien, head of advertising for the New York Times. "The desktop industry will contract because of mobile in a tenth of that time."

The second, related trend is the rise of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, which have become an important navigation system for people looking for content across the web. "The convergence of social and mobile has given an addressable audience online that's 100 times bigger than ever before," says Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, an online news and entertainment site.

Social networks hold rich data about their users, who volunteer lots of information about themselves. Facebook and Twitter can also see where else people go online, which can help them sell their users' attention to advertisers.

The third big development has been the rise of real-time bidding, or "programmatic buying", a new system for targeting consumers precisely and swiftly with online adverts. Publishers, advertisers and intermediaries can now bid for digital ads electronically and direct them to specific consumers at lightning speed.

Jonathan Nelson of Omnicom Group, a large advertising company, says his firm has the chance to bid for around 10m online advertising "impressions" (ads seen by a user) every second. Real-time bidding will spread further as more screens, such as televisions and billboards, become connected to the internet.

The lines between established media businesses are becoming blurred. Richard Edelman, the boss of Edelman, a public-relations firm, describes the media and advertising business as a "mosh pit". Media companies are producing more content on behalf of advertisers, dubbed "native advertising".

At the same time some advertisers have taken to hiring their own journalists to produce stories, websites and videos. The new advertising-technology (ad-tech) industry is making inroads into the business of traditional advertising agencies. Publicis, a big advertising group, is becoming "much more an internet company than an advertising group", says its boss, Maurice Lévy.

screenshot/The Economist

Look at me

Jeff Goodby, the boss of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, an advertising agency, finds that clients' biggest question is whether people will even notice their ads. Consumers are dividing their time among many screens, and ever fewer of them are watching TV programmes live.

Even so, television advertising has kept its dominance for now because it is one of the few ways to reach a wide audience, especially during live shows and sporting events. But advertisers worry that they could fragment their brands by having to come up with lots of different ads to reach consumers across many media, says Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of Unilever, the world's second-largest advertiser.

This special report will show that technology is profoundly changing the dynamics of advertising. Building on the vast amount of data produced by consumers' digital lives, it is giving more power to media companies that have a direct relationship with their customers and can track them across different devices. An entire industry has sprung up around targeted ads. Third-party tracking companies gather information on browsing habits and online purchases, often invisibly.

"A site is not one company any more. A site is tens of hundreds of companies all knowing where you are and what you're looking at," says Chris Babel of TRUSTe, a firm that provides privacy services. Nikesh Arora, formerly chief business officer at Google and now vice-chairman of Softbank, a Japanese media company, says a race is on to have the best data and become the "intelligence broker".

Consumers may gain from advertising tailored to their particular needs, and so far most of them seem content to accept the ensuing loss of privacy. But companies are sensitive to the potential costs of overstepping the mark. As the head of one British advertising firm puts it: "Once people realise what's happening, I can't imagine there won't be pushback."

Click here to subscribe to The Economist

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The Radically Changing Advertising Business Has Profound Consequences

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A FEW MONTHS ago Progressive, an insurance company, ran a video ad on Facebook featuring a grown man who acts like a baby and is carried around in a sling. The ad urged youngsters to "act your age" by renouncing their parents' car insurance and buying their own.

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"I almost didn't realize what it all meant," he says.

Neither did many of his classmates. Back then, Facebook apps were a novelty. The iPhone had just arrived, and the first Android phone was a year off.

But by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. For many, the long trek from idea to product to company has turned into a sprint.

Start-ups once required a lot of money, time and people. But over the past decade, free, open-source software and "cloud" services have brought costs down, while ad networks help bring in revenue quickly.

The app phenomenon has accentuated the trend and helped unleash what some call a new wave of technology innovation - and what others call a bubble.

Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert's, for example, allowed users to send "hotness" points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue.

Such successes helped inspire entrepreneurs to ditch business plans and work on apps. Not all succeeded, but those that did helped to fuel the expansion of Facebook, which now has nearly 700 million users.

Venture capitalists also began rethinking their approach. Some created investment funds tailored to the new, bare-bones start-ups.

"A lot of the concepts and ideas that came out of the class influenced the structure of the fund that I am working on now," says Dave McClure, one of the class instructors and founder of 500 Startups, which invests in lean start-ups. "The class was the realization that this stuff really works."

Nearly four years later, many of the students have learned that building a business is a lot harder than creating an app - even an app worthy of an A+.

"Starting a company is definitely more work," says Edward Baker, who was Mr. De Lombaert's partner in the class and later in business. The two have founded Friend.ly, a social networking start-up.

Still, many students were richly rewarded. Some turned their homework into companies. A few have since sold those businesses to the likes of Zynga. Others joined hot start-ups like RockYou, a gaming site that at the time was among the most successful Facebook apps.

The Facebook Class changed Mr. De Lombaert's life. His team's app, Send Hotness, brought in more users and more money faster than any other in the class. And its success attracted the attention of venture capitalists.

"The class, more than anything, set the tone for us to try to start something big," says Mr. Baker, 32, Friend.ly's C.E.O.

When the Send Hotness app began to take off, Mr. Baker encouraged Mr. De Lombaert to treat himself to a new car. Mr. De Lombaert settled for a laptop. (He also put some money aside to help to pay his Stanford tuition.) They eventually sold the app to a dating Web site.

Facebook did not actively participate in the Stanford class. But some of its engineers attended sessions, and it benefited from the success of the students' apps. "It really felt like an incubator," says David Fetterman, a Facebook engineer who helped develop the applications platform.

The startling success of some of the class's projects got Silicon Valley buzzing. The final session, held in an auditorium in December 2007, was attended by more than 500 people, including many investors.

"The Facebook platform was taking off, and there was this feeling of a gold rush," said Mike Maples Jr., an investor who attended some of the classes and ended up backing one of the start-ups.

THE Facebook Class was the brainchild of B. J. Fogg, who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. An energetic academic and an innovation guru, he focuses on how to harness technology and human psychology to influence people's behavior.

Mr. Fogg thought that the Facebook platform would be a good way to test some of his theories. Creating a new model of entrepreneurship was far from his mind.

At first, university administrators pushed back. "Facebook was not taken so seriously in academic circles back then," Mr. Fogg recalls.

But there was no hesitation among students - from undergraduates in computer science to M.B.A. candidates - who were spending much of their lives immersed in Facebook.

From the start, many approached the class from a business angle. Mr. Baker, for instance, was a graduate business student but lacked technical skills, so he spent his first week interviewing engineers. "I wanted a technical co-founder," he says.

He settled on Mr. De Lombaert, and the two, along with a third student, Alex Onsager, created Send Hotness. It let users send points to friends they considered "hot" and to compare "hotness" rankings.

Soon they found themselves in a proverbial "the dog ate my homework" situation. Three days before a presentation was due, Mr. De Lombaert accidentally deleted the computer code he was tinkering with. "We kind of freaked out," he recalls.

Rebuilding the app would take too long. So, working around the clock over a weekend, they built another version, with a more rudimentary algorithm.

The stripped-down app took off. In five weeks, five million people signed up. When the team began placing ads on the app, the money poured in.

They had stumbled upon one of the themes of the class: make things simple, and perfect them later.

"The students did an amazing job of getting stuff into the market very quickly," says Michael Dearing, a consulting associate professor at the Institute of Design at Stanford, who now teaches a class based on similar, rapid prototyping ideas. "It was a huge success."

DAN GREENBERG was sitting at the kitchen table one night when he and another teaching assistant decided to get into the app game. Mr. Greenberg, a graduate student who had done research for Mr. Fogg, hadn't planned to get app-happy. But the students' success whetted his appetite.

Four weeks into the quarter, he and his colleague, Rob Fan, set out to create an app that would let Facebook users send "hugs" to one another.

It took them all of five hours.

The app took off. So they moved on to apps for "kisses," "pillow fights" and other digital interactions - 70 in all.

Their apps caught on with millions of people and were soon bringing in nearly $100,000 a month in ads. After the class ended, the two started a company, 750 Industries, named after the 750 Pub at Stanford where Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Fan where drinking when they decided to become business partners.

But juggling the business and schoolwork was too much for Mr. Greenberg, then 22. So he called his father.

"I said, 'Dad, it is 10 p.m., and I've got so much stuff to do,' " Mr. Greenberg recalls. " 'We're running this business, and I've got customers, and we are earning money, and we got financing and we have people to hire. But I have to write a paper tonight, and I just don't have time for it.' "

His father advised him to pull a Mark Zuckerberg and drop out. The next day, Mr. Greenberg did just that.

Now 25, he works out of a glass-walled corner office in San Francisco. He is C.E.O. of his company, now called Sharethrough, which uses social media to distribute videos across the Web for companies. It employs 30 people and has raised about $6 million in venture capital. "It feels like a fairy tale when you look back on it," he says of the class.

He has upgraded his lifestyle somewhat, but still doesn't own a car. "I have a Vespa and skateboard," he says.

"LOVE CHILD." It sounds like an unlikely name for an app. But Johnny Hwin and his Stanford class team set out to build an app of that name, one that would let two users create and raise a virtual child. It never took off.

"We were overly ambitious," Mr. Hwin says.

Seeing his classmates strike gold with simpler ideas proved to be a valuable lesson. In 2009, he began working on Damntheradio.com, a Facebook marketing tool that helped bands and musicians connect with fans online.

It opened last June and was acquired in January by FanBridge, where Mr. Hwin is now a vice president, for a few million dollars, he says.

Mr. Hwin, who is 26 and also a musician, now lives in a loft space in the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco. He uses his place as a kind of salon for late-night art shows and concerts.

"With Love Child, we wanted it to be perfect," he says. With Damntheradio, he found his first clients by showing mockups of the product. "We were able to launch within weeks," he says.

Another class member, Robert Cezar Matei, says he had only modest success with his projects. One, he said, allowed users to send "cheesy pickup lines" to friends; another encouraged people to reveal something about themselves. After graduating from Stanford, he wanted to earn some money to go traveling, but instead of getting a job, he decided to write Facebook apps. "I'd seen my peers being so successful with apps," he says. "If they could do it, I could do it."

After a few false starts, he created an app that let people send points and "kisses" to friends. It struggled until Mr. Matei, who speaks several languages, translated the app. The next day, traffic jumped fivefold. He added games, and employees, and the app became one of the most popular Facebook programs in Europe. In late 2009, he sold to Zynga for an undisclosed sum.

Also in the class was Joshua Reeves, who built an app that created animations that Facebook members would send to one another as birthday greetings or other messages. It made enough money for him to quit his job in 2008 to start Buzzeo, a content management system for Facebook. A year ago, Buzzeo was acquired by Context Optional, where Mr. Reeves, 28, is now a vice president. Last week, Efficient Frontier, a digital marketing company, acquired Context Optional for an undisclosed sum.

ONE recent afternoon at the headquarters of Friend.ly in Mountain View, Calif., 10 engineers worked away as two employees turned their attention to a companywide project: a 24,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

For much of the past year, Friend.ly has worked on developing its service, a social network for meeting new people, without much success. A few weeks ago, the work appeared to pay off: traffic took off, growing to nearly five million monthly users.

Mr. Baker says the Facebook platform is a magnet for young developers, even though the kind of simple apps that were the focus of his Stanford class now face bigger hurdles. Facebook has made it harder to develop big-hit apps by controlling how apps spread virally.

But Mr. Fogg, says that for those who were at the right place at the right time - in late 2007 - things were different. "There was a period of time when you could walk in and collect gold," he says. "It was landscape that was ready to be harvested."

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The 'Facebook Class' Built Apps, and Fortunes

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"I almost didn't realize what it all meant," he says. Neither did many of his classmates. Back then, Facebook apps were a novelty. The iPhone had just arrived, and the first Android phone was a year off.

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