Unified Hires Googler B...

Unified , a company offering tools to help agencies and brands manage their social advertising campaigns, has lured someone from Google to run it sales team. Specifically, it’s announcing the hiring of Brian Murphy as its new vice president of sales. His past experience includes leading Google’s ad sales to the financial industry, overseeing AdMob’s East Coast advertising team, and managing international sales at DoubleClick. When I met with co-founder and CEO Sheldon Owen a couple of months ago, one of his points of pride was the fact that Unified executives come from the enterprise technology industry, not just from the ad world — but hiring Murphy should help build the company’s connections on the ad side. In its announcement blog post, Unified says Murphy “will help top brands and their agencies change the way they use social media advertising.” (Beyond selling its own social advertising products, the company tries to train its customers on best practices through a program called Unified University .)

Ad Agency Reviews: It’s...

The ad business has always been stressful and cutthroat. I know this because I grew up watching Darren Stevens on Bewitched burning the midnight oil desperately searching for that brilliant tagline. Then, on the verge of losing his job, his wacky witch wife would make a mistake which would end up leading to the best ad campaign ever created. Oh, if only we were all married to witches or to Don Draper. He makes the ad business look cool. In the real world, without magic and martinis, it’s become even harder to land that big client mostly because the rules have changed. AdAge says the agency review process has gotten “totally out of control.” They participated in a panel discussion with top agency search consultants and what they heard was a lot of frustration and few solutions. The biggest complaint is that things simply aren’t being done the old way. Normally, that would be a good thing, but not in this case. Different departments are getting in on the act, each with their own agenda. Worse, some companies have been resorting to open calls which means a company could be up against 100 other agencies. With so many agencies vying for the same few accounts, the company is in a position to make crazy demands. Short turn around times, tight budgets and unreasonable presentation expectations all cut into the creative process. Brilliance takes time and presentations cost money. Even the best agencies are going to strike out some time and that’s money that’s not coming back to them. But what can you do? If you want to play, you’ve got to pay. Search consultants suggest that agencies carve out a niche and stay active in social media so they’re the ones people think about when a job comes up. As for companies looking for a new campaign – remember that most ad men don’t have magic on their side, only knowledge, a good work ethic and a never-say-die team. Cut them some slack and they’ll make you look marvelous.

U.S. Consumer Financial...

I’ve been harping for a while here on TechCrunch about the benefits of open source software. I often quote Canonical’s Technical Architect Allison Randal, who said “Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software.” Free and open source software enabled much of the innovation we write about here at TechCrunch, but it’s been slow to move into established enterprises, let alone the U.S. Government. That’s starting to change today with an announcement from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that states, unequivocally, “We use open source software, and we do so because it helps us fulfill our mission.” The announcement goes on to state that “when we build our own software or contract with a third party to build it for us, we will share the code with the public at no charge.” The CFPB is making it clear that they get it with respect to open source software: they have a GitHub account for hosting their works and are sharing their open source policy as a GitHub gist in addition to a static HTML document on their own website. According to Chris Willey, CIO at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “Using open source software isn’t innovative compared to the outside world, and having a policy that says so probably seems odd to many in the tech community. But many federal agencies avoid open source software because they don’t have internal policies and procedures that allow it.” He observes, however, that the policy to share by default is absolutely brand new within the federal government. “Some tech-inclined agencies like NASA, NOAA, NSA and FCC share code selectively,” said Willey. “We want to share everything we make.” We are a citizen-facing agency, so keeping pace with the rest of the world is a high priority. We think our online presence should be on par with the web’s most popular tools and communities. Enabling outside developers to contribute to our products makes that goal more attainable. I asked Willey what kind of advocacy — if any — the CFPB was doing (or planning to do) for open source software within the government. He shared that they’re using GitHub Enterprise internally, and have fielded a number of questions from other agencies about how they procured that and set it up. “It’s hard for us to have these conversations with other agencies without implicitly advocating an open source philosophy,” Willey told me. “So instead of trying to sell open source to other agencies on principle, we’re finding that it’s a lot easier to prove the value of open source software by showing our colleagues the great results it has gotten us.” I was curious whether the CFPB’s policy is the natural result of more digital natives taking government jobs. According to Willey, it was “simply the byproduct of building a government organization from scratch in the information age: we are able to craft our technology philosophy with a modern perspective.” “We wrote this policy to make sure that our team always has the freedom to use [open source] tools,” Willey continued. “It’s a freedom that many other federal agencies do not have, and that’s because they lack a policy–or, in some cases, because they have policies that strictly forbid open source software.” Hopefully more government agencies — in the U.S. and around the world — will start to adopt similar policies for the benefit of citizens everywhere.

Agency Survey: Early 20...

CP+G, AKQA, Razorfish, MRM, Brunner, and other agencies reveal spending trends.

Float Does Simple Sched...

Float (no, not that Float – what is with the duplicate names for startups lately?), is a new, minimilist scheduling application for teams. The software comes from the New York-based startup Pixel Paddock, whose three co-founders have some 30 years of combined digital agency experience behind them. They know first-hand what agencies need, and designed the software to suit. But agencies aren’t the only one who could benefit from using Float – studios, firms, and other small teams that need a simple scheduling complement to their project management suite or current workflow may find Float useful. Although the project/task management space seems to be a crowded field, with all-in-one solutions like Clarizen  and  Podio , Basecamp , and new entrants like Schedule and ResourceGuru , just to name a few, Float was designed to be easy and straightforward to use. It’s also not meant to replace more complex PM tools, only to run alongside them. To use Float, admins set up project tasks, which they can drag-and-rop into the scheduling space. Employees are tagged with their skill set (like “Photoshop,” Javascript,” etc.) for easy search and assignment, and several built-in reports give you both a view of your team’s current utilization, their utilization over the coming weeks, or in the past. There are also built-in email notifications, so Float can send out weekly schedules to team members, as well as schedule updates. “The trouble with agencies is that they’re the ones that have the most problem with having multiple teams and multiple projects and having to balance the time between those,” explains Glenn Rogers, CEO of the bootstrapped startup’s focus on the digital agency. “But to be honest, Float would apply to any group of people, whether that’s freelancers with a small team under them, small studios, or even accounting firms that have clients they need to service,” he says. To that end, Float already has 120 active accounts helping it beta test the software (for free, it should be noted). And it will continue to offer a free version in addition to the three pricing plans starting at $19/month. (Just scroll down on the pricing page – they’re sneaky about tucking away the free plan below the fold). As for the simplicity? That was the hardest part. “Simple is hard. Every feature that’s in this had to fight to be a feature,” says Rogers. “And we took a lot of features out because it either complicated the user flow or just wasn’t quick enough. It’s very easy to add a feature, but it’s very hard to take a feature out.” More info on Float is available on the homepage here .