Meyer & Wallis has set up shop in some pretty cool spaces over the years. Our first office was in the oldest building on Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee. Twenty years and three offices later, we find ourselves on the corner of Jackson and Mason.

This is the first space we've had that we've been able to build to suit. It's pretty cool. With in-house facilities for everything from media buying to broadcast production, we really are a full service advertising agency.

The first space you enter off the elevators is our reception area.



Behind the hiding receptionist, and below our target logo, you can see a few of the awards we've won over the years.

There are more of these. In fact, we have a couple "walls of intimidation" throughout the place.



And another:



In fact, we've won so many awards, they can be found throughout the agency, anywhere there's shelf space. Like here, with our software manuals:



I'm not trying to brag. It's just that, well, we've won a lot of awards for our work. Anyway...

Our walls are covered in galvanized steel on which we can display our work however we wish.



We've also been known to display some personal "Flair" outside our offices, as well.



The floor really feels like a creative space. Even our common area feels fun and inviting. On the back wall: the famous Meyer & Wallis Christmas Card Retrospective.



And, finally, throughout the agency you'll find these unique displays representing beliefs that our company has been built on:



They remind us why we do what we do, and why we do it better than most.

If you'd ever like to get a closer look at the place, Bob Meyer loves giving tours. Just a warning: he'll probably want to talk about your advertising, too.

Okay. I'm all about new technology. I have wireless speakers streaming music off my laptop at home. I long for an iPhone. I have a website, a blog, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page, etc. I regularly collaborate on music projects with a friend in New York with the help of the internet. I video conference with my parents when they're in Florida for the winter. This is all normal to me. Modern technology is part of the air I breathe.

But i DON'T Twitter.

For the rest of you who don't, Twitter is a sort of "Mini-blog" that allows you to post short (140 characters or less) "tweets" to your Twitter page, that other users can view. Part of the appeal of Twitter is that many cell phones, etc., can post to it, meaning users can update their Twitter pages from virtually anywhere.

I don't get twitter. I appreciate digital technology for what it allows me to do more thoroughly or more speedily, and I honestly feel like Twitter is a dumbing down of human interaction. (If you've already got the cell phone in your hand and you want me to know what you're up to, give me a call, my friend! Then we can have a conversation about it that will likely use more than 140 characters!) But it looks like I'm probably wrong.

Last week, Oprah devoted her entire April 17th show to Twitter. She "tweeted" for the first time with Ashton Kutcher, who was live on the show via satellite to the delight of housewives everywhere.

Now, there could have been some confusion that day. Perhaps several of her viewers thought that Twitter would somehow enable them to chat with Ashton Kutcher. But whatever the reason, the day Oprah's Twitter episode aired, traffic to Twitter's site was up an incredible 43 percent, with 37 percent of their overall traffic that day representing first-time visitors. THAT'S CRAZY.

There are many lessons here, not the least of which being the confirmation of television's staying power and ability to reach a wide audience in an increasingly digital world.

But the biggest lesson, to me, is this: If Oprah thinks Twitter is a useful enough tool to spend an hour talking about it, what's my problem??

You'll be finding me on Twitter soon, but for now you can find Twitter at Twitter.com.

Despite my slowness to adopt a new technology like Twitter, Meyer & Wallis exists on the cutting edge of technology. Our broadcast production, media buying, and account supervision workflows all make use of great digital tools that help us communicate with our clients better and create ads for them in a more cost-efficient manner. Wanna know more? Contact us today.

There was a curious article in the New York Times this week. The journalist was writing out of honest confusion. He had heard that AOL was adding some new features to its home page, and wanted to ask his readers if any of them cared. Even a little bit.

See, this world we call “interactive media” is a funny place where empires rise and fall with the predictability of the seasons. There was a time when America Online was called the “goliath among Internet service providers.” Admitting you weren’t on AOL was like admitting you didn’t have indoor plumbing. AOL’s base of almost 30 million dial-up users made their service synonymous with “the Internet” for the better part of the 1990s.

But even though AOL was a kind of perfect solution to the WEB 1.0 world, it fell flat on its face as newer alternatives were brought to market. All of a sudden, internet users didn’t want online hand holding. They wanted freedom, options, media, and speed. Oh, how they wanted speed. Now, in this world of broadband access and wireless hotspots, the AOL many of us depended on for internet access is basically obsolete. Obsolete?!? How did this happen?

What AOL was among the last to appreciate is that, unlike print or broadcast, interactive media has yet to develop any sense of heritage. Small innovations aside, a book is still a book and a 30-minute sitcom is still a 30-minute sitcom. But we love interactive media for what it can do today that it couldn’t do yesterday, and we have little patience for it when it doesn’t evolve fast enough.

Anyway, the author of the article in question did get a handful of replies from people who still use AOL. Predictably, they were mostly baby boomers who only use the internet to check their email and use their cell phones “for phone calls and nothing more.” Like AOL, this kind of internet user probably won’t exist in a generation. And, for that matter, neither will the internet as we know and love it today.

With all that said, I should probably mention that Meyer & Wallis’ interactive team spends a lot of time each day playing with and discussing the emerging interactive technologies you won’t even know about until next year. Our commitment to our clients is to understand this stuff better than anyone, and to understand it in the greater context of a comprehensive creative marketing strategy across all possible media. You owe it to your customers to stay current on the means available to you to interact with consumers. Like never before, they expect this of you, and see it as a measure of your company’s relevance to them. If you last looked at your company's website before FaceBook and YouTube existed (only a couple years ago), chances are it's collecting some virtual dust. Don’t believe me? Don't know what FaceBook is? Hey – you aren’t reading this on AOL, are you?

Read the NY Times article here.