On your TV, the El, your Facebook feed, even the Wabash Ave. bridge – it seems everywhere you turn there’s an advertisement vying for your attention. In fact, it’s been said that the average American is exposed to as many as 3,000 ads each day.

Finding new and innovative marketing tactics can be challenging. To capture the attention of stakeholder audiences, marketers know they must be original and strategic. Take for example Plan UK, a not-for-profit organization that helps children in third-world countries. A first-of-its-kind, the company is currently trialing new outdoor digital ads that use high-definition cameras to determine the sex of its viewer before displaying a gender-specific ad.

The built-in system is 90 percent accurate in identifying its male and female onlookers. As a female passerby, you will see a 40-second spot promoting female education in developing countries. Males, however, are taken to the Plan UK website to convey how it feels “to have basic choices taken away.” The campaign runs for two weeks in the hopes of raising $40,000 in donations.

What do you think of gender-controlled advertising? Is it smart? Here to stay? What other ways will technology impact the marketing world? We know we’ll be watching. 

The Super Bowl has become a TV viewing event that draws audiences to the commercials as much as the game. In fact, 16 percent of viewers say they pay more attention to the ads than the game itself.

Each year, advertisers clamor for seconds in the highly sought-after timeslot, some even forking over as much as $3.5 million. That’s quite the investment.

To help bolster ROI, marketers used social media to further conversations online and engage audiences. Building on the metadata trend, this year, 1 in 5 commercials featured a hashtag and viewers were encouraged to vote for their favorite ads by hashtag on Twitter. In the end, it was Samsung that received the most votes, trailed closely by H&M, M&M and Kia.

Which Super Bowl commercial was your favorite? Here are just a few from Volkswagon, Career Builder, Go Daddy, E* Trade, Audi, Dannon and Cars.com. Leave your comments or a link to your favorite commercial below. 

It’s hard to believe that Facebook has only been around for eight years. However, last Wednesday the Harvard-dorm-room-start-up filed preliminary paperwork for its hugely anticipated IPO. An IPO, or initial public offering, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. The company plans to release its shares in May.

By the time of the sale, The New York Times says the internet giant could be worth as much as $100 billion. That’s excluding the $5 billion in capital the IPO sale is expected to generate. That means, if successful, Facebook will hold the record for the largest internet IPO.

Without question, the most interesting part of this deal is the staggering figures revealed in Facebook’s SEC filings. Figures, the company has kept virtually secret until now, such as:

·        Facebook currently reports an active user base of 845 million. In September, that number was estimated at 800 million users.

·         Every day, Facebook users upload more than 250 million photos and contribute more than 2.5 billion ‘Likes’ and comments.

·         Currently, the company estimates that there are 100 billion Facebook friendships on its site.

·         And in 2011, Facebook earned a whopping $1 billion on $3.7 billion in sales.

We can't help but wonder, do the numbers revealed in Facebook’s SEC filings surprise you? Is going public the right move for the company? And, when the shares do become available, will you be buying stock?