New year, new oppor­tu­ni­ties, new ideas; art direc­tors and account man­agers who want their online adver­tis­ing agen­cies to go on ris­ing in 2014 might do well to heed advice from Dan Dins­more, the CEO of award-win­ning New York cre­ative agency Over­it. He offers some intrigu­ing point­ers on what’s like­ly to be hot in Adland this year.

Get the con­tent right and embrace the PR pow­er of Linkedin 

In a guest arti­cle for Tech Cock­tail, Dins­more pre­dicts that con­tent mar­ket­ing will attract more atten­tion in 2014 – but agen­cies must set spe­cif­ic goals for their con­tent strate­gies and make sure they’re using the right met­rics to keep tabs on effec­tive­ness. He also feels that brands need to think more orig­i­nal­ly about the kind of con­tent that will gen­uine­ly inter­est their tar­get audi­ences, and avoid sim­ply using the same chan­nels with­out vari­a­tion – fol­low the media the cus­tomers are using, and exper­i­ment with new con­tent expe­ri­ences to grab their attention.

But to keep those projects rolling in, art direc­tors and account man­agers should get savvy with PR and keep the agen­cies’ LinkedIn pro­files reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed. It’s become aston­ish­ing­ly pop­u­lar and, at Over­it, it’s proven indis­pens­able for build­ing rela­tion­ships with reporters, help­ing clients learn more about the tal­ent work­ing on their accounts, from art direc­tors to copy­writ­ers to account man­agers. The mes­sage? Don’t be shy about shar­ing com­pa­ny news and show­cas­ing agency tal­ent through LinkedIn – it helps pave the way to new opportunities.

Social and SEO

Dins­more is keen on social media, and thinks the rest of us should be too: agen­cies should put more ener­gy into direct engage­ment through social accounts like LinkedIn and Twit­ter this year. Con­ver­sa­tions between brands and indi­vid­u­als are more ben­e­fi­cial than one-way broad­casts, offer­ing a far more per­son­al rela­tion­ship – if peo­ple are talk­ing to a per­son with a name rep­re­sent­ing a brand, rather than an anony­mous brand mouth­piece, it works better.

And don’t neglect SEO. Over­it will be pro­mot­ing rich, orig­i­nal con­tent using info­graph­ics, mobile apps and wid­gets through social shar­ing plat­forms like Digg and Red­dit, increas­ing brands’ vis­i­bil­i­ty and help­ing them grow in the process. And it’ll also be inte­grat­ing micro video capa­bil­i­ties (think Vine and Insta­gram) – the videos might only last a few sec­onds, but han­dled cre­ative­ly they can con­vey strong visu­al mes­sages and, Dins­more says, “leave last­ing impres­sions on your audience.”