Below is a video snippet of Punch playing a Beatles song, displaying his mix of contemporary with classical violin playing. Check out more of his innovative playing style here. 

The past year has been a whirlwind for MediaWhiz. We formed an operating partnership with SolutionSet, an independent integrated marketing services company, to create the SolutionSet MediaWhiz Partnership. Five months later, we became part of the Hyper Marketing Inc. (HMI) network, following a merger of SolutionSet with D.L. Ryan Companies, the nation’s largest independent digital, shopper and promotional marketing agency.

Through it all we kept growing and building the core of the MediaWhiz brand: a results-driven digital marketing agency. And that growth continues to be recognized by our industry peers.

Case in point: the 2012 Advertising Age Agency Report, out this week, lists MediaWhiz as the No. 21 digital-agency network in the United States and the No. 73 overall advertising/marketing agency across all divisions, by revenue.

We’re especially proud of the latter as it represents an improvement of 112 places from our 2011 ranking of No. 185. It marks MediaWhiz’s first-ever appearance in the top-100 rankings of all agencies in the Advertising Age Agency Report.

These strong rankings confirm that MediaWhiz’s results-driven business model is a success. They also are a testament to the partnerships we have developed with our clients and the entrepreneurial spirit of our employees.

MediaWhiz continues to evolve with the rapidly changing online media and digital marketing space. Our clients depend on us to manage the complexity of their modern marketing and digital media challenges, and we have grown MediaWhiz to meet those needs.

It’s no longer just about executing search campaigns or optimizing social media programs. Now, more than ever, online advertising success depends upon building integrated online performance marketing programs that take full advantage of the interactions across all digital media efforts.

Businesses face challenges on multiple fronts to effectively market their brands online. The MediaWhiz model — helping clients acquire customers more profitably via expertise in all forms of online performance marketing, including Affiliate, Search, Social, Display, Email and Data Acquisition, and optimizing within and across all digital media channels — is what we believe the future of online marketing and advertising should entail.

We’re proud to be on the vanguard of this new paradigm in online marketing. This year’s Advertising Age Agency Report rankings indicate that MediaWhiz’s work is valuable to our clients and to the digital marketing industry. It’s a recognition we aim to uphold in the months and years to come. 

Eduard Kats is president of MediaWhiz.

In Jonathan’s words;

“Future winners in the online marketing space will understand that success means investing in performance marketing programs of continuous improvement that provide increasing and demonstrable profits. That’s performance marketing, and you won’t want to cap its success with an annual budget.”

Read the whole article here.

Death of the Marketing Budget

Blogger Stephanie Lichtenstein, creator of the influential affiliate marketing blog, stephanielichtenstein.com had this to say about John;

“Since I know a little more about John Carcutt, I can tell you that he is the real deal when it comes to SEO. He hosts a weekly podcast called SEO101 on Webmaster Radio every Monday. He also has been in the game for a long time calling himself the, “SEO Oldtimer.”

The details of the panel are listed below.

When: Sunday, January 17, 2010

What: Monetizing Blogs for Affiliate Marketing and SEO
Learn to maximize affiliate commissions using blogging, increasing your community, and utilizing SEO.

Who:
Kristopher B. Jones, President, Pepperjam Network, A GSI Commerce Company
(Twitter @pepperjamceo) (Moderator)
Drew Bennett, Professional Blogger, BenSpark.com (Twitter @BenSpark) John
Carcutt, SEO Manager, MediaWhiz (Twitter @JohnCarcutt)
Tim Jones, Owner, TheRealTimJones.com (Twitter @TheRealTimJones)
Murray Ross Newlands, Founder, Affiliate Heat (Twitter @murraynewlands)

When: 1:30pm – 2:30pm

Where: Brasilia 1-2 Rio Hotel
Passes: Platinum, Gold

Look for John’s video summary =of his panel session on January 17. Stephanie Lichtenstein will also be covering the session and explore MediaWhiz’s MonetizeIt business.

In the coming months this blog will be a destination for online marketing thought leadership. We will share our ideas and we hope you will share yours. We will discuss our results. We will utilize the fact that our company is made up of a team working to be the best and the brightest, and we are going to use our tenacious approach to being the best to redefine performance marketing.

We will be showing you our results; In the shape of case studies, white papers, and opinion posts, you will see our performance first hand. You will get a glimpse into how MediaWhiz can help you make the most out of every single marketing dollar.

Were also taking this show on the road. This year alone we will be attending a host of conferences including:

Affiliate Summit West – January 17 -19 2010
IDate2010 -January 27 – 29 2010
LeadsCon Las Vegas – February 23 -24 2010
AdTech San Francisco – April 19-21 2010

This blog will be sharing the highlights of all the stops throughout the year.

We’re going to have a little fun too. Check back often for guests, sports highlights, funny stories and online marketing fun.

We hope you are all as excited as we are. It’s going to be a big year for us and our family of partners and clients. Time to show tenacity, excitement, spirit and results! Here we go…

Kontera®, a leading provider of In-Text Advertising and Information Solutions for web publishers and advertisers, announced that ScribeFire will be utilizing the company’s patent-pending contextual analysis technology to power In-Text offerings to its vast base of publishers.

Through this technology partnership, ScribeFire publishers benefit from an easy, one-click implementation of Kontera’s In-Text Advertising solution directly from their respective publisher consoles.

Kontera analyzes the content of the ScribeFire®-enabled publishers, and highlights contextually relevant keywords. The technology discovers the keywords on a web page, blog, or widget in real-time and automatically matches them with contextually relevant advertising or information. When a user mouses-over a double-underlined keyword, a contextually relevant ad, known as ContentLink®, is displayed.

The real value of the ScribeFire / Kontera (ContentLink) integration is in its ability to engage users. Publishers running ContentLink experience engagement rates that are higher than with other pay per click advertising solutions. Publishers of user-contributed media regularly report equal or greater click-through rates with Kontera than with Google’s AdSense®.

“Today, bloggers and small publishers are looking for more opportunities to monetize their content,” said Patrick Gavin, founder and President of ScribeFire. “Thanks to Kontera’s proprietary technology, we’re among the first ad platforms to offer publishers the ability to run both high ROI in-text advertising as well as fully optimized banner ads. Contextually relevant ads will generate revenue for thousands of ScribeFire-powered publishers.”

“From reality TV to social networking and the blogosphere, user-contributed media is changing the monetization models for all forms of content,” said Mathew Haugen, VP of  Business Development, Kontera. “With Kontera’s technology being utilized by MediaWhiz (ScribeFire), we’re enabling thousands of bloggers and online publishers of all sizes to tap into a new revenue stream.”

We are proud to announce that ScribeFire QuickAds, our ad optimization product for website publishers, will launch out of beta today marking three months of significant business growth and technological innovation. QuickAds is the first ad platform to enable publishers to serve both optimized banners and in-text ads on their sites via a single platform.  Since its launch in July of 2008, more than 5,000 website publishers have signed up with QuickAds to increase their revenue earning potential.

ScribeFire QuickAds greatly simplifies ad inventory management with a powerful optimization decision engine, which matches each impression with the highest revenue producing ad.  Ads are selected from the MediaWhiz ad inventory pool, which is fueled by MediaWhiz’s experienced sales team and relationships with over 100 ad networks.

ScribeFire’s advanced in-text advertising solution guarantees site publishers the highest degree of relevancy between content, keywords, and ads.  In-text ads appear as double underlined keywords that reveal a relevant advertisement upon rollover.  It is an easy way to add subtle, contextually relevant, and eye-catching advertisements to a web site.

ScribeFire’s display advertising solution accepts high impact Flash and Video banner ads, along with static JPEG, Pop-Unders, and animated GIF ads in IAB-standard ad sizes (e.g. Leaderboard: 728×90, Wide Skyscraper: 160×600, and Medium Rectangle: 300×250).

“It is very exciting to launch ScribeFire QuickAds out of beta after just three months,” said Patrick Gavin, President of ScribeFire. “Small publishers the world over now have a powerful and incredibly easy way to generate top dollar for their web site’s ad space.”

“ScribeFire is making it easy for websites to optimize all the ad networks, and take advantage of our substantial and highly experienced sales force,” said Jonathan Shapiro, CEO of MediaWhiz. “To be the first ad platform to offer publishers the ability to run fully optimized banner ads as well as high ROI in-text advertising is a remarkable accomplishment by the ScribeFire team.”

“Any blogger, with any level of technical know-how, can get these ads going and start making money on their blog…almost immediately,” said Barry Schwartz of the Cartoon Barry Blog.

“I am thrilled with this new discovery… it has opened new avenues (for web site publishers) to earn money from (their) blog or website,” said Jobin Sebastian of TechMartini.

Shane of Ask Shane.org wrote, “I’m really impressed with the QuickAds interface.  Very clean and easy to use…they’ve definitely worked hard (and successfully) to create a very nice system.”

ScribeFire QuickAds is available for FREE download at the ScribeFire website.

Payoneer’s service provides a global-friendly alternative to checks, wire transfers and other online payment methods. Publishers benefit by having immediate access to their money while avoiding the hassles associated with lost or stolen checks, hold times and fees, and the lack of availability of PayPal in certain countries. Additionally, cardholders can spend and/or withdraw funds in their own currency without the need for a bank account.

According to MediaWhiz, publishers who opted for this payment method during a six-month trial rollout reported tremendous satisfaction with getting their earnings faster, lowering foreign currency exchange rates, and gaining 24×7 online account management access from anywhere in the world.

This service allows MediaWhiz to turn the payment process into a brand-affirmation opportunity. Cards bear the MediaWhiz logo, reminding publishers of where their earnings came from with each use. MediaWhiz also found that Payoneer was a significant cost-saving option considering its large number of publishers, 40% of whom are located outside the United States.

“Publishers perform just about every business function at online speed and expect the same when they get paid,” said Jonathan Shapiro, CEO of MediaWhiz. The company paid nearly $100 million to its network of over 30,000 publishers in 2007. “Our publishers love their co-branded cards from Payoneer because they get paid faster, and the overseas publishers can keep more of their earnings. We love it because it lowers our processing costs, and keeps an important community of ours happy.”

Patrick Gavin, President of MediaWhiz Display added, “Payoneer integrated simply and easily into our existing payment infrastructure – and let us use payment as a marketing advantage, especially overseas.”

“We see tremendous growth opportunity for the use of reloadable Prepaid MasterCard cards as recurring mass payment vehicles through service providers like Payoneer,” said Alonzo Primus, President and Chief Operating Officer of First Bank of Delaware. “We are eager to help industry leaders such as MediaWhiz gain a competitive edge with innovative payment solutions.”

Yuval Tal, CEO of Payoneer added, “As the Internet makes a global player out of every web site, Payoneer can help online advertising leaders like MediaWhiz take exceptional care of their publishers, and their own bottom line.”

Additional rankings:

• Ranked No. 19 in the Top 100 Businesses in New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA
• Ranked No. 21 in the Top 100 Advertising & Marketing Companies

We are happy to announce that we have strengthened our Lead Management System, LeadROI™, by implementing JetDial®, a powerful web-based dialing technology that greatly enhances advertisers’ sales force efficiencies, lead throughput time, and conversion rates.

LeadROI’s JetDial is an innovative on-demand call center software that dramatically improves sales force efficiency. The technology automatically manages answering machines, busy signals, disconnected numbers, and fax lines to improve sales talk time by over 40%. For example, when an answering machine is detected, a personalized pre-recorded voicemail greeting is automatically delivered and the sales representative is promptly connected to the next available live party. Finally, JetDial is equipped with powerful monitoring capabilities that enable sales managers to track and analyze the performance of their sales team.

“The JetDial technology sets us apart from the other lead management systems, which offer very basic click-to-dial applications that don’t do much to improve sales force productivity when compared with our advanced preview dialer technology,” said Raj Parekh, General Manager of MediaWhiz’s LeadROI product. “LeadROI’s JetDial technology does everything from screening busy calls to leaving messages while simultaneously making the next call… enabling sales organizations to be significantly more efficient and profitable.”

Jeff Felman, JetDial’s Vice President of Sales, adds “JetDial’s integration with LeadROI is an important development in the lead management system space. LeadROI’s interactive reporting, automated lead distribution, workflow, campaign, and pipeline management capabilities coupled with JetDial’s powerful auto-dialer technology is a perfect marriage that has a huge upside for advertisers looking to improve the ROI of their lead generation campaigns.”

About LeadROI, Inc.

LeadROI was founded in 2004, and acquired by MediaWhiz in April of 2008. LeadROI offers lead buyers and sales organizations a web-based lead and customer relationship management solution. LeadROI provides a variety of point-of-sale tools, including credit reports, pricing and data transfer tools, and the JetDial auto-dialer technology. The proprietary software streamlines new customer acquisition, improves productivity, maximizes sales conversion, and provides critical insight into lead generation production metrics.

About JetDial

JetDial is a private call center technology company, whose founders have over 50 years combined experience in teleservices. JetDial’s expertise is in developing and executing cost-effective, scalable, and legally compliant customer contact solutions that help increase productivity and performance. JetDial is built on a carrier-grade, scalable platform packed with reliable features that assist customer service or sales teams in receiving or making calls. JetDial’s hosted call center technology allows users to analyze calls, track performance, and improve results in real-time.