We’re still only about six months into sharing our Marketing with Meaning, but I’m very encouraged by the progress so far. One measure of our progress in spreading the Marketing with Meaning idea is our recognition and inclusion on lists of some of the best and most relevant marketing blogs. For example, we recently moved up to #6 on the Junta list of the top content marketing blogs, and we’re moving up the Ad Age Power 150 list of media and marketing blogs.

I’m proud to report that we were recently selected by a new tool and list called Alltop. Alltop is “an online magazine rack” that collects feeds from sources that it reviews, categorizes, and updates. Jonathan Richman (from our team) submitted this blog and we are now listed in the Marketing section.

Alltop represents an example of the trend of “human aggregation” of Internet content, which is an interesting evolution in how information is organized and accessed. While Google has done a great job of building an algorithm to make the Internet much more search friendly than before, there is still a lot of difficulty in searching for what you want or simply discovering great content.

Now, humans are getting into the act of helping to further identify the good stuff. Wikipedia is one of the first, largest examples of humans adding value to the search process. Digg then came along to help flag the most interesting stories. And now “closed” sites such as Alltop have potential to succeed by providing trusted recommendations of the best content feeds on a wide variety of topics.

And some marketers are starting to use aggregation to better organize meaningful content for their customers. Purina is sorting through tons of cat and dog photos to create a “best of” site called Pet Charts. According to a recent Ad Age article, “it takes a trained person 30 minutes per day to go through and update the site’s content.” This provides Purina with a low-cost, owned media outlet, and also drives huge natural search traffic to the brand.

I also recently discovered “Tabbloid,” a service by HP that helps people make the content they aggregate more useful. The company is offering a software that turns RSS feeds into a daily newspaper. By offering this service, HP forges trust, opens a direct communication avenue, and gets people to use its HP printers and ink more often (thanks Ad Lab).

So discover Alltop and the power of human aggregation for yourself, and please use this link—as the more traffic we drive to the site, the higher we’ll rise in its listing!

This week Pedigree dog food and its agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, won the grand prize in the 27th annual Kelly Awards, a show presented by the Magazine Publishers of America that honors creative excellence and effectiveness in magazine ads.

Pedigree won top honors with a marketing campaign that drew attention to the plight of dogs living in shelters, asking people to contribute time and money to dog shelters, and asking people to adopt pets of their own.  Compelling print ads were accompanied by a website that provides information for prospective adopters.

The results show success on both Meaning and Marketing objectives.  According to Ad Age, the campaign “raised $2.7 million for shelter dogs and contributed to double-digit sales growth for Pedigree.”  What’s more, TBWA/Chiat/Day is contributing the entire $100,000 in prize money to the Pedigree Adoption Drive Foundation.  That’s a big deal in the agency world of tight margins!

For years advertisers have used cute puppies in ads to sell products.  Now they’re actually saving cute puppies through ads, and selling products.  That’s a nice win-win.