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I am heavy into marketing, and even more heavily into technology. You also might see some blog posts about modern art spring up here and there - so don't freak out.

I also blog at The Direct Marketing Voice, and throw around ideas as a Market Intelligence Analyst at QuantumDigital.

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Wasted banner ads?

I was on slideshare today and noticed a peculiar phenomenon - one that I have seen in the past but only on smaller blogs/websites.  Essentially it was 1 particular ad, repeated several times in close proximity to one another.  In my mind this is a complete waste of advertising spend. Well, maybe not a complete waste, but the fact that the left hand ad is repeated twice is very distracting visually, and it compels me NOT to look at the ad. A better effect would just to use the "skyscraper" ad format. 

 

But at least Google is making money.

 

Outlook

Filed under  //  advertising   marketing   web tools  
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Customer Feedback Providers & the new Art of Stories

A good article on Conversation Agent outlined some very important trends that are both around stories: one an internal story needed to shape your own business' strategy, and the other a need to grasp the old art of storytelling.

 

Looking at emerging trends:
Customer experience will be more important than ever -- we outlined a few areas to consider above. To those, I'll add the importance of the role of the community manager to represent brand experience.

Storytelling will evolve - location will become a key component; the speed at which stories are developed is crucial; and above all, emotional connections matter -- you cannot fabricate, push, or coerce emotional connection.

While most may know that we should be focusing on a customer's experience, few companies have adopted this into their internal processes to the extent that they should.  Customer's experiences should fuel the development of products, processes and communication. Many of us have been in meeting after meeting where opinions are levied, but no customer sentiment is aggregated.

 

Fortunately, there are a few tools that are emerging that will help us deal with these challenges.  Among the new tools, Get Satisfaction (focuses on providing an idea/suggestion aggregation tool), is one of the most attractive in crowd sourcing your companies' future direction.  On the web/usability side, there's  UserTesting.com , Userfly, or the IT favorite, Silverback.  All allow you to get first hand accounts at what the average user thinks about your website or web order process. Some of these even have extremely low cost payment structures.

 

The hard part will be getting people to agree that you should be designing around customers - oddly, enough.

 

The second bullet point addresses an interesting shift in the marketing landscape.  "Broadcast" and "Communications Plan" has been replaced by an idea of Storytelling. An age old artform that needs new stars.  In the age of twitter and facebook, the art of the story may be somewhere in between "the hook" (why someone should tune in - in 140 characters or less) and "the shocker" - content that was created citizen journalist style, that has information that no one else has. Intelligence is a natural resource. It's scarce, but present. Now it's time to mine it.

Filed under  //  advertising   emotion   marketing  
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6 different ways to attract customers

Credit where due, I was browsing http://www.notorious-rob.com/ and came across this graphic that Rob found in @issue: the online journal of business & design (why had I not found this magazine before!).  Turns out they're citing it from a book that's coming out by Marty Neumeier, who has delivered some very interesting presentations before. 

 
Anyhow, this graphic seeks to compare the different disciplines of "wooing a customer". Hilarious:
 

Outlook

 

Besides this, I did happen upon a great video that encompasses many of the strategic marketing shifts, a' la Marty Neumeier:

 

Filed under  //  advertising   b2c   emotion   marketing  
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Be honest about the Brand - and don't pretend you're Charlie Rose

AdAge launched a hilarious and scathing review, from a marketing perspective, of what everyone can learn by NBC's missteps with regard to the Jay Leno Show.  I did manage to watch the Jay Leno Show last week and realized very quickly that Jay tries to be serious (when interviewing 1 on 1) - sort of Charlie Rose-esque - but unfortunately fails at it.  They should have stuck to the parodies and "man on the street" segments.

 
Anyway, AdAge calls out the fact that NBC paints the Jay Leno brand as being an "institution" that everyone in America would watch irrespective of the quality of programming - because it's Jay!  Instead, the quality breaks through and we realize that Jay isn't funny ALL the time, and thus, his status as an "institution" is falling sharply. It would not have been so bad for NBC if they hadn't have painted the brand in such a way... it just erodes trust in the network itself.  A lesson for anyone promoting product brands of any sort.
 
 
7. It's dangerous to pretend your brand is something it's not.
NBC executives, in marketing Leno's move to prime time, tried to position him as a beloved broadcast institution -- like they were bestowing a comedic gift on America -- as a cover for their entirely cynical cost-cutting. In reality, though, it was clear all along that late-night Leno functioned as a sort of utility: an easy, default pre-bedtime diversion literally not ready for prime time, even after 17 years. NBC used to offer substantive entrees at 10 ("ER," "Law & Order"), and figured that viewers could be forced to switch to comfort food. But Leno at 11:35 wasn't ever really even meatloaf; he was more like that stale bag of Funyuns in the back of the cupboard you were willing to settle for because mindless late-night snacking is ... mindless.

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=139926

Filed under  //  advertising   marketing  
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