Extreme Direct Marketing

posted by hal…

Our colleague Nathan brought this to our attention. It’s a short film on Wholphin about a Steven Meyer, a self-proclaimed “active advertiser” or “street dancer.”

Basically, he dances and cavorts in a crazy fashion while waving a sign or nutty prop for his sponsor. He claims to have produced a 25% lift in K-mart stores where he has performed.

Now that’s direct response advertising.

Have a happy Fourth!

Will Congress Pull MySpace into Mainstream?

posted by greg…….

I was recently asked to respond to a question for Revenue Magazine’s performance marketing section. Whether or not my comment will be published we’ll just have to wait and see, but I thought I’d also post it here.

Will new age-related rules on social networking sites such as MySpace effect advertising revenue?
Social networking sites are extremely popular because they are an unmonitored playground for personal expression. People flock to these sites because they are unruly and uninhibited. In short, they are fun.

Imposing rules of any type, in this case age restrictions, immediately begin to erode the sites’ legitimacy by pulling them into the mainstream where they will become less popular over time. While social networking sites will suffer the effects of less advertising, advertisers themselves will simply follow the crowd to wherever they next find their outpost of self expression.

More on the topic of laws targeted at social networking sites here:
Congress Targets Social Network Sites

Digital Immigrants and Natives (more)

posted by hal….

Last week, as reported here and elsewhere, Lord Saatchi, the Briritsh advertising icon, pronounced advertising as we know it dead.

One facet of his thesis which kept coming up over the weekend was the notion that the brains of Digital Natives are physiologically different than those of Digital Immigrants.

If you recall, Digital Natives are people under 25 – those who grew up with the internet. Digital Immigrants are geezers over 25. We’ve learned the customs and language of this new land, but will always speak with an accent.

So it turns out that the brains of the Natives have developed differently than our own. They are wired differently. This phenomenon is called CPA, or Continuous Partial Attention (sometimes Constant Partial Attention).

Natives are constantly doing three, four five things at once, processing information, making decisions, taking action on many simultaneous levels. It’s beyond multitasking. It’s hypertasking.

Digital Natives hang out on Web 2.0 places like YouTube and Flickr.To be successful in our brave new world, marketers and communicators will need to learn how to blend in with the Natives and communicate without a thick Immigrant accent.

It might require that we re-wire our brains.

Brands of the World

posted by jes…

A client pointed me to a very cool site called Brands of the World (http://www.brandsoftheworld.com). It contains vector versions of tons of major company brands. This is a handy tool in the online advertising trade, where clients don't always get you the assets that you need. Doing a search for a current project that we are working on, I was able to find the exact logo that we needed (for Columbia Pictures).

Try it out next time you are in a pinch and the deadline is bearing down on you…

Lord Saatchi: Advertising is Dead

posted by hal…….

As reported in the Financial Times online, Lord Maurice Saatchi has announced “I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising.”

More on this shortly, but the gist of his argument is that technology, sociology and psychology have come together in a combustible mix to divide our world into under 25 “Digital Natives” and over 25 “Digital Immigrants.”

If you want a good summary right now, go to Brand Republic.

Speak Yankee or Dixie?

post by Hal…..

Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Stanley Cup has taken up residence in the South. Whatever the reason, NPR had a story this morning (and an online quiz!) about the causes and differences of regional speech patterns in the United States.

The quiz introduces itself thusly: “To find out how much Southern blood your speech shows, simply choose the words you use below, then press ‘Compute My Score!’ at the end.”

The test is based on research by the Harvard Computer Society and enhanced by Dr. Robert Beard, the CEO of Alphadictionary. The quiz is 20 multiple choice questions and bears absolutely no resemblance to “You might be a Redneck If…” surveys.

Take the Quiz Right Now: AlphaDictionary / Rebel or Yankee?

Advertising I Want to Watch

posted by greg…….

It should be obvious by now that as a society we are moving more and more toward niche interests and pursuits, made possibly by communication and information technologies and fueled partly by targeted content and programming (as well as our own self interests).

An eMarketer article by David Hallerman, The Death of Mass Marketing, talks about how advertising is affected by this movement, saying that “mass-market advertising is no longer as viable as it was in broadcast television’s heyday,” that “the internet has multiplied audience fragmentation far beyond what cable has done to the broadcast networks,” and “the hundreds — if not thousands — of niche markets found online not only create the need for greater ad targeting to reach the splintered audience, but all those niches make targeting more feasible, too.”

Not only do niches make targeting more feasible, but more importantly, it presents an opportunity to make the message more relevant and remove the stigma of advertising as an intrusive annoyance. As a cycling aficionado, I’m interested in all things bike riding, and I am genuinely interested in related product and service information. And that should be the goal of targeting – to serve up advertising that people want to receive.

The New Netscape

posted by hal…….

As reported by Reuters, The New York Times and others, Netscape came back to life this morning as an uber-news and blog aggregator. Jason Calacanis, famous for Silicon Alley Reporter and Engadget, is the driving force behind the push to re-invigorate Netscape in it’s new guise as an AOL service.

Nothing wrong with the concept – a lot of others are doing it, so why not jump on the band wagon? You weren’t expecting anything original were you?

I checked it out. Tried to sign up, maybe loft a comment. Sign-up didn’t work on Safari. Didn’t work on Firefox. I went to the trouble of downloading the Netscape browser (7.2 for Mac) – the site still choked on sign-up.

Honestly – today, tomorrow, the middle of next week – it doesn’t matter when you launch a new service AS LONG AS IT WORKS. This would seem to be especially true for a damaged brand like Netscape.

Will I go back to the site? Maybe. Maybe not.

The New Netscape – probably as irrelevant as the old Netscape.

25 Worst Products of All Time

posted by Jes… 

PC World recently released its 25 Worst Products of All Time article. While I don't necessarily agree with all of their choices, I think the 'worst' products tend to earn their status because of one (or more) of these things:

1. Bad usability
2. Sketchy ethical practices
3. Poor customer service
4. Trying to shoehorn a revenue model into a free product
5. Buggy software

Much of what is often categorized as buggy software actually has more to do with the first item on the list: poor usability.

As I was thinking about my own personal choice for the worst products ever, most of the things that came to mind were products that had poor usability. Poor usability combined with items (2) and/or (3) above creates a powerful cocktail for a truly infamous product.

With that in mind, here are a few products with poor usability in my opinion:

• Yahoo's small business web site services
• Toyota Prius' bluetooth calling feature
• Almost all wireless print servers

Please post comments with your own products, and maybe we can compile the list of 25 Worst Usability Experiences of All Time.

Incidentally, if you need to improve the usability of landing pages or registration processes for your online e-business initiative, contact us here at Brooks Bell Interactive.

Show ‘Em the Money

posted by Greg…….

The other day I wrote that when it comes to newsletters, people only want to read about things relevant to themselves. Let me go one step further. Whether you are an individual employee answering to your employer, a business unit reporting to a division, a service firm with clients, or a corporation with shareholders – at the end of the day, it’s all about how you make or save them money.

Applying this to newsletters then: What’s more relevant to business people in decision making positions than how to save or make them money? Create content that squarely addresses this subject and you have a winner! MarketingSherpa’s case study, How to Create Email Newsletter Busy Execs Will Consistently Open, Read & Click On, covers going about this.