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.

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.

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.

Internet Acronyms

posted by hal…..
In the word dodge, two rival camps compete for dominance: those who would keep the language “pure,” and those who see language (especially English) as changing and dynamic.

Shakespeare coined many words, gravitating particularly toward Latinate endings. Lots of people are still pissed. Authors, journalists, bloggers and writers of all stripes coin new words and phrases daily. Some terms will join the main body of language (“google it”) while others will wither away (“bling”).

But what do we make of Internet acronyms? You know, that annoying little shorthand used for IM-ing and text messaging. Scourge or savior? What would Shakespeare make of it?

Lots of websites have sections on internet acronyms, but Netlingo has one of the most complete.

Here are a few amusing entries –

BTHOOM (Beats the Heck Out of Me)
BTSOOM (see above)
CSL (Can’t Stop Laughing – it’s the new LOL)
DQYDJ (Don’t Quit Your Day Job)
GAL (Get a Life)
IIIO (Intel Inside, Idiot Outside)
ILICISCOMK (I Laughed, I Cried, I Spat Crumbs On My Keyboard)
KYPO (Keep Your Pants On)
OMIK (Open Mouth, Insert Keyboard)
PAL (Parents Are Listening)
SSEWBA (Someday Soon, Everything Will Be Acronyms)

You get the idea. Some of these terms are migrating into everyday language – my teenage daughter seems to speak exclusively in acronyms.

ME: Hey Jill, you want to help me wash the truck?
JILL: Kimwas, Dad.

It means “Kill me with a Spork.”

Whatever our position on the “sanctity of language” as enshrined in the OED, it’s beneficial for us as marketers, writers and advertisers to recognize the widespread usage of Internet Acronyms and employ them where it is appropriate. It may also help us communicate with our kids.

What’s a Spork?

Dime Store Packaging

posted by hal…….

With all the fancy marketing talk going around these days, it’s good to occasionally recall simpler times. So let’s all take a moment to reflect back when it was okay to call your product “Plastic Hut” instead of something like “Agricultural Education Center.”

This little site – Dime Store Packaging – contains a couple of dozen hilarious packaging concepts from the days of the dime store.

(Thanks to Cory at BoingBoing!)

Relevance

posted by greg…..

One of the more popular online marketing buzzwords is “relevance,” and a lot has been written about the impact of landing page optimization and behavioral targeting toward this end. In today’s iMedia Connection alone there were two such articles: BT Puts Theory into Practice Online by Bill Gossman (http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9829.asp) and Radical Simplicity for Web Design by Jamie Roche (http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9849.asp). But let’s not overlook the impact of developing creative that serves to gratify needs. Like fishing, you have to use the lure that best attracts your target, or when thinking about developing creative for your target audience, think like your target audience. For example, casual gamers like to be rewarded when playing, they respond to the immediate gratification that short word or card games present. If casual gamers are your target audience, for example, then craft a marketing campaign that appeals to these sensibilities, by making the campaign itself a game within a game with a clearly defined and gratifying reward system.