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.

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.

Write About What You Know

Blogs are all the rage these days. It seems like if you don’t have one you’re out of the loop, especially if you’re an online marketer.

The problem is, if everyone is doing it, it becomes harder to generate an interesting voice amongst all the clutter. It’s kind of like newsletters. They’ve become so easy to produce that everyone seemingly has one. The standard company newsletter has become predictable. People forget – no one wants to read about another company’s news; they want to read about themselves! (Or at minimum, about things relevant to themselves).

That doesn’t mean blogs and newsletters aren’t important and valuable. It does mean, however, that you can’t roll out the standard fare and expect to generate interest. You have to look very closely at what you do well as a company – at the reasons other companies do business with you – and use blogs, newsletters, and other similar forums not as a trendy offering but as another way to further communicate your company’s core value and expertise.

Two articles in today’s iMedia Connection newsletter address this subject, and got me thinking about it in the first place:

Get Started with Email Newsletters

Michael Mayor states that the key to successful email newsletters is staying focused. As an “interest starting point” for your customers, email newsletters need to stay on target and provide relevant and valuable content.

What Matters Most in Email Marketing

Tricia Robinson also acknowledges the importance of email marketing, when done correctly, and applies the traditional 40/40/20 direct marketing principle to email marketing – offering our target audience what they want, when they want it is the key to success.

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?

Less Is More

by greg…….
Following up on my comment yesterday that “today’s consumers are so inundated with choices that they are looking for a reason to reject an option and move on rather than making an active decision,” I have some quantitative evidence in support.

The Marketing Experiments Journal has an article out today that concludes “emails offering one service compared to emails offering a choice of services bring higher conversions.” Their findings, they observe, aren’t surprising given that a website landing page which focuses on a single product or service will almost always do better than a similar page which tries to sell multiple products or services, and in their test the email with 1 free offer outperformed the email with 4 free offers in sales conversion rate by 464 percent.

Here’s the link to the article as published on iMedia Connect

And if you have a chance, check out MarketingExperiments.com – it’s a performance-based online marketing gold mine!

Customer Service as Marketing

posted by Greg.

Is customer service direct response marketing? Not exactly, but good customer service, like good direct marketing, leaves a direct impression, good and bad.

In this day of hyper competition for customers’ attention, good customer service is a must. It doesn’t even have to be outstanding, just above average, since most customer experiences are forgettable, at best. In fact, today’s consumers are so inundated with choices that they are actually looking for a reason to reject an option and move on rather than making an active decision.

Case in point. We just ordered a brand new computer from an online retailer. It didn’t work out of the box, but instead of replacing it with a new one, no questions asked, we have to ship the original back whereupon a technician will examine it, and if repairs need to be made, etc., etc. Meanwhile, we need this computer NOW so that we can serve our customers. Sure it may cost the computer retailer more money in the short term to replace it, but in the words of our purchasing agent, “they clearly don’t want repeat business.” You can do the math.

Contrast that with a password I needed in order to unlock a free .pdf white paper I received as part of attending a conference. I was supposed to already have the password, but I didn’t, and asked if it could be provided. Not one, but two separate people promptly addressed my inquiry, and one even left me a voicemail as a backup in addition to a separate email she sent. I thought this reaction, given the relative insignificant value of the transaction, to be a little surprising. But it was a pleasant surprise.

There is no question which company I had the better direct response with.