Advertising and Marketing

Why Not to Protect Your Email Address from Being Harvested by Spammers

February 25, 2008

I just became aware of a trademark/branding issue that affects someone I know. I don't know the guy well, by any means, but I know who he is, and I figured "Hey, I should probably let this guy know about this, just in case he's interested." So I went to his website, clicked through to his contact page (how about putting an email address in the footer?), noticed his email address wasn't linked (annoying), so I had to copy and paste it (hence the annoying bit), sent an email off, and got an error back a minute later. Turns out the guy had included hidden characters in his code so that if a script were out there searching around for email addresses, it would copy the wrong email address and therefore this guy won't get any spam. Unfortunately, he didn't get that email from me, and although I was motivated enough to write this blog post about it, I'm not motivated enough to go back to his website, click through the contact page again, and then type in his email address.

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Weight Loss, Anorexia, and Advertising

February 14, 2008

Now honestly, who would create an ad like this and honestly think "Yes, this is the type of woman who needs to lose 25 lbs."

Not that this topic is new. The controversy over marketing, its effects on young women, the apparent rise in diseases like anorexia and bulimia and the subsequent need for eating disorder treatment programs has been with us for decades now.

This ad is simply one more example that either people are ignorant, people just don't get it, or people don't care. Shouldn't they have put a big, fat woman in the ad? But then I suppose the people who are sensitive about fat people being portrayed as such in advertising would be up in arms, shouting and waving signs and demanding that fat people be accepted and loved for their fatness and not denigrated or exploited for corporate profit.

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The Bad Billboard Project

March 12, 2007

You're probably not like me, but if you are, you wonder how people are able to spend thousands of dollars per month on a billboard that can't be read by anyone in a moving car or which is so ugly as to make customers less likely to buy the advertiser's products. For those of you who feel my pain, I bring you The Bad Billboard Project.

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Marketing Quality to Price-Sensitive Customers

February 19, 2007

This post is a question, not a statement. The question is how does one go about marketing a high-quality B2B product or service to customers who are at best price-sensitive, and at worst just plain cheap? Add to the situation that the product/service is a new offering, and the marketplace is already crowded with offerings that claim to be high-quality. I've already got a few ideas, but any suggestions/insights/experiences would be appreciated.

1. Branding. Although within this particular space every competitor already says in one way or another that they offer a high-quality service, their brand doesn't reinforce the claim. Everything from their logo to their website to their messaging says they are fly-by-night operations. However, I don't pretend to believe that good design and branding will carry the day when it comes to selling a product/service to cheap customers who tend to ignore good branding. Certainly it will help, but I don't believe it will be enough for effective differentiation.

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The Craft of Clear and Concise Communication Through Competent Copywriting

December 19, 2006

I am not a professional copywriter, but I know when I don't understand something. I respect those companies that can clearly and concisely communicate what it is they do and I admire the skills of the copywriter or marketer who creates good messaging. Getting your message across to the majority of recipients shouldn't be a measure of excellence but rather competence, although the more experience I get in life the more I find that excellence and competence are often the same thing. Oh, and I'm something of a sucker for alliteration.

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How to Take Advantage of Digg

December 7, 2006

Getting a link from Digg's homepage can mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of people visiting your website. A public relations consultant can get 100 or 1,000 times the normal value of a press release if they can somehow get it on Digg's homepage, where links to content on other websites stay or go away depending on how many people "digg" or vote for that content. The more diggs, the longer the content stays on the homepage. A hundred or two hundred diggs can often be enough to get your content there. The savvy marketer can use traffic generated from a Digg homepage link to generate leads, signups, awareness, and revenue. An entrepreneur with a good, web-based business idea could practically guarantee the instant success of his or her business with a link from Digg's homepage.

So how do you get on Digg's homepage? You could either have something so interesting that people will be naturally motivated to digg it, you can email all your friends and ask them to digg it, or you can just hire 300 people in India to digg it. That's the topic of a recent post by Seth Godin, and it could spell the end of Digg as we know it, just as they come out of their beta phase.

Thanks to Russ Page for turning me on to Seth's post regarding Digg.

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How to Name a Sports Arena

November 21, 2006

The Delta Center is no more, long live the...Energy Solutions Arena?

Those who know me know that I'm not into mainstream sports. The worst date I've ever been on...well, second worst, was when my soon-to-be-wife took me to a BYU basketball game. I was miserable the entire time and couldn't wait to leave. The only part I was impressed with was when they started throwing the cheerleaders 50 feet in the air. That was something. A bunch of guys throwing an orange ball through a metal ring with a net on it? Boring. I'm sorry, I'm just not wired in such a way as to find that interesting or entertaining. But my dislike of basketball notwithstanding, I can still find something morbidly fascinating about the recently renamed Delta Center and its new moniker, the Energy Solutions Arena.

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How to, Create Controversy

November 3, 2006

The title is not "How to Create Controversy," it's "How to, Create Controversy." Or should that be a semi-colon instead of a comma? I can never remember.

Based on purely unintentional and anecdotal experiences, I've come to the conclusion that if you want to drive more traffic to your blog and get more comments there are two ways to do it; publish "how to..." content, and create controversies.

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Fighting Battles and Losing - The Real Estate Industry

July 28, 2006

I've become fascinated by what companies do when they are having serious problems, especially when they include advertising as part of their survival strategy. My fascination stems from how many of these "We've got to turn things around, fast!" advertising campaigns merely confirm to the public that said company is not just in trouble, but their demise is already a done deal. Cases in point, Coldwell Banker and realtors in general.

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Microsoft vs. the iPod

July 7, 2006

Many technology (and engineering firms and auto manufacturers for that matter) have a fundamental misunderstanding of why people buy things. Some people buy a product instead of a competing product because they've researched the technical specs, features, capabilities, etc. and for those reasons they feel one product is superior to another. But the vast majority of consumers (i.e. the general public, not governments or businesses) buy one product instead of another because the product is cooler than the other, not functionally better. That's why Microsoft's product that will compete with Apple's iPod is going to fail.

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Advice from Established Bloggers, a Marketing Research Study on Blogging

June 14, 2006

I recently was invited to participate in a marketing research study on blogging. The study was conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Chancellor Professor of Marketing and Director, Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

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Marketing to Skateboarders

June 9, 2006

Pet peeves? Yeah, I've got a few. One of them has to do with being poorly marketed to. I don't mind people marketing to me, but for the sake of Pete do your research and use your basic intelligence to create something that will have at least a chance of reaching me.

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Get a Free iPod...Well, Almost Free

March 27, 2006

This post is in no way related to a previous post in which I promised free iPods to anyone who referred a search engine optimization client to MWI.

This is about something you've probably heard of, may have participated in, or maybe you just thought it was a scam. I thought it was a scam, or at least something destined to fill my inbox with an additional 50 spam messages per day, but apparently it's all legit. I even found an article in Wired Magazine about it.

Here's how it works in a nutshell...

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Ignition Consulting Group, The Ad Agency's Agency

December 31, 2005

Don't you hate it when you're almost finished with a blog post and then you accidentally hit the keystroke to go back a page in your browser, and when you hit the forward button it reloads the page and you lose everything you typed? Arrgh! So, as I was saying...

I just stumbled onto Ignition Consulting Group the other day, and I must say I'm intrigued. It was founded by Tim Williams, formerly the head of R&R Partners.

Their website says this about them:

Ignition Consulting Group helps branding firms define and develop their own brand. We work with advertising agencies, public relations firms, design firms, interactive firms, media firms, in-house agencies and other marketing communications organizations to help them:

1. Define their positioning and align it throughout their entire organization.

2. Adopt the best practices of the best marketing communications firms.

3. Reinvent key aspects of their organization and business model to become more relevant to clients in today’s multi-channel environment.

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Common Youth Marketing and Advertising Mistakes

December 6, 2005

I often wonder how it is that adults can so easily forget what it was like to be a teenager. I think about this frequently, because I frequently see marketing and advertising campaigns, designed to target the 13-20 year-old demographic, that are so completely out of touch as to be damaging to the brand, product, or service being marketed.

One such example is a recent online advertisement for Levi Strauss jeans that attempts to market to skateboarders.

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Worked Skateboard Magazine and Online Publishing

December 2, 2005

Sure, there's nothing new about an online magazine, they're all over the place. But I'll bet you probably haven't seen one like Worked Magazine.

Leave it to skaters to think "Well, what if the online magazine actually looked and worked like a real magazine?"

Go to http://www.workedmagazine.com/, and then click on the right where it says "Click here to launch".

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Training Table Radio Ads--A Little Behind

October 19, 2005

Have you heard the Training Table's radio ads lately for their low-carb burgers? When I say they're a little behind I don't mean that's what you get from eating them, I mean they missed the boat, they're not on the ball, they're not with it, they're a tad bit off.

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CEOs Who Blog

June 18, 2005

Just saw a link to a page of CEO bloggers on Paul Allen's blog.

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Another Great Moment in Attraction Advertising

May 23, 2005

http://www.beam.tv/beamreels/reel_player.php?XkNbYWSwTr

I don't know who made this, I don't know anything about it. I'm too lazy/busy to find out at the moment. But it's hilarious and had to be posted.

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Guerilla Marketing

April 15, 2005

What exactly is guerilla marketing? It's a term used to describe marketing that is unconventional and generally inexpensive and maybe just a bit sneaky. It comes from the jungle's of Central America where neo-Fascist rebels called Serbs engage in guerilla warfare, which is a type of advertising campaign designed to undercut the local phone companies and free Guatemala from its debts to the IMF and TLC.

So here's a form of guerilla marketing you may not have heard of. It's called "putting a temporary tattoo on your head for a month in exchange for $10K."

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Mail Order Chickens

Another entry in the saga of "attraction-based marketing"--Mail Order Chickens.

http://www.mailorderchickens.org/

Despite the fact that I'm incredibly busy at work, I couldn't help but spend 15 minutes looking at this bizarre website. Apparently it has something to do with social causes related to Ghana, IMF, the World Bank, and Christopher Walken.

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The Bad Billboard Project

April 6, 2005

I'm sure someone else is doing this but I'm going to start my own one of these days--The Bad Billboard Project.

Basically I'm going to stop my car on the freeway in the middle of traffic whenever I see a bad billboard and take a photo with the digital camera I haven't bought yet and then I'm going to criticize them here and see if I can get anyone to take issue with me.

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TV Advertising and Tivo

February 3, 2005

A few months ago we started house-sitting for my in-laws. Part of the deal is that we have to pay the bills for Dish TV, which comes with Tivo. Actually, I'm not sure if it's Tivo, but evidently Tivo has done a good enough job with branding that I don't know the name of any of the competing services.

In case you've never used Tivo or a similar service, it's wonderful. Yes, you can already record TV with a VCR, but this makes it so much easier you'll never use a VCR again. One of the benefits is that you can skip commercials 30 seconds at a time and watch an hour long show in about 40 minutes. This is great for me, but renders advertising almost useless. And for this reason, advertisers are going to have to start doing more ads like this:

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-video/Media/video/2005/01/27/golfgti.mov

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Overstock.com - Example of Bad Advertising

January 27, 2005

"And sometimes...it's all about the gold."

Overstock.com is a Utah-based online retailer. They believe in not paying an ad agency to come up with their ads, but rather soliciting ideas from employees. Here are the results:

http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=staticpage&page_id=2440

:: Update :: The specific commercial I refer to in this post has been removed from the page I link to above. Maybe it's out there somewhere, but I don't really have the motivation to find it if it is.

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