Eric Friedman has an excellent post on how sees the future of advertising. I can't agree with him more. With the increasing number of devices that we have come to own as consumers, advertising is increasingly changing to 'discovering' and 'informing' continously, one customer at a time. Take a look at what he has to say:
I believe that the future of advertising is in providing real time information instead of real time interruption. This is the future of advertising, or what we call marketing 2.0.
Real time information is how advertising will work (and is working) for the next generation. We have been brought up on the idea of instant gratification and having information available to use 24×7 at our fingertips. It is no surprise that advertising is now more precise and targeted to our needs - this is a direct correlation to how we consume information in general today.
The difference between the two is a generic 30 second television spot that appears between segments of your favorite prime time show and a search query performed at 3:00am when you are looking to find some information.
In a world where optimization is not only needed but expected, every display of my ad and subsequent click results in a search engine learning about the relevance of showing it to each user. Engines such as Google and Yahoo use this information to help the user experience and provide the most real time and relevant information possible.
As companies learn that their dollars can be better spent placing their ads in front of people with questions, and understanding that their ad can actually answer these questions, the true shift in advertising dollars will occur. I know we have written about the fall of the television upfront and changes to advertising many times (1, 2, 3, 4) but now the knowledge exists to make these changes possible.
When you understand what your customer motivations are and appeal to them, even years later the communication piece can still remain a classic.
Martin Conroy's letter is one of them. He wrote a famous subscription letter for WSJ. It was not an ad or a TVC but a two page letter! NY Times reported that he passed away on Tuesday. Here's a tribute from the article.
Mr. Conroy’s masterwork never appeared in newspapers or magazines. Nor was it broadcast on television or the radio. It was a letter — a simple, two-page letter. It begins:
“On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both — as young college graduates are — were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.”
Then, a small note of foreboding:
“Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.”
Mr. Conroy’s letter is a subscription pitch for The Wall Street Journal. Written in plain language with the inexorable pull of a fairy tale, the letter is widely considered a classic of direct-mail marketing, sent to millions of people in the course of nearly three decades.
Alan Rosenspan, the president of Alan Rosenspan Associates, a direct-marketing concern in Newton, Mass., uses Mr. Conroy’s letter as a teaching tool in seminars.
“I ask people to read out loud the first paragraph of the letter,” Mr. Rosenspan said by telephone. “And what’s astonishing to me is that they never stop at the first paragraph. They keep on reading. And I tell them: ‘You have just proven why this letter’s so powerful. It’s a story.’ ”
May his soul rest in peace.
A former executive at online auctioneer eBay has come out of a short-lived retirement to take a job leading Silicon Valley startup LiveOps, which contracts with companies to handle customer service and sales calls. Maynard Webb, 51, left his position as eBay's chief operating officer in August after seven years with the company. Webb was named late Monday as chief executive of LiveOps, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company whose technology routes customer service calls to 9,000 work-from-home agents around the country.
Greg pointed me to an excellent video on "An Economic Response To Unsolicited Communication" by Marshall Van Alstyne about e-mail spam. While this is about email spam, I believe this has profund implications on:
- How to build a next generation list marketing company
- How the marketing in the future will move from paying to media (to get audience attention) to sharing the monies with media and audience(by paying for audience attention)!
Take a look:
MSN has launched demographic search which looks quite interesting to me. In online advertising, the demographics of the user is always in question as there is a lot of 'junk' registered data. Even though this is based on an index file of MSN search users, it can serve as a useful predictor of the kind of sites one would want to advertise.
Here's the link
Business Week has a great article on how customers can be involved and enagaged in every business, if only companies have the intent.
Passionate customers can transform your company. Here's how to make them your secret weapon:
Each week, Greg Selkoe, founder of streetwear retailer Karmaloop, and a handful of his employees gather in his office overlooking Boston Common to review new designs. The group votes on which, if any, of the T-shirts, jackets, and other clothing should be added to the line Karmaloop sells in its Newbury Street store and online.What's worth noting is that the designs are submitted by customers. Since October, 37 designs, out of about 1,000 that have been submitted, have been added to the 33-employee, $4 million company's offerings.
Selling clothing dreamt up by customers is just one facet of a business model that brings customers so far into Karmaloop's DNA that they have become, in effect, extensions of the company's sales, marketing, and product development teams. Karmaloop has an 8,000-strong army of customers who proselytize the brand and get discounts or cash when they, or someone they've referred, make a purchase. Members of this "street team," called reps, also upload images, photos, or artwork to Karmaloop's site to make company stickers or banners other reps can download. "The reps are evangelists for our site," says Selkoe. And they're doing their job: Fewer than 1% of Karmaloop's customers are reps, but their purchases and those they inspire account for 15% of sales.
CEOs have been talking about customer loyalty for years, but entrepreneurs such as Selkoe know that making people truly loyal to your company—to make them really, really like you—takes a lot more than a frequent buyer program. It means nothing less than getting people so jazzed about your brand that they become engaged contributors to your company's sales, marketing, and innovation efforts, and ultimately its success. How does that happen? By knocking down the walls between "you" and "them" and creating a larger, looser community that is inviting to both your customers and your employees.
TechSmith's Weber was such a fervent believer in the power of a customer community that three years ago she persuaded the company's president to create her chief evangelist position. She then built customer advisory panels by including customers so happy with products that they'd written "love letters" to the company over the years, as well as those she found on blogs and through customer referrals. But Weber didn't shy away from the company's critics. Among the panelists is Paul Pival, distance education librarian at the University of Calgary in Alberta, who had written on his personal blog that he found Camtasia Studio, a TechSmith product that records keystrokes and mouse movements made on a computer, slow and difficult to use. "I was surprised she sought me out," says Pival of Weber's overture. "It was a little bit gutsy, but ultimately successful." After getting involved with the company's customer panels, Pival says he realized the product had been improved.
On-demand customers are changing the way companies are transforming the workplace. Business Week has an interesting article on how Best Buy is responding to this challenge:
The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.
Another thing about this experiment: It wasn't imposed from the top down. It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution. So secret was the operation that Chief Executive Brad Anderson only learned the details two years after it began transforming his company. Such bottom-up, stealth innovation is exactly the kind of thing Anderson encourages. The Best Buy chief aims to keep innovating even when something is ostensibly working. "ROWE was an idea born and nurtured by a handful of passionate employees," he says. "It wasn't created as the result of some edict."
So bullish are Anderson and his team on the idea that they have formed a subsidiary called CultureRx, set up to help other companies go clockless. CultureRx expects to sign up at least one large client in the coming months.
Then again, the new work structure's proponents say it's helping Best Buy overcome challenges. And thanks to early successes, some of the program's harshest critics have become true believers. With gross margins on electronics under pressure, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) and Target Corp. (TGT ) shouldering into Best Buy territory, the company has been moving into services, including its Geek Squad and "customer centricity" program in which salespeople act as technology counselors. But Best Buy was afflicted by stress, burnout, and high turnover. The hope was that ROWE, by freeing employees to make their own work-life decisions, could boost morale and productivity and keep the service initiative on track.
It seems to be working. Since the program's implementation, average voluntary turnover has fallen drastically, CultureRx says. Meanwhile, Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE. Employee engagement, which measures employee satisfaction and is often a barometer for retention, is way up too, according to the Gallup Organization, which audits corporate cultures.
Five of the nation's largest employers plan to soon give their workers a unique healthcare benefit -- their very own electronic medical record that they can take when they travel, change jobs or see a new doctor. About 2.5 million workers and their dependents would have access to their health records through their computer. The records will be compiled by an independent, nonprofit organization. The information will be stored in a database that only the employee is supposed to be able to access.
Opening up an online high-yield savings account for Jeff Dennis, 57, of Brighton, Mass., was a no brainer. "I deposited $200 into an account and got a $25 bonus at a time when interest rates were in the basement," he told the E-Commerce Times. That was three years ago. Interest rates on savings are still in the basement. The popularity of online high-yield savings accounts is zooming, so much so that financial players from banks to insurance companies are falling over each other to get a product in the market.
TechNewsWorld Spotlight on Security Now Available. Register here and receive your copy today!
