The Marketing Innovation Blog

It's no longer marketing as usual.

Archive for November, 2009

Repeat After Me: I am Not Afraid of Technology

Monday, November 30th, 2009

As PR pros, we’d like to think we are special but the reality is that we are not unique. Virtually every industry has seen drastic changes in the last couple of decades. However, as the public voice of a company or organization, it’s important for us to stay ahead of the curve and proactively lead the pack to influence changes that are most important to our profession.

I began my career in PR in the mid-90s and remember thinking “we are going to save SO MUCH time and money when editors want press releases via email rather than fax or snail-mail!” And then it happened. Looking back, it’s amazing how much time do we save. From an agency standpoint, a major benefit of this time savings is that it allows us to spend our billable hours on strategic, value-added client work rather than administrative tasks.

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Theater of Public Influence – Ep. 23

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The holiday season is upon us and the Theater of Public Influence panel is checking out all the jingle bells and whistles making noise this year. In episode 23, we take a look at 4 major players in the holiday shopping game and discuss their efforts to capture your gift-giving dollar.

First up, Brady tries out MasterCard’s Priceless Gift Finder with mediocre results. Mike Stevens takes a page out of the Trend Report and tells us how to find the best deals on Black Friday. Mike Giovinelli looks at K-Mart and the triumphant return of layaway. And finally, Holly and Ben tackle two of the major “box retailers” – Kohl’s and Macy’s

Stay tuned for our next episode (coming next week), when our panelists play fantasy gift-giver in the first annual Theater of Public Influence Imaginary gift exchange!

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Wireless Advertising Advances

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The battle over the mobile advertising dollar stayed competitive throughout 2009, as advertisers still looked for the best ways to try and tap into this growing medium. While the economy stopped a number of companies from experimenting with mobile advertising in 2009, the technology to make it much more trackable has continued to evolve.  Two companies who are positioning themselves to benefit from the growth in mobile advertising are Google and Research in Motion (RIM).

 

On November 9, 2009 Google purchased AdMob for $750 million in order to expand their mobile advertising offering.  The deal is one of Google’s largest acquisitions behind the purchase of DoubleClick in 2008 for $3.1 billion.  The motivation behind Google’s purchase of AdMob was to help better justify the value of mobile advertising.  Google is now developing a number of new tools that help to create, serve and analyze mobile advertisements.  The acquisition will also allow Google’s clients to target mobile users within several ad formats thus helping the company to stay ahead of the competition in the mobile advertising arena. Google has already created an advertising environment online in which they dominate the competition, look for the company to do the same within the mobile medium.

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The (Facebook) Rules They Are A’Changin

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Rules. From our earliest recollection as a toddler, we were taught to “obey the rules.” I’ve always been a do-gooder (yep, I was that kid) so this has been easy for me. However, if rules are written in legal-ese, it takes a bit longer for me to figure out how to do right.

In our industry (marketing, and in my case in particular, PR) we have a responsibility to be current on the rules set forth by the mediums we use in order to best serve ourselves and our clients. For example, there are rules to using Twitter. Some are common sense (don’t say anything inappropriate while representing your brand), some are best practices (RT people whose work you admire and you found helpful), and some are set forth by the medium itself (follow, update, and API limits) .

Today I want to highlight a very important “rule change” the happened in November one of our most popular mediums: Facebook.

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Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

As Thanksgiving approaches so does the retail industry’s most important time of year, the holiday shopping season.  Black Friday, the official start of the holiday season is just a couple of weeks away and retailers are gearing up for this important shopping event.  In a year where the economy has affected so many things expect a significant amount of attention to be placed on Black Friday this year as it will help to predict the outcome of the holiday shopping season.  As big as Black Friday has become for the retail industry, Cyber Monday is what industry expects look at in order to predict the season’s online holiday shopping sales.

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Turn that commercial down

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

How many times has this happened to you?  You are sitting there watching your favorite program on television and boom a commercial comes on 1115% louder than the show was.  You quickly rush to grab the remote to either turn the volume way down or switch the channel as you are about to start bleeding from the ears.  It’s terrible, and nothing is worse than watching sports.  Commercial breaks during sports games are so loud that I fear my television is going to blow up.    So why are commercials so loud?

 

The short answer is that commercials are louder than televisions shows.  Currently, the FCC does not regulate the volume of television programs and commercials.  When a television show is filmed they use a number of different audio levels so the viewer can hear the distinction of a soft whisper versus a car explosion.  Advertisers don’t want to have different audio levels in their commercials so they record the commercials at the highest possible level possible because they want to grab the viewer’s attention.

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