How to get a teens attention

My neighbors spotted teenager asked me about cool adds and I pulled out the well known mustached milk adds. He is after all a key market segment. His comment “whatever” told it all.
Since that humiliating experience I have been on a mission to catch his attention. A few days ago I heard about the California Milk Campaign which tries irony. Think shades of Spinal Tap and a retro young ironic hip cool vibe? Who would have thought to put milk inside a guitar? In the hands of a musical phenom by the name of White Gold?
And you may ask what was the spotted ones response. Coool or something like that. Anyway it seems irony is the new cool. I am cool again. Respect.

Clinton vs Obama is Obama ahead ?

The Gallup daily reports that the the democratic race seems to be widening between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I love survey groups like the Gallup Poll . They get me thinking.
HAS HILLARY CLINTON LOST THE BATTLE – SHOULD SHE RETIRE?

There is gold in those System Stats

This morning I had a brain jolt when reading “Seth Godin’s Blog” where he argues that Firefox users are a group with distinct characteristics and tendencies. He calls Firefox users “a self-selected group of clickers and sneezers and power users.” He backs this characterization with some interesting observations and facts from their use of Squidoo. (one of his brilliant ideas). He writes:

“Example: 25% of the visitors we track at Squidoo use Firefox, which is not surprising. But 50% of the people who actually build pages on the site are Firefox users. Twice as many.”

“This is true of bloggers, of Twitter users, of Flickr users… everywhere you look, if someone is using Firefox, they’re way more likely to be using other power tools online. In order to use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to download and use a browser that wasn’t the default when you first turned on your computer. That’s an empowering thing to do. It isolates you as a different kind of web user.“

I missed that one. I must be honest the last time I worried about system stats was in the snail pace days of dial-up. I am going to look at the system stats of all my clients. Way to go Seth and thanks for opening up a pot of data gold. I can see a new love for system stats in the land of marketing.

Do yourself a favor and layout a few dollars and buy Seth Godin’s latest book Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? Read it and go for the brain jolt- this book is packed with edgy insight. Not only do you see the lights but Seth revisits some of his most popular marketing advice.

Is Seth onto something? Share your thoughts on the characteristics of Firefox users.

Cache reserves and canoes

Sunday is for reflection and today I came across a gem of technology trivia.

Cache which we know is temporary storage entered English in the 17th century from highly volatile but very proud crews of Canadian French and Indian adventurers called Voyageurs. The Voyageurs piloted huge canoes deep into the Canadian north. Those trips were long and required a lot of energy so the Voyagers placed along the way secret “cachers” of food. And thats how cache- as a on demand reserve entered our technology vocabulary – riding on a canoe.

Who would have guessed?

Top 10 Google Search Shortcut Tips

On April 1st John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, posted his “Top 10 Google Search Shortcut Tips”. I though it was another April Fools Joke. What a mistake.
These tips are gems and essentials. As John notes “Using specialized Google searches for SEO and competitive research is a pretty simple, but powerful tool. Many times you can improve your ranking for important search phrases by better understanding the construction of pages that rank well ahead of you. Studying and understanding how a well ranked page is optimized and having access to a list of sites that link to these pages will tell you a great deal about what you may need to do to get similar results.”

Check out John Jantsch’s list at My Top 10 Google Search Shortcut Tips

GREAT LIST

HOW TO ALIENATE YOUR CUSTOMERS

On April Fools Day I received an email from a pure pay online rug company. They are very successful and there is a lot to admire. What shocked me was how damaging to the company their recent email campaign was. Someone was asleep at the switch.

They had forgotten about their relationship to their clients and they had forgotten the most fundamental issues of appeal and e-mail marketing. The email stated I was the lucky winner of a rug from the company. I was excited and clicked on the email and the first message above the fold I got was April Fools. I had lost. First impressions above the fold count folks..message first.

The image below tells the story. I took a snapshot of what was above the fold on my screen. That is the absolute sweet spot. This is example of how not to email market. Make sure you get to the point quickly and do it above the fold. How many of us scroll down below the fold on the screen. Be honest – I have a 17 inch screen.   PS: Below the fold was a great offer. TO LATE

Behavioral Targeting is coming of age

Tom Hespos in an article in Imedia Connection on Behavioral targeting makes a startling claim about its effectiveness. He writes that ” It’s not uncommon to see 1,000 percent lifts in clickthrough and conversion rates when adding behavioral targeting to an online ad effort. With that kind of performance differential between targeted and untargeted ads, it’s more important than ever to understand how your ads are being targeted.Behavioral targeting has captivated marketers and agency people alike with promises of increased return, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that behavioral targeting learned how to scale appropriately. For example, when Tacoda was in the enterprise software business, its clients realized that BT’s biggest issue wasn’t identifying people according to their web behaviors but rather how to find enough people fitting certain behavioral criteria to make campaigns worthwhile.”
Its a great read. Also have a look at Neil Perry’s article on “Agencies & Behavioral Targeting”

Measuring Social Media

Measuring Social Media is something like sucking and blowing at the same time. You can build brand awareness and but To often the metrics are hard to get to. But there is help at hand. Fast Company has launced a new show entitled Global Neighbourhoods TV which is hosted by Shel Israel.

They are all good shows but the one that caught my attention is the most recent where Shel interviews Kami Huyse about how she used Social Media for her client SeaWorld San Antonio. Its sounds like a huge success. The Show

Interesting article in Marketing Vox “Social Media Marketing Still Lacks Strong Metrics“

Email Campaigns and deliverability

All marketers have silver bullets that they pull out when sales plummet. Usually they are e-mail campaigns, refined PPC, SEO tweaks and so on. To often however the favorite weapon in a slowing economy is e-mail campaigns. They are fast and quick.

Be careful of the temptation to do one more spin of the wheel and do yourself a favor and read Josh Aberants article “The banes of deliverability” in this weeks DMNews

What caught my eye in Josh’s article is that even if you did everything right as he said “by crafting appealing offers, providing relevant content and targeting those most likely to benefit, some of those e-mail messages still won’t get through”

Apart from the need to be clear on what people are opting in for one also needs to be careful of list fatigue and consumers getting peeved off. The distance between driving them to report your e-mail as spam is very low. Josh Aberant reports in his article that “half a percent is a common threshold —ISPs will take action to block your messages or deliver them to the junk folder.”

Hillary Clinton, Rocky Balboa and Barak Obama

Today Hillary Clinton compared herself to Rocky Balboa in that classic movie “ROCKY”. Addressing a meeting of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Tuesday, the former first lady and New York senator said she, like Rocky, wasn’t a quitter. She said “When it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit.”

Two things really came home. Hilary Clinton knows at last that she is against the ropes and she is finally realigning the Hillary Clinton brand. It may be to late for brand alignment. But good luck Hillary. You know you are the underdog by comparing herself to Rocky Balboa. Here is my advice Hilary come out swinging but don’t go toe to  toe  as Rocky did . Thats a losing strategy. Be aggressive, align yourself quickly , set a new agenda and command the media.

This ding dong battle between Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama is a study in branding, Public Relations and marketing. Barak Obama has done very well. It seems Hillary Clinton has misread her audience and will potentially lose the race.

My advice rise up above the underdog and swing as a victor. Drop this underdog stuff.