Are you already paying for postcards or other mailers? What if we could do your direct mail, PLUS our exponentially better email marketing program as well – for the SAME PRICE you’re paying now?

Interested?

Stay tuned, our new toolkit, DM² for marketers will be launching in July 2009!

Ad dollars are leaving print… and fast!

Their Q1 losses for 2009 were worse than expected, around a 27% loss in advertising revenue. This outpaced their efforts to cut costs (not surprising, good journalism is expensive).

Seth Godin, on his blog, is predicting that by 2012 there will be, “no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US.”

WOW! and entire vertical market will be gone, or almost gone in less than three years!

These are both interesting reads and worth the effort to see what’s coming for online advertising.

We have seen with with our clients, and in our past, efforts to cut “traditional” media spending and emphasize online strategies. We’re helping our client get better results through email and PPC marketing; things that are measurable and quickly executable.

• Write A Killer Profile
• Focus on a Quality Network Rather than Quantity Network
• Establish a Time-Saving Routine
• Respect Your Friends
• Start to SHARE

read more

And then, from us, some advice:

It’s important that your Social Networking profile/site be as professional as your business. Make sure that your copy is well written, that your page is free of typos, that you friends list reflects your potential customers and employees, and, perhaps most importantly, make sure that your profile provides potential customers with a method to contact you, either email or phone or physical address.

Whether you do it yourself, or use an agency to help you, Social Networks are here to stay and having a presence, no matter how small your business, is important.

On a larger scale, the folks at Procter & Gamble (P&G), just held a little “summit” to figure out how to use Social Media to help their business…read more at Cincinatti.com.

And here’s some anecdotal evidence that Facebook has overtaken Google as a source for referrals to some sites…

“A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…”

Sorry, wrong story.  It was a long time ago, however, when I was at Wunderman.  We created this metrics package because we didn’t trust the client’s reporting package.  We called it iMetrics and, while we were building this tracking package we realized that not only could we tell what our users were doing on the site, but, we could, with the inclusion of a VERY small piece of additional code, deliver targeted call-to-action messaging during their browsing experience.  We played with it, talked to our strategy and planning folks, and created some interesting logic to deliver the ads based on the users actions within the site.  Using this simple methodology we were able to boot our lead generation for the client by more than 2000% (no, that isn’t a typo).  The message, from that, and something that has continued to stick with me for the past 10 years, is, “Give the Consumer What They Want, When They Want It.”
This ties directly to something over on eMarketer, an article about ad personalization & targeting, another good read.

The New York Times (nyt.com) gets it… They were the ONLY newspaper to roll out an application with the launch of the new iPhone… And, they have an advertising program designed for this medium. Very nice work, NYT.

• 24/7 Real Media – A Digital Media Company
• Blast Radius – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Brierley+Partners – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Burson-Marsteller – PR & Public Affairs
• CommonHealth – Healthcare Communications
• digital@JWT – J. Walter Thompson’s Digital Advertising & Marketing Group
• G2 – Direct, Digital, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Grey – Advertising
• Hill & Knowlton – PR & Public Affairs
• JWT – J. Walter Thompson – Advertising
• Kang & Lee Advertising – Demographic Marketing
• KnowledgeBase Marketing – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Landor Associates – Brand Identity
• Marsteller – Advertising, Corporate & B2B
• Mediaedge:cia – Media Management
• MindShare – Media Management
• Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide – Advertising
• OgilvyOne Worldwide – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Studiocom – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Sudler & Hennessey – Healthcare Communications
• Team Detroit – A "blended" shop consisting of teams from Y&R, JWT, & O&M to service Ford‘s brands
• VML – Digital, Direct, Promotion & Relationship Marketing
• Wunderman – Direct, digital, promotion & relationship marketing
• Y&R – Advertising
• Young & Rubicam Brands – Advertising; Branding & identity ;
  Direct, Digital, Promotion & Relationship Marketing; Healthcare Communications; PR & Public Affairs

Sorry about the long list, but I sort of took a walk down memory lane… I’ve worked for the WPP companies in the past and know people at most, if not all, of the agencies above.  Read my commentary after the break about why I think this is HORRIBLE for marketers…

So, back to the question… is the good for marketers?  Well, media
companies have sort of been doing stuff like this for years, buying
"blocks" of time for their client during the "upfronts," etc….  This, however, in my view, goes FAR beyond those "upfront" buys.  We now have a media company providing a toolkit into ITS platform only and partnering with a HUGE holding company to push that toolkit down stream to the individual media planning and buying agencies.  The agencies just became incentivized to do business with Yahoo!’s properties and not Google‘s and other’s properties.  The interesting conflict here is that some of the WPP brands represent the MSN group, and other Microsoft brands, so it’ll be interesting to see how this "plays out," on the ground with the individual agencies.  In the past, when WPP has "pushed" things like this down to the individual agencies it has been done as effectively as possible, the Team Detroit group, above, is an example where a client wanted to unify their business systems and WPP "merged" three large agencies into a single entity and LOTS of people on the business side of those agencies were asked to "leave the building."

• Create linkages between services based on
  individually-controlled identity federation
• Compete on creating the most compelling social
  experience, not social graph lock-in
• Develop social applications that have meaning
• Integrate social networks into existing activities
• Design business models that reflect the value
  created by people’s social network

These are great ideas, it’s interesting to see that the "traditional" research companies are breaking new ground and helping us (digital/online/interactive folks) educate both the traditional agency folks and our clients.

1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee – Here is his blog, and his predictions for the future of the WWW.
2. Professor Nigel Shadbolt
3. Professor Wendy Hall – Her homepage.
4. Kai-Fu Lee
5. Dr. David Belanger
6. Mitchell Baker – Her blog.
7. Mark Bernstein
8. Robert Cailliau – His website.
9. Robert Scoble – His blog.
10. Tim O’Reilly – His homepage.

Not a list to laugh at, at all.  So, where was I among all of this?  Well, thirteen years ago, while Netscape was undergoing its IPO and starting the first "boom," of what we now call, "New Media," I was working in IT at a large advertising agency in Los Angeles.  We decided it would be a good time to demonstrate, to our clients, at the time names like, Vons, Flamingo Hilton, Honda Motorcycles, that we should be doing something with this "WWW" thing.  Well, we built some small products in JavaScript (well, back then we called it LiveScript); we went to the first Netscape Developers Conference in NYC; we impressed our clients with flashy branding stuff.  Then I moved on to a classified service, headquartered in Orange County, CA… We began putting classified ads online, we migrated their flat-file system to a dynamic, server-side database system, then, we moved in on to a Microsoft based database application…
The point of the story, though, is that what was misunderstood fifteen years ago is still misunderstood by a great many people.  Click through to find out what and why…

Misunderstandings…
Well it’s not hard to understand why the WWW is misunderstood by many people in marketing and advertising…
Is it a place for brand advertising?
Is it a place for direct marketing?

What is interactive marketing?
Well, I guess it’s both, if it is used correctly.  It provides marketers with the ability to build their brand in new and unique ways.
Most importantly, however, is that it brings the reality of one-to-one marketing to marketers.
It’s up to us, then, the agencies that provide strategies for our clients, to use the "New Media" environment to most effectively build their brand and communicate with their target markets.  We must coach them with the right marketing mix.  When is it appropriate to have a blog, when is it appropriate to have a MySpace site, when is an online survey a good idea, when should a marketer send email, how many, how often, etc….  Here at DMIdeas that is what we know and that is the experience and skill set we bring to our clients.