Just making a statement

I went to the post office yesterday and the guy working in the back had an NRA T-shirt on.

I would have taken his picture for you but...well....you know.

The worst sales letter I've seen in a while

I just got the most condescending sales letter I think I've ever seen courtesy of PBS.

"We decided to respect your intelligence - to use the power of television to strengthen our communities with preeminent programming and services that enrich, respond and relate to your life".

Should I even get started on my opinion on parasitic intelligentsia?

Read it here (PDF).

Don't ever do this...Don't ever alienate. Don't ever assume and don't ever get haughty.

More borrowed interest

I caught a bunch of promos yesterday on FX for their new race-bending show "Black. White" - which I have to say looks pretty interesting (even for a reality TV hater like me).

What I really dug was that at the end of the promo, they directed viewers to a "MySpace" site.

I hit the site this morning and there are nearly 27,000 "friends" listed on the site and 1,200 posts.

Brilliant use of a cool online site to bring and added element of hipness to this show.

Nice move....whoever you are. :)

Take a look at www.myspace.com/blackwhite

Laser Display May Create 3D Ads in the Sky

How cool is this???

Japanese researchers have developed a laser display which can produce "real" 3D images in the air, instead of the pseudo-3D images on two-dimensional planes created by current devices, according to an article in New Scientist (via Roland Piquepaille in his Emerging Technology Trends blog). While these displays are still in demonstration stage, they could soon be used to shine giant 3D ads in the air.

The system has been built by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and Keio University, in collaboration with Burton Inc.

What were they thinking

A caught a Chrysler 300 spot last night during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies that kind of made me scratch my head.

It referenced the new Harrison Ford movie, "Firewall" and told us to watch for the new 300 in the movie. As if we're going to stand in line so we can see the car.

Ya know - we get it with the product placement and the giveaway notion but this just seems like such a bad idea.

Somebody somewhere will certainly trumpet it as a success. Your thoughts? Anyone...anyone?

Holy Cow....I just blew my 15 minutes of fame.

How would you like to be the guy who was assigned to drag the plastic cow around by a rope during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies last night? What the &*$% was that all about? They even pumped the "moos" through the PA mix.

I was thinking to myself. What committee was sitting around what conference table and decided that this was a good idea.

"Yes - you're absolutely correct! What we need is a cow!"

Online Search

I came across a great article. Here's an excerpt.

Popularity of Online Search Is Skyrocketing
By Jennifer LeClaire
www.TechNewsWorld.com

"The double-digit increase in online search activity marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Internet consumer behavior," said Ken Cassar, senior director of analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings. "Online search is the primary tool most people rely on to do everyday research."

It seems everyone is searching for something -- and Nielsen//Netratings (Nasdaq: NTRT) is proving it.

The Internet media and market research firm on Thursday reported that the number of online searches across 60 search engines grew 55 percent year-over-year to nearly 5.1 billion in December 2005. By contrast, there were 3.3 billion searches conducted via search engines in December 2004.

While the number of online searches online swelled, the number of people connecting to the Internet rose a mere 3 percent to 207 million people in the U.S.

"The double-digit increase in online search activity marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Internet consumer behavior," said Ken Cassar, senior director of analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings. "Online search is the primary tool most people rely on to do everyday research."

Read the whole article

Good example of borrowed interest

I got this email from an opt-in list that I'm in. iPods are clearly buzzworthy - even if slit lamps aren't! (Slit lamps are binocular microscopes that are used by eye doctors to look at and inside your eyes).

Hook your wagon onto something hot and see where it takes you.

Super Bowl Commercials - The Best & Worst.

My favorite: The FedEx Stick Ad.

Close Second: GoDaddy's "SuperBowl Approved" Wardrobe Malfunction. (I pictured 50 million user pounding that server at once).

I hated: the Whopperettes.

Go watch them all at http://video.google.com/superbowl.html

What do you guys think?

The worst part of the Steelers Super Bowl Victory

Forgive the personal post but I'm a die-hard Browns fan. I was at the old Stadium for "the Drive" and have suffered through 6 years of football follies that rival the performance of the AZ Cardinals in futility.

Watching the Steelers win last night stung a little...not a lot...but a little because these Steelers are hard to hate.

They're what we wish our Browns were. A bunch of blue-collar hard working guys who play TOGETHER. And yeah, it was kind of nice seeing Bettis finally get there (as much as I hate to admit it). And love him or hate him, Hines Ward is the toughest and scrappiest player in the league. He deserved that MVP.

But the worst part of the Steelers victory is this: Quincy "Worthless" Morgan got a Super Bowl ring.

.....sigh. Somewhere, Tim Couch is laughing.

Creatures of Habit...

A brand new Super WalMart just opened in a nearby community a few days ago. It containes over 4 acres of merchandise ranging from truck tires to frozen quiche.

The mega center opened with all the local fanfare that such an event usually creates. There were even protests - courtesy of the local food workers union.

I heard that there were actually people waiting outside at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday so that they could be the first people to shop there. So it goes.

I walked in for the first time this morning and felt like Gilbert Grape. There was a decidedly blue-green tinge to everything. Very odd. The employees were TOO NICE - which is just the over eagerness of a group of new people at a new job.

They're in their honeymoon phase.

And the shoppers, much like myself were shuffling around glassy-eyed, absorbing the new envirnoment.

I do the grocery shopping most of the time. I like to do the cooking (it chills me out) and therefore like picking out the stuff which all-in-all works.

But my main reason is that I like watching consumers in the wild.

Call it field study...call it stupid. Call it whatever.

I like watching people pick stuff out. Face it, when you've got 22 kinds of pasta sauce staring you in the face, "reason" is not often the motivating factor in your purchase decision. (I like MID's - try it if you can find it!)

Anyway, so there I was, walking around with a fish-eyed stare like the rest of the shoppers and all I kept thinking about was just ditching my cart and going to my regular grocery store.

We are such creatues of habit - aren't we? We reach for the same spaghetti sauce and park in the (usually) the same general location. When we have our meetings, we all usually sit in the same place, don't we?

So what forces us to break our habits? What forces us to change?

Why did I go shop at WalMart this morning?

The Answers: The promise of low prices and everything under one roof. Seeing what all the hub-bub was about. It was closer than my regular grocery store. Adventure and discovery (jk).

It took me over an hour to find half of the stuff that I usually buy and then I kind of gave up. Things weren't in logical order (at least I thought so) and I couldn't shake the feeling that I didn't belong there. Don't get me wrong. It's not like I was looking for some holistic experience - after all, it's WalMart - but I guess I was expecting more of a grocery store and less of a warehouse. (The floors were dyed cement).

Afterwards, I ended up going to my regular grocery store to get the rest.

I walked onto the familiar tile in the entry. I walked up to the familiar face at the deli counter. I walked the familiar aisles and out of the corner of my eye, caught some of the same faces that I just saw at WalMart. They were home again too.

I think my grocery store overcharges. Their bakery is horrible, it's almost impossible to get a fresh loaf of bread.

But the people are friendly and I've been going there for so long that I guess I don't mind paying a little extra. In fact, this is the same grocery store that I went to when I lived in this small town 5 years ago. I drive 10 miles out of my way to go there because I just like the store, even though there's another chain location that's closer to me.

I gave WalMart a shot and now I'm going back to Giant Eagle (Madison).

My point: It's tough to unseat the local leader, the first on the block, the incumbent, the "first". You may get a shot but you get ONE shot. Make it count.

What brought you here today?

I was talking with a marketing director from another home building company the other day. We were joking about the traits of sales people.

For some reason, a lot of sales people can tell you in depth details of a prospects life but don't have a solid answer on what brought the prospect to the door that day.

After all, spoiling a nice conversation by asking a tough soul-baring question can really ruin the mood, doesn't it?

Which, makes marketing's job much harder because guessing what we should be spending our money on is based on 1) a gut feel or 2) a dartboard.

I/you/we spend a lot of money advertising our message. Some channels are dead. Some are underutilized.

Get your sales team to ask "what brought you hear today" and adjust your spending accordingly. You're guaranteed good results.

Advertisers Say Google Ads Work Best

Most marketers - 71 percent - think Google search ads are effective, compared with 62 percent saying so about Yahoo and 49 percent about MSN, reports MediaPost, citing a survey by Outsell.

Advertisers who thought Google performed best were the ones with the smallest marketing budgets: Those who said Google ads were "extremely" effective had total budgets averaging $3.7 million, whereas the budgets of those saying Yahoo and MSN were extremely effective averaged $4.6 million.

Outsell also predicted that spending on online marketing would grow 19 percent this year, with search increasing 26 percent.

Source: http://www.marketingvox.com

Brand Loyalty

"Loyalty is the absence of a better deal" -- submitted by RC.

Who's Listening to Podcasts?

While many people still haven't heard of podcasting, many others can't wait to hear more.

There is little argument - perhaps with the exception of VoIP - that podcasting was the breakout Internet phenomenon of 2005. It changed the listening habits of millions of consumers and affected the way radio ? and to an extent, television ? broadcasters communicated to their audiences.

Bridge Ratings found that approximately 5 million radio listeners downloaded at least one podcast in 2005, and that figure will nearly double in 2006 ? and double again in 2007.

Now a new survey of one thousand online adults (18+), commissioned by Podtrac and conducted by Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), sheds some light on exactly who is doing the downloading.

According to the survey, one in three respondents, 32%, are familiar with the term "podcasting," which means, of course, that about two-thirds of the population (even online) still knows little or nothing about podcasting.

Only about one-third, again 32%, of those who are familiar with the term have ever actually listened to a podcast ? that translates to roughly 9% of the online population. And two in five, 41%, of them have listened to a podcast in the past seven days.

The demographic breakdown is more intriguing. On one hand, 78% of those who have ever listened to a podcast are male. However, of that group, women are more likely than men to have listened in the past week.

"With podcasting just over a year old, the current maleness of the podcast audience at the aggregate level is consistent with gender usage trends of the early Web," said Mark McCrery, Podtrac's CEO. "The fact that so many women who have listened to podcasts have done so recently signals the beginning of a trend toward a more balanced gender composition of the podcast audience."

One gentleman, however, is getting into podcasts in a very big way.

Dan Safkow of Aliso Viejo, California, claims to have had it with mainstream media. He is "divorcing" television and radio, donating his video and audio entertainment devices to charity on December 31st, 2005, and relying on podcasting as his only source for home entertainment throughout the year 2006.

"I'm bored as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" he said.

Junking old technology is not a new idea, of course.

On January 1st, 2000, DotComGuy (yes, he legally changed his name) moved into an empty townhouse in Dallas vowing to go nowhere, use no communications other than the Internet and to buy all his necessities online for year. As USA Today reported: "Corporate sponsors hoped DotComGuy's stunt ? and his dependence on the Internet ? would encourage others to use cyberspace for transactions normally reserved for the storefront."

After the year was up, DotComGuy emerged from his townhouse none the worse for wear, married a girl he had met in his chatroom, changed his name back to Mitch Maddox and has largely been forgotten.

After all, millions of people "live on the Internet" now.

Will whole scale adoption of podcasting follow the same path? Check back at the beginning of 2007 and see.

For more information on related topics, read eMarketer's recently published Mobile Entertainment report.

Men, Women Online in Almost Equal Numbers; Use Web Differently

29 Dec 2005

The proportion of women to men who go online has mostly evened out, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, but what they do when online remains different: men are more likely to look at weather and news sites, download music, and find financial information, whereas women seek health and medical info, email, and look up directions, writes Mediapost (via MediaBuyerPlanner). According to the report, titled "How Women and Men Use the Internet," 68 percent of men are internet users, as are 66 percent of women. Six years ago, those proportions were 49 percent and 44 percent, respectively.

Some 52 percent of men currently use broadband at home, while only 48 percent of women do.

However, women under 30 and black women are ahead of male peers, writes the E-Commerce Times. Some 60 percent of black women are online, compared with 50 percent of black men; 86 percent of women ages 18-29 are online, compared with 80 percent of men that age.

Older women, though, trail older men: 34 percent of men age 65 and older are online, compared with 21 percent of women in that age group.

Source: http://www.marketingvox.com/

This should be a proverb.

If you have nothing to look forward to but a paycheck each week, you are wasting your time.

(Forwarded to me by "Z")

Who has time for this?

I read an article the other day in BusinessWeek about the MySpace generation (Click Here for the BW Podcast) and was blown away about how connected the kids are today. What especially got me was the fickleness of the crowd in terms of "what's in" and the half-life of basically anything.
Nobody wants to be interuppted (we knew that)

So how do we mass produce a customized world? :)

How do we mass market a GENUINE one-to-one user/client/customer experience? The key word is genuine.

I hate voice mail systems...and nothing infuriates me more than the cheerful computer voice that is guiding me through the prompts in "order to serve me better" when I'm already pissed off - only to be transferred to a bored tech rep in Delhi.

Here's our big marketing challenge. No one wants to be sold anymore (but did they ever???) - they're too clever. TV and radio are a waste of money (so they say). Print is dead (so they say) - but has anybody clicked through a banner ad lately? Anyone

There's a bit of a backlash with podcast advertising. The purists are at arms. You can't do that they say. People don't want to have to listen to advertising. So we do it for free...for now. Remember a decade a go when we first got involved with this here world wide web. No one will pay - you can't advertise! You'll just commercialize it! (...yeah...that's the point.)

So here we are chewing up bandwidth and spending our time producing, posting and downloading content to share with the billions and trying to make a buck off of it. Why? Because I built my portfolio 15 years ago thank you and my pro-bono plate is full. :)

There's a billion blogs out there and somehow you found this one! :)

SIDENOTE: I spent 47 seconds this morning deleted 73 spam emails selling me everything from viagra to geniuine faux swiss watches that would make me sexier for the ladies and the shady bastards fill it with babble to fake out the software I installed just so I wouldn't get this drek in the 1st place.

Does this work? Seriously? It would have to - just by sheer numbers but I can't imagine anyone opening up Outlook and going "Oh my god, ya know - I was thinking about buying some Cialis over the internet. Good thing this came".

So Anyway - who has time for all of this. I'm telling you - we're going to tip over and revert to one on one selling the old fashioned way. People buy people (not a typo).

Hmmmph...I desist. c-ya

ideaPeddling Podcast

I've finally gotten around to getting the ideaPeddling podcast launched after threatening to do so for the past 6 months.

If you like some of the tips you've seen in this blog, then sign up to receive ideaPeddling once a week! The RSS Feed is: http://www.aflmarketing.com/podcast/ideapeddling.xml.

iTunes users - type in "ideaPeddling" in the search bar. (I'd post the link but they haven't posted it yet".

You'll get great sales & marketing tips and tricks. I'm also looking for your input. Do you have a take? Email me your take at podshow@aflmarketing.com and I'll try to work it into the show. Try to keep it under 60 seconds. MP3 format only please.

My Odeo Channel (odeo/1db8751be64b6df0)

Getting Sweaty: Staring Dead-Eyed at the Deadline

You're crafting an important presentation on a key project. It's 6 pm. The nerves are kicking in. Your idea stream has dried up and you're staring at the blinkety-blink of your cursor against the bare white page on your monitor.

In exactly seventeen hours, ten sets of eyeballs will be boring a hole through your brain as you unveil your latest creation. And, right now you haven't a clue where to go next.

What do you do?

We all get creative block but in order to conquer it, we have to change our perspective on a problem in order to uncover our next steps.

Years ago, Sting (the musician, not the wrestler), was quoted as saying, "An album is never completed...it is simply abandoned".

There comes a point where there is simply nothing more to offer creatively.
The development and refinement of any given project is involving,
challenging and actually quite fun until you get to the "action" points near the end and the presentation that wraps it up in a nice tidy box. We love to theorize and speculate. We thrive on the "aha" moments and dread having to put it all together at the end - especially when it's our reputation on the line.

So, how do you summon up the inspiration to cross that finish line?

First, breathe. Then go take a walk, eat a banana or pull out your putter for a little office putt-putt. Do whatever you have to in order to clear your mind of your dilemma prior to kicking it back into gear again.

Now, collect your work. Make a pile and drop it on the floor - it doesn't matter if your notes get mixed up because they are just "your notes" - and technically, all a note is supposed to do is trigger a memory, right?

Pull out a sheet of paper or click on Word and create an outline as if you were starting from scratch.

By having mentally flushed your work in progress another step in the "notes" process, you'll ultimately free yourself from the constraints of your dead-end train of thought. It's kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle and then dumping it to start over - you'll start in a different place but you'll recognize shapes and colors so the assembly is much quicker the second time. You'll also see things you never noticed before as your mind re-analyzes data, consider new alternatives and uses your mental and physical notes to forge new ideas.

No doubt, that this "second time around" you'll gravitate towards the soul of your project and its presentation. Consequently, you will develop a sharper focus than you did the first time around.

Once you separate the core idea from the forest of data, your concept will be stronger and more convincing than ever.