Advertising is not rocket science. It's about understanding media relationships and bringing value t
We all come across articles, stories, research that helps us paint a marketing picture. We can alll use this page to post information, research, and articles useful to anyone interested in the advertising community.
Insightful words from Elon Musk, "I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you; it can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed, but is right for you...low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!"
The pandemic shook up US counties' populations as Americans looked for cheaper living or a more idyllic lifestyle. Insider mapped the overall results.
Best time to increase market share! When you competition stops advertising.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2019/09/05/when-a-recession-comes-dont-stop-advertising/
With talk of a possible economic slowdown, numerous case studies have pointed out that marketers should not cutback on their advertising. Those advertisers that maintain their "share of voice" or change their ad message to emphasize value, often end up with a higher "share of market".
Some insightful words during these difficult times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=107&v=kHaM_7l5-Gw&feature=emb_title
How to advertise when people are anxious, distracted, and afraid. It's not about features and benefits. It's about relationships.
A great ad from the 1990s that makes you think.
Multichannel campaigns can become complex and challenging, but research released Friday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau shows that consumers viewing a constant message across a variety of channels can improve purchase intent by 90% and brand perception by 68%.
Episode 2: Blogger and FeedTacoma.com Creator Kevin Freitas talks Community @ Get Real Tacoma Podc
In the second Get Real Tacoma Podcast, Marguerite sits down at Amocat Cafe with Kevin Freitas to talk about how online communities are making a difference in real life- right here in Tacoma! Kevin Freitas is a manager of Internal Projects and Innovation at Sitecrafting, a Tacoma-based Web Design com...
Not marketing related but incrediabily facinating.
Don Sadoway on an effective way to store energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind.
“If we’re going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can’t just conserve our way out. We can’t just drill our way out. We can’t bomb our way out. We’re going to do it the old-fashioned, American way. We’re going to invent our way out, working together.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy.html?WT.mc_id=3_26_2012_sadowayTED_fb&WT.tsrc=Facebook
TED Talks What's the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage -- so we can have power on tap even when the sun's not out and the wind's not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that sto...
The Quality of Your Product Doesn’t Matter (That Much)
Darren Hardy, Publisher of SUCCESS Magazine
Now I don’t like this fact. I would philosophically argue against this fact. But it is a fact… and the evidence is all around us.
Who makes the best-tasting hamburger in the world? Doubtful you’d anoint McDonald’s with that title, but they outsell everyone else... by many billions of dollars.
What is the best wine in the world? Certainly Franzia (which comes in a box!) wouldn’t be your first or 100th guess, but it is the best selling.
What is the highest-quality bottled water? If you tested it, it certainly wouldn’t be Aquafina (owned by PepsiCo), Dasani (owned by Coca-Cola) or Poland Spring (owned by Nestle Waters), but those are the number 1, 2 and 3 best selling.
Nine times out of 10 it is not the best or highest-quality clothing line, automobile, restaurant, CPA firm, real estate agent, lawyer, furniture manufacturer, refrigerator, etc. that sells the most or becomes the biggest—it is the ones who market themselves the best.
This is the business axiom that I witness all around me every day:
The ultimate success of a product or service is 10% the quality of the product and 90% the quality of the marketing.
Now while I don’t necessarily LIKE that fact, as I believe the success of a product or service should be what’s most important and it should stand ENTIRELY on the value it delivers, that is just not how it works in reality.
A very interesting article
Is TV Dead? "In every instance where the Internet has offered an alternative to "old media," old media loses. Just take a look at newspapers, CDs, books, and magazines. If content can be gotten cheaper, faster, and easier (with more choice), it will be."
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2155118/tv-dead-live-tv
If some of the biggest television companies in the world couldn't get advertisers jazzed about the future of TV, then TV as we know it may have no future.
Meaningful touch points with good frequency and a call to action = success!
Marketers need to ensure that they've created multiple opportunities for engagement with their brand.
Only 1% of listeners changed the station during a commercial brake on Talk radio. Compared to music formats averaged 12% changed. Careful, it's just one survey. See the attached for details.
The viral life of this stunt is still spreading almost 2 years later.
What do you call 20 sensory-overloaded minutes fashioned out of 60+ dancers, an original visual program created by Daft Punk's light designers, a new pop sym...
Ads worth spreading. A short video highlighting the approach of the top creative minds in the world.
Sizzle Reel from TED 2011: Ads Worth Spreading
Great advice from Cline Davis of Acura Southcener.
Business owners when someone comes into your store make sure your employees great them with a warm friendly smile and engage them to offer assistance. Offer a monthly drawing, have the customers give you their contact information. And either send them a thank you email immediately or a nice card for visiting your store. People buy people...products can be bought off the internet. Make your environments fun, friendly and engaging. Just one tip to help you sell.
Lack of click activity does not equate to lack of influence. In fact, more than three-quarters of users ages 25 to 54 had taken actions such as performing a search or visiting a company website after viewing an ad.
Because ads are as likely to influence users as they are to incite click activity, advertisers—especially display advertisers—should be particularly mindful of their ability to attribute ad-initiated behavior to the ad of origin.
Consumers most often clicked on ads that either made them interested in considering a product or showed them products already of interest, illustrating the importance of maintaining brand presence throughout the purchase funnel.
This is a great artcle from Banc Investor Daily but applies to any industry.
MOONSHINE AND MOONWALKING INTO A BRAND:
The other night at a banking gathering some participants threw back some “Junior Johnson” before proceeding to pay homage to Michael Jackson. While the display wasn’t the prettiest, it was refreshing to see some personalities emerge and some differentiation take place. This underscores a challenge in banking that is best summed up by a recent study by the research firm Brand Keys that looked at 75 product categories to measure the degree of differentiation among competing companies. Banks, unfortunately, ranked tied for dead last. Soap, athletic shoes and even water companies all have figured out something most financial institutions haven’t –
how to set themselves apart. If bottled water companies can figure out how to build a brand, surely banks can.
Part of the problem, of course, is that we all say we are about service. Given that the financial service industry, as the nameimplies, is based on service, this is like saying Ford differentiates itself by producing motor vehicles. All banks are based on service, so saying you are about service, moves your differentiating factor to zero. Worse yet, for many banks the moniker of service rings hallow as the only loan you can get is a floating rate one, you have to come into the branch to open an account and your cash management products come in two flavors checking or savings. We can also safely assume that you are community focused, have high integrity, keeps things easy,care about the customer, are flexible and friendly. This list sums up 90% of the differentiating points that we have heard from banks over the last 25 years. The problem is, these factors are interchangeable with almost any bank and don’t answer the 3 basic test questions that a good brand should: 1) We are meaningfully different than our competitors because of X; 2) X can be demonstrated in the following ways; and, 3) As we grow, X will remain valid. In other words, you need to stand for something relevant that your competitors do not. This has to be supported by your actions in some fashion and this differentiating factor should be able to be duplicated across markets, communities, products and personnel as you grow. On this last point, local decision making is fine, but if that decision making is slow and/or it is meaningless in other markets, then you may have an OK brand proposition, but it would fail the test as a “good” one.
As the survey results show, if you don’t stand for anything, your community will think you stand for nothing and treat your service as a commodity. If service is the hallmark of your identity then we urge bankers to take the next step and better define what that really means. Is it short waiting times, more branches, faster loan approval times or just generally higher satisfaction? Whatever it is, refine it to the point of differentiation, track it and manage the metrics. This will not only allow management to monitor and improve that hallmark service proposition, but will let the bank better drive home the point to their customers. We will also add that service doesn’t have to be about a high end, Ritz Carltontype of effort. Southwest Airlines usually takes the #1 spot in airline service by just offering a superior value.
If your bank is more than about service, then take the time to define your market position, pricing strategy, distribution and your relevance. Then state your brand message. Maybe your bank is about providing direction to the small business customer, is the “fun” place to bank, serves a particular customer/product niche (like professionals or home mortgages) or offers advisory to the affluent. Whatever the case, refine your brand until your message stands out and then make sure you put resources behind the message in order to get the word out clearly to your stakeholders. Unlike soap and bottled water, banks and bankers can make a difference in someone’s lives. The economy, today’s complexity and the huge generational transference of wealth from the Baby Boomers all scream the need for financial leadership and a bank that is bold enough to do a little moonwalking in order to prove they can stand out
The Banc Investment Daily is a targeted newsletter specifically created for community banks. Nov. 9, 2011
Stop Competing to Be the Best - By Joan Magretta
With Cyber Monday, the tablet wars kicked into full swing. Which one is the best? Is it the iPad? The Kindle? Who has the best technology? The best distribution? Who's the best overall? For most people, "being the best" is what competition is all about. So General Motors CEO Dan Akerson was simply echoing popular sentiment when, on the day the new GM went public, he threw down the gauntlet: "May the best car win!" he told reporters. The phrase reflects an underlying belief about the nature of competition that feels so intuitively correct that it is almost never examined or questioned.
But if you want to win, says Michael Porter, this is absolutely the wrong way to think about competition. In fact, it's practically a guarantee of mediocre performance. The first problem with the competition-to-be-the-best mindset is that, in the vast majority of businesses, there is simply no such thing as "the best."
Consider a business as prosaic as seating for airport waiting areas. You would think that there would be a "best" here — standardized, functional seating. Well you would be wrong. Different airports have different needs. Some want waiting passengers to shop. They don't want seats that are too comfortable. Some need the flexibility to reconfigure waiting areas. They don't want long rows of fixed seats. Many airports have to watch their spending. But others — airports in the Middle East, for example — have snapped up luxury designs. Some airports value seats built to take extraordinary abuse. London-based OMK makes "prison-worthy" seating, the industry's highest standard, using self-sealing polyurethane that can withstand a stabbing without showing the knife scar.
If there is no "best" airport seat, now think about all of the industries in the economy. In how many does the idea of "being the best" make real sense? The best hotel for one customer is not the best for another. The best sales encounter for one customer is not the best for another. There is no best car. There is no best art museum. No one best way to promote environmental sustainability.
Yet, it's a pervasive idea. Management writers — and leaders seeking to inspire — regularly reinforce it by using colorful metaphors from warfare and sports. These lend emotion and drama to business competition. But, they are misleading.
In war, there can be only one winner. Not so in business, where companies like WalMart and Target can thrive and co-exist, each offering a different kind of value to its customers. In sports, there is just one contest with one set of rules. Not so in business, which is more complex and open-ended. Within an industry, there can be multiple contests, not just one, based on which needs are to be served. McDonald's is a winner in fast food, specifically fast burgers. But In-N-Out Burger thrives on slow burgers. Its customers are happy to wait ten minutes or more (an eternity by McDonald's stopwatch) for non-processed, fresh burgers cooked to order.
Here's the problem: When rivals all pursue the "one best way" to compete, they find themselves on a collision course, trapped in a destructive, zero-sum competition that no one can win. Everyone in the industry follows the same advice. Companies benchmark each other's practices and products. Customers, lacking meaningful choice, buy on price alone. Profitability deteriorates.
Instead, Porter urges a different kind of competition: compete to be unique. Focus on innovating to create superior value for your chosen customers, not on imitating and matching rivals. Give customers real choice and price becomes only one competitive variable. But understand that doing this profitably means accepting limits and making tradeoffs — you can't meet every need of every customer. Nothing is more absurd — and yet more widespread — than the belief that somehow you can do exactly what everyone else is doing and yet end up with superior results.
Grasp the true nature of business competition and you'll see that the performing arts provide a better analogy than war or sports. There can be many good singers or actors — each outstanding and successful in a distinctive way. Each finds and creates an audience. The more good performers there are, the more audiences grow and the arts flourish. This approach produces positive sum competition. Companies that do a good job can earn sustainable returns because they create more value. At the same time, customers benefit by getting real choice in how their needs are met.
What's your organization's underlying model of how competition works? It's a question well worth asking. If "best" is your model, you will follow the herd. Copycat products and services will always make sense. Growth at any price will seem reasonable. Acquisitions will always look better than they really are. How you think about competition will define the choices you make and your ability to assess those choices critically.
*Joan Magretta is a senior associate at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School. She is the author of Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy.
A very powerful video
Portland Area Radio Council the radio advertising experts. Increase revenue, improve radio advertising, see a return on your investment. Services include radio industry initiatives, radio advertising and marketing.The Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) leads radio industry initiatives and provides organ...
Internet-Only TV Homes Surge 22.8%, Spend 9% of TV Time Online
Characterizing it as a "development to watch," Nielsen issued a new report to clients last week showing that the number of U.S. households that bypass cable or satellite TV and subscribe only to broadband Internet access has grown dramatically in the past year, and not surprisingly, they spend dramatically more time watching TV over the Internet.
The Nielsen report said it is too soon to determine whether these households are so-called "cord-swappers" -– swapping the cable/satellite TV cord for the broadband Internet cord -– but they are growing faster than any other segment of the "cross-platform" television marketplace.
While the percentage of Internet-only TV homes is still relatively small -– less than 5% of all TV households -– they grew 22.8% over the past year, according to the report, which reflects data for the third quarter of 2011 vs. the third quarter of 2010.
Not surprisingly, these households are streaming more than twice as much TV online as the general population: an average of 11.2 minutes daily vs. 5.0 minutes for all TV households. While these households are relatively low users of TV -– at about half as much as the time spent watching TV by the general population –- they currently are watching more than 9% of all their TV minutes online. According to Nielsen's data, the average TV household currently is watching about 1.9% of their total TV minutes online.
"The increase in broadcast-only/broadband homes is the most significant of any category, though it is not necessarily an indication of downgrading services," reads the Nielsen report. "Rather, this could reflect broadcast-only homes upgrading to broadband as their needs change. Further underscoring the importance placed on broadband Internet, the number of homes subscribing to cable-plus and no broadband decreased 17.1 percent since last year."
(Source: Media Daily News, 02/09/12)
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