A Measured Approach

What’s the key to almost all successful direct marketing?

THE Data.

Isn’t it ironic then, that this week, at the office of my firm, Johnson Direct, we received three (3) ship-shape ECHO award call for entry pieces and two of the three were addressed to individuals who have never worked for Johnson Direct?

They included the company name and their titles, CEO and President with the wrong names. My piece was correct. Note: No other associate here received a piece, but two never-beens did.

Effective direct marketing is about credibility. more

Here they are, the commercials designed to get all Americans to complete the Census 2010 questionnaire.

The census effort is one of the biggest market-research project’s this decade. They will spend North of $15 billion to count the U.S. population as of April 1, 2010, and gather tons of data on U.S. consumers, which will help all marketers.

Your thoughts on its value to spend ratio?

Here’s my annual list of what to expect, marketing-wise, in the upcoming 12 months. Time will tell how accurate these are, although my 2009 list was fairly spot-on:

#10) Mobile advertising will still NOT flourish in North America in 2010. However, if the Google mobile phone becomes a hit it could make a late-year run and enter 2011 with great momentum.

#9) The web will continue to grow and play an even more important role in great, measurable marketing. Websites that create relevance, with smart use of microsites, and also help develop a dialog, will reign supreme. One-way websites will be viewed as antiquated and ineffective; YouTube will grow in its importance for traditional TV-based advertisers (:30 second commercials will decline greatly). Google Analytics will continue to gain users and importance.

#8) Wal-Mart’s attempt to compete with Amazon will prove more

In an effort to improve efficiencies by 10% or more in its movie recommendation model, Netflix asked anyone who was interested to prove that they could do so over their current model. Three years later they have a winner.

This is good PR, but even better business, as Netflix understands that by engaging people to make their service more efficient leads to an increased bottom-line. They become participants, not just customers. more

…the clever ads that don’t track their results, and probably lost money for their clients. Hooray! Perhaps I’m the only marketer alive that still thinks advertising and marketing is, now more than ever, about selling your stuff. (Please prove me wrong and comment here!).

Here’s the link to the clio article.

I have had way too much discussion lately with folks who still want to brand, but don’t take the time to realize that clever is out and relevant is in. By that, of course, I mean advertising/marketing work needs to produce measurable, real-world results. You’d think that after seeing how effective offer positioning and measurable marketing techniques are these days — even in these tough times — that folks would be using deep dive analytic crunching and testing until it hurts. Sadly, the education needs to continue.

I continue to read about the “hot creative shops,” the “killer idea,” “sexy work” and the “clever concept” way too much. Ask yourself if these brands fall into those categories: more

On Friday, 5/15/09 at 7pm cst a brand new search engine will be launched, Wolfram/Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha is the latest project by Wolfram Research. They are the software company behind Mathematica, a popular computational program designed by scientists, mathematicians and engineers.

Instead of retrieving ready-made Web pages that match a user’s query, Wolfram Alpha calculates answers on the fly based on a relevant set of data presumably located somewhere in the cloud.

Another competitor is duck duck go.

Let’s see what happens in the next few months. Google is already on the defensive.