April 19, 2005

  • Why I’ve Been So Quiet

    I haven’t been posting much over the last few months and most likely it will continue that way.

    Three reasons for this:

    1. Business is great! I’ve got more clients already this year than this time last year, and last year was our biggest to date. It’s great to be busy but it does cut into much needed blogging time. This seems to be a trend.

    2. I’m cheating on myself! I’ve set up a side project called One Degree (where Canadian online professionals gather) and most of my time and attention have gone to the care and feeding of that site. If you are looking for regular posts from me, go there.

    3. I’m spoiled! One Degree is built using Movable Type and it is so nice having a full-fledged blogging system in place. This site uses Blogger and has since launch, but the service is so limited that I have outgrown it. At some point this site will be redone using Movable Type, but that will have to wait for a while as I attend to these other burning issues.

  • What Companies Should One Degree Track?

    We have this category called “Tracked Companies” that we will be using to keep an eye on Canadian companies involved in the online marketing industry. To qualify as a tracked company, we’re thinking they should:

    1. Be active in Canada and preferably Canadian owned and operated.
    2. Be involved in online marketing through selling ads, making online marketing technology, being an agency or web developer, or other stuff directly related to online marketing. This means we won’t be adding Tim Horton’s as a Tracked Company, even if they do get online religion at some point (but we might add the agency that helps them or the vendors that support them).
    3. Be somewhat interesting and envelope-pushing. We want to track the companies that matter.

    So, given these criteria, who would you like to see added to the list?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 19, 2005.

April 15, 2005

  • CNMA Delays Announcing Finalists, But Books Carlu

    Just got word from the CNMA on changes in their timeline, hopefully, this is just scheduling issues and not a reason to be concerned.

    Organizers of the Canadian New Media Awards (CNMA) wish to announce a delay in publishing the list of finalists. The announcement is now targeted for Wednesday, April 20th, 2005. In addition, we are pleased to announce that this year’s event will be held at Toronto’s most significant and unique historic venues, The Carlu (444 Yonge St. 7th Floor). Registration and ticket purchases will be available online starting April 20th, 2005 at http://www.cnma.ca/.

    I like the fact that they came out quickly announcing the missed deadline. In this “age of transparency,” this is pretty much required, but it was also nice that they mentioned that they’d be using “The Carlu” which offers some assurance that the whole thing hasn’t gone off the rails.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 15, 2005.

  • Bloglines Down — Net Junkies Go Outside

    It looks like “Bloglines” had a major meltdown in their user log-on processes around 3:00AM EDT. I’m reverse engineering this information from a “Technorati” search.

    At “about 7 hours ago” people are still commenting on what they read via Bloglines, then you start seeing posts with individuals apologizing for blogrolls not working or saying that they won’t be updating their sites because they can’t access their feeds. Interestingly, because this happened while much of the Americas slept, many of the posts are in Japanese, Spanish, German, French and Italian. A bit later you see people cluing into the fact that they are not alone and that the problem is Bloglines itself. In the last hour or so posts have moved to the “Oh my God, when was the last time I downloaded my OPML file” kind of panic.

    I’ll now kick off the next phase by recommending your take this opportunity to try out “Rojo” a new feed reader/social network thingy. Others seem to have had the same idea as Rojo’s servers appear to be feeling the strain of all those OPML files being uploaded.

    A few observations:

    1. I couldn’t find anything on Bloglines’ site saying there was a problem. This is a big mistake and I’m sure this is the last time they’ll make it as the negative buzz is building fast.
    2. If anything weird ever happens online and you find yourself wondering “is it just me?”, remember to do a Technorati search and you’ll quickly find out if others are in the same boat.
    3. Going back in time via Technorati is a bit like taking core samples — the deeper you go the farther back in time you go, effectively building a reverse timeline.

    Update: they’re back up. Official word is ”This morning, one of our user databases suffered a failure that wasn’t detected by our monitoring systems. This resulted in the inability of people to log into their Bloglines accounts. The database has been reset and no data was lost. We apologize for the issue and we’re looking at ways to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 16, 2005.

April 8, 2005

  • Making Einstein Simple

    Jessie Scanlon has a great essay in the NYT on simplicity in design (“A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple”) that includes this line that intrigued me:

    “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler,” Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying. His actual wording was a tad more convoluted, but in any case, few in Silicon Valley heeded his advice.

    A bit of Googling showed that indeed a lot of people like this quote and attribute it to Einstein.

    A bit more digging found more details on the attribution in a lengthy discussion of Occam’s Razor:

    The pithiness of this quote disguises the fact that no one knows whether Einstein said it or not (this version comes from the Reader’s Digest, 1977). It may well be a precis of the last few pages of his ‘The Meaning of Relativity’ (5th edition), where he wrote about his unified field theory, saying ‘In my opinion the theory here is the logically simplest relativistic field theory that is at all possible. But this does not mean that nature might not obey a more complex theory. More complex theories have frequently been proposed. . . In my view, such more complicated systems and their combinations should be considered only if there exist physical-empirical reasons to do so.’

    Funny that someone (probably Reader’s Digest) had to simplify the concept of not simplifying too much.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 8, 2005.

April 4, 2005

  • Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience

    Great column (as always) by Mark Hurst. This one, entitled Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience, deals with an all too common problem — companies that budget well for advertising to get people to their site but spend almost nothing to ensure that people can actually use the site once they get there. I see this every day as I meet with companies to discuss their websites. Many of them have such underfunded and poorly thought out sites that they don’t even know what the potential is. I met with a major insurance company who was happy that five customers had signed up using their complex online quote and purchase process. Five! And that was a good day. My guess is they process that many customers a minute through call centers and sales agents. No wonder the CEO doesn’t want to spend more on web initiatives.

    Of course, with a proper strategy, a well-designed site, and an integrated approach to marketing in and between multiple channels, I’m sure that the Web could be on an equal footing with the call center. But how to convince the CEO that a properly implemented web strategy and user experience would mean one hundred times the sales through the web channel? If you suggest that poor site design makes 500 potential sales per day into 5, who will ever believe you? Still, I am encouraged, as Mark is, that some folks are starting to get the madness of this approach. Read the article and you too will be left shaking your head at the illogic of “business as usual”.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 4, 2005.

  • The Death of Offline Advertising — And The Birth of “New Marketing”

    (I originally wrote a brief post to the AIMS discussion list on this topic and was then asked by Direct Marketing News to write an extended commentary based on that post. Here is my original draft of the column which inexplicably differs significantly from the in print (but not online) version. Consider this the true version please.)

    The Death of Offline Advertising — And The Birth of “New Marketing”

    At the end of March 2004, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sang a sweet song to online marketers looking to forget the dark years that followed the heady days of the Internet ad boom. During the company’s MSN Strategic Account Summit, Ballmer told the 500 or so US ad executives in the audience that 100% of ad dollars will be spent online by 2010. That’s no typo. He said all marketing will be online in six years. Given that major consumer packaged goods advertisers are generally spending less than 1% of their budgets online and that many advertisers are still unsure of how to market online, why would Ballmer make such a bold prediction? Certainly, it is in Microsoft’s best interest to tell advertisers to up their online ad budgets to 8–13% now in preparation for the day when all their budgets are online. MSN counts on online ad revenue, so it seems natural they’d want ads online instead of in channels Microsoft does not (yet) own. And more online activity means more devices, and that means more software, and that means more money for Microsoft.

    But — looking beyond self-interest — might there really be a basis for Ballmer’s assertion? There may be more evidence that Ballmer is on to something than you would think.

    Bye-Bye Bomb-times

    First, if you haven’t been paying attention to online ads lately, you may be surprised that, in the US, the first quarter of 2004 was the biggest quarter ever for online ads, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. And that’s hot on the heels of the last record-breaking quarter, the 2003 holiday season. With the online ad industry now bigger than it was at the peak of the boom, “Bomb-times” seem to be behind us. And while some sectors are lagging behind in online ad spending, others have figured out that online ads can be more efficient than other channels.; In the US, the travel and financial sectors are leading the way with 15 and 17% of budgets online respectively. So online ads are commanding a greater share of the ad budget. Is it possible they will command it all?

    One IP To Rule Them All

    Let’s deconstruct Ballmer’s exact words to get a better understanding of his vision. Ballmer is quoted as saying “All marketing will have the characteristics of online marketing”. I would argue that the “characteristics of online marketing” that make it compelling are that it is targetable, actionable, and trackable — all in real-time. These four characteristics give online a unique advantage that marketers are just now beginning to comprehend. Ballmer is also quoted as saying that “everything will go over intelligent IP [Internet Protocol]”. This echoes Chairman Bill Gates’ vision of a “seamless computing” future where all devices are Internet-enabled and can easily speak to each other and to the Net. This intelligent network will use the same underpinnings as our present-day Internet but it will be so embedded in all our devices and business practices that it will disappear from consciousness; like electricity. So while many have dismissed Ballmer’s comments as more Microsoft FUD, I don’t believe that Ballmer meant that someday we’d all be shilling banner ads for a living. Rather, I think that he is wisely noting that the ubiquity of Internet access in all locations and through all devices will allow most media to become targetable, actionable, and trackable. And if a particular media cannot evolve to share these characteristics with online marketing, it will be relegated to a minor supporting role in larger, IP-based marketing campaigns. For lack of a better term, let’s call it “new marketing” and define it as “marketing through channels that allow companies to target specific consumers based on context, behaviour, location and other factors in order to create measurable responses that can be tracked in near real-time”. If we look carefully we see the seeds of “new marketing” blooming all around us, just as “new media” once did.

    Here are a few early sightings:

    1. ROI Marketing Hits The Tipping Point There is a strong move towards accountability for all major business expenses. Marketing won’t be spared from the drive to measurability and accountability. CxO’s are asking tough questions like “What do I get for my ad dollar?” and “Did this campaign make or cost us money?” These are questions that traditional “awareness” marketing can’t answer except anecdotally. Marketers will be forced to adopt direct response models in order to justify their budgets and their jobs. Once enough people move this way, everyone will suddenly make the switch because their careers will be on the line if they don’t learn to go with the ROI flow. Any marketing vehicle that can’t help marketers justify their spend will be hard pressed to keep up with New Marketing opportunities that do.

    2. The Perfect Response Tool As companies look for ways to measure marketing ROI, more and more cross-channel marketing will be directed towards the Net. Search Engine Marketing is catching fire because marketers who “get direct” see that they can now build testable, trackable campaigns online and that means budgets will be diverted from less measurable channels. And as we get smarter about what works and what online marketing is worth, watch for other DM channels to have to fight for attention and ad dollars. Response marketers look for the most cost-effective channel, and if it’s the Net, say goodbye outbound telemarketing and direct mail.

    3. The Net Generation We’ve already seen reports that young males are “missing” from TV audience figures. Look for today’s young adults — raised in a web-based, multi-tasking world to become the core consumers of the next decade, meaning that the Net will be a natural place to find consumers in their peak buying years. And these kids expect everything to be online, instantaneous and under their control. Will they accept “ol’ skool” media for much longer (if they ever did)?

    4. All Bits Move To The Net Over time, anything that can move over the Net, will move over the Net. When was the last time you received a fax that wasn’t junk or wasn’t sent because to provide a signature? The last time you wrote a letter? In the mid-90’s I witnessed Nicholas “Being Digital” Negroponte tell a ballroom full of music industry executives that they were in the “bit radiation” business and that as soon as someone figured out how to make it more efficient to radiate bits over wires rather than stamping them on shiny discs they’d all be out of jobs. Those execs laughed at the time, but they are now scrambling to cut deals with Puretracks and Napster to try and correct the damage done by free download sites. But the music industry is just a canary in a coal mine. The movie industry and phone companies are next into the breach, struggling to cope with BitTorrent and Voice Over IP (VoIP) respectively. In six to ten years I’m sure that the majority of voice, TV, radio, music, and movies will be entering our homes over a Net connection. And many non-measurable, non-targetable media will soon be replaced by new and improved online versions. Is it hard to imagine radio stations moving online and targeting ads based on past behaviour and the listener’s physical location? What will happen to radio when ads are addressable, measurable, and immediately actionable online? Will the “marketing bits” you radiate be the only ones to avoid this inevitable move to the Net? Are you sure?

    5. Media On Demand Consumers are just now beginning to see the joys of an “on demand” approach to information and entertainment. WiFi is making the Broadband home a reality, iPods are allowing us to put a lifetime of music in our pockets, and PVRs are taking time-shifting to a completely new level. Once the user is in control of the when and where of media consumption, the impact on advertising will be considerable. If there is no primetime, only “my time”, won’t ads need to provide the same responsiveness to a consumer’s desires?

    6. Online, All The Time Increasingly we live in a world of three screens — a TV for communal viewing, a computer screen for individual work, and a “Third Screen” for accessing information while on the move. As “unwired” PDAs are replaced by phones and hybrid products that allow for voice, e-mail, SMS, IM, web access, and digital photography all from one device, ads that are aware of their location in the world will increase. Adding toll-free order numbers, e-mail and web addresses, or text numbers to outdoor and transit ads is a logical first step towards our devices actually interacting with the ads. How would your marketing change if transit ads were part of the Net? If Google on a cell phone was everyone’s default yellow pages?

    7. GPS Pop Cans Coke’s “Unexpected Summer” promotion is taking “New Marketing” to a new level. Coke has randomly placed 120 GPS-enable cell phone “cans” in pop cases across the US. If you find a can you can use it to phone in and have your location tracked so that your grand prize can be airlifted to you wherever you are in America. If products are already being hooked to the Net and electronically enhanced, what will happen when RFID tags allow retailers and manufacturers to track each unit individually?

    Ramping Up

    As much as I’d like Steve Ballmer’s world of targetable, actionable, trackable, real-time advertising, my guess is that we’ll never quite arrive at this marketing nirvana. There will always be those that espouse brand at any cost, those that believe they have too little time and too little money to “bother” with tracking their marketing. But that’s not you. How do we get to this “new marketing”? I concur with Steve Ballmer and recommend that we get busy now. It’s time that marketers learn to allocate budgets differently and drive all ads to a measurable channel. And then we need to begin driving all measurement to standards-based net apps so results can be analyzed and adjusted in real-time. The challenge for ad suppliers is to figure out how they can create New Marketing channels that, like online ads, are targetable, actionable, and trackable. If you sell ads for a living, what will you do to prepare for the New Marketing? Measurable billboards? Commerce-enabled transit signs? POP that changes based on the weather? What will your ads do tomorrow that the Net can do today?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 4, 2005.

  • What is the State of Affiliate Marketing

    I’ve long felt that Affiliate programs were one of the better ways for retailers large and small to increase their reach. At the same time, affiliate programs offer a great way for content publishers to generate revenue from contextually relevant advertising.

    But whenever I do a search on affiliate programs I feel like I need to take a shower afterward. While some of this stuff has merit, much of what you get looks like *make-money-fast*, too-good-to-be-true offers that don’t line up with my ethical, contextual image of affiliate programs. If you did follow that link to Google you may have been greeted (as I was) by over 85 AdWords links on the affiliate marketing page. When did Google start putting 85 ads on one results page?

    So I put it to you dear reader: Should an affiliate marketing program be part of every online retailer’s toolkit or has this once great concept been taken over by hucksters.

     


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 14, 2005.

April 1, 2005

  • Getting Order Confirmations Past Spam Filters

    I just “placed an order” with “TigerDirect.ca” and I noticed some interesting copy at the bottom of the confirmation page after the order was completed:

    Note: If you do not receive the confirmation message within next several hours, check your spam folder in case the confirmation email got delivered there instead of your inbox. If so, select the confirmation message and click This is Not Spam (AOL), Not Junk (Hotmail), Not Spam (Yahoo), Not Spam (Gmail) or the like, which will allow future messages to get through.

    Given the rise in the use of spam filters (often overzealous ones), I think we’ll see more of this kind of stuff in the future. I thought this was particularly useful in that it spelled out exactly what to do for the most common e-mail systems.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 1, 2005.

March 30, 2005

  • Webnames.ca Newsletter Changes

    Canadian domain registrar “Webnames.ca” a looks like it still has faith in e-mail newsletters (and so it should).

    Here’s their announcement to their current list telling of changes coming:

    Dear Subscriber to Webnames.ca’s Monthly Newsletter,

    This notice is to inform you that Webnames.ca will be publishing a new and improved monthly newsletter which will debut in April. The new newsletter replaces Webnames.ca’s monthly newsletter and is named “The Server Room”. It will include a new design, new monthly features and high-quality articles written by industry experts. We will highlight issues of importance to Internet-era businesses, profile real-world web experiences, offer relevant news summaries and, in general, try to earn your attention with incisive articles aimed at your needs. Be on the lookout for “The Server Room” which will be delivered to your mailbox the first week of April. We are confident that you will find it interesting, worthwhile and informative and welcome your feedback after you have seen it.

    Sincerely,
    Webnames.ca Inc.

    As a subscriber, I was pretty happy to see they’d be upping the quality of the e-mail, but then again I’m a marketer. I’m not sure all subscribers will be thrilled about another e-mail in their inbox if it doesn’t directly benefit them — and this doesn’t.

    They also missed an opportunity to ask subscribers to add the newsletter mail-out address to their address books to help avoid spam filter problems. If they change the mail-out address this is coming from I think they’ll find that lots of people don’t get future messages because Webnames mucked up their filters with the changes.

    Does anyone have any experience with switching over from one sending e-mail address to another? What are the pros and cons?

    Finally, I’m really not too sure about this rampant need to create a sub-brand for everything we do. Calling their newsletter “The Server Room” doesn’t really help Webnames establish themselves and further disconnects their content from their service. “Ariad” made a smart move a few years ago when they moved away from a heavily sub-branded newsletter (“Empact” intended to mean “E-mail Impact”) to their current strategy of calling it “Ariad’s Online Marketer” and using the company name as the sender. Ariad was smart to keep their company name front and center.

    Let’s hope Webnames.ca does the same.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 30, 2005.

March 29, 2005

  • I’m A Happy Customer

    One Degree uses “CampaignMonitor” to manage its newsletter (you are a subscriber aren’t you?).

    I love the product and in sending a routine support question to them I happened to gush at them a bit. My “Bloglines” “vanity feed” just found that CampaignMonitor “just added me” to their “Happy Customers/Press” blog category. And now that I’ve linked to them, they will, in turn, see that I’ve linked to them when they next check their vanity feed. “And so it goes.”

    Tip: Since not everyone monitors feeds using “Technorati”, “Feedster” or “PubSub”, it’s a good idea to click on all your links after you’ve blogged them so that you’ll create at least one referrer in their web stats. That way they can find you when they check their logs. Do you have any examples of companies using blogs to capture and promote testimonials?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 29, 2005.

  • AIMS — Inaugural Think Tank Event

    “AIMS” has just announced the inaugural event in their Think Tank Series will be on April 27, 2005.

    This is an interesting new twist for AIMS as it is a premium breakfast event.

    Network with your colleagues and hear what the CEO’s of two leading Global Internet Services firms are seeing on the internet horizon. Our panelists include Mark Kingdon, CEO of “Organic” (from New York) and Canada’s own Gurval Caer, CEO of “Blast Radius”. The session will be moderated by Ken Schafer, President of “Schafer Group”:(and past-president of AIMS) [ed. — and your humble author].

    The AIMS Think Tank Series is a breakfast series that brings together Internet thought leaders to discuss the trends, innovations, and technologies that Canadian Internet and Marketing executives need to know. This series is for Directors, VPs and above.

    You can get “more event details and register” for this event now.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 29, 2005.

  • Crispin Porter Bogusky And That Viral Chicken

    The April 2005 issue of “Fast Company” includes a fairly lengthy piece called “Ruling The Roost that chronicles life at super-hot ad agency “Crispin Porter + Bogusky”.

    Online folks know CP+B primarily for their work on a certain viral marketing campaign for Burger King. The whole article is worth a read, but of particular interest to you will be the hatching of Subservient Chicken:

    With plans in place to stage a couple of days’ worth of hot chicken Webcam action to go along with the Subservient Chicken spots, Benjamin wanted more. Then he got an idea (surprise!). If he were able to come up with an exhaustive list of commands that the film crew could shoot the chicken performing, maybe he could create a site where the chicken would simultaneously carry out millions of demands in real time. Burger King never pushed him or the agency to do this. He just thought it was cool. “Our approach has always been, ‘Follow the work,’ “ says account-services director and partner Jeff Steinhour, meaning if ever you’re in doubt about a decision, simply ask whether it’s going to make the work better.

    Suddenly, the situation became a no-brainer. The film crew grabbed a friend’s apartment in L.A. and shot the chicken doing 200 different actions while Benjamin set to work on the Web site’s functionality. Even before it was finished, everyone in the agency knew they had a barn burner on their hands. When the site neared completion, Benjamin emailed the URL to several people within CP+B asking them to send the link out to friends to test. From that single email Benjamin sent on the morning of April 8 last year, without a peep of promotion, the Subservient Chicken site ended the day with 1 million total hits.

    Like all good Internet phenomena, Subservient Chicken took off literally overnight. By the end of January, nine months after its release, the site had scored well over 385 million hits and was still getting 250,000 to 500,000 hits per day. “I guarantee they’ll take home some awards for Subservient Chicken this year,” says Joan Minihan Reilly, the associate director of the Advertising Club of New York, which hosts the International Andy awards this month for creativity in advertising.

    Awards are nice, but results are even nicer. As Andy Bonaparte, a Burger King ad director, bragged to Adweek in October, the site helped “sell a lot, a lot, a lot of chicken sandwiches.”

    If you haven’t visited “Subservient Chicken” yet, you know have a legitimate reason to do so. If your boss looks over your shoulder, just tell them it’s viral marketing research.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 29, 2005.

March 28, 2005

  • Jigsaw Uses Contacts As Currency

    The New York Times’ “A Service That Aims to Make Cold Calls a Bit Warmer” gives some interesting background on a new social networking service called “Jigsaw”. This is an interesting one.

    I can totally see that the dynamics of the model are great and I am sure they could make a business of this. Still, I’d be really concerned about the fact that the data they’re trading is someone else’s personal information. Given that the first thing I ask when I’m cold called is “where did you get my name?” and “how did you get my number/e-mail?”, this “valuable information” being shared could end up hurting relations as prospects get creeped out by how they were found. Also, I really hate that they want to supplement an paid service with ads. Ads don’t belong in every business model and I think pure online services like this dilute their value greatly when they try to make a few extra bucks with banner ads.

    Does anyone know if CEO Jim Fowler (not “the Jim Fowler”) has a blog? It would be interesting to hear about his experiences with privacy and business model issues as they clearly have an interesting idea here.

    (Tip’o the hat to Kevin Speicher at “Woodgreen” for the link)


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 28, 2005.

  • Is It Time To Drop IE 5.x?

    “37 Signals”:http://www.37signals.com “just announced” that they will not be supporting Internet Explorer 5.x on their sites anymore. 37 Signals is the company behind the innovative Ta-Da (“mentioned earlier”), “Basecamp”, and the soon-to-be-announced “Backpack”. Most of what 37 Signals does can be considered online applications (they’re drinking the “ajax”) so this move makes sense.

    But what about marketers? Is it time for marketing sites to give up on old browsers? What do your stats show? What percent of your marketing site’s traffic comes from IE5.x?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 28, 2005.

March 22, 2005

  • Google Likes Dashes More Than Underscores

    One of the things mentioned at the SXSW “How To Trick-out Your Blog” session was that Google seems to like dashes a bit more than underscores in URLs.

    I’ve since found some discussion that seems to confirm this:

    I seriously doubt that the impact of the switching from underscores to dashes is significant enough to warrant changing current URLs (and generating a sea of broken links that kind of defeat the purpose), but for new sites, it makes sense to use dashes instead of underscores.

    And as an added bonus, the URLs are also more human-friendly as underscores are harder to discern when they are linked (the underscore blends into the underlining of the link).


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 22, 2005.

  • More Reasons Not To Use Pop-up Ads

    Jakob Nielsen’s “Most Hated Advertising Techniques” provides some hard data on what many of us have known for a while now — aggressive online ads alienate site visitors out of proportion with the potential upside of clickthroughs. Here’s a particularly relevant part of the article:

    “Users have started to defend themselves against pop-ups. The percentage of users who report using pop-up or ad-blocking software increased from 26% in April 2003 to 69% in September 2004, which is an astonishing growth rate. Users not only dislike pop-ups, they transfer their dislike to the advertisers behind the ad and to the website that exposed them to it. In a survey of 18,808 users, more than 50% reported that a pop-up ad affected their opinion of the advertiser very negatively and nearly 40% reported that it affected their opinion of the website very negatively.”


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 22, 2005.

March 14, 2005

  • What is Google Caribou?

    I’m at “SXSW” this week, enjoying the warm weather and (relatively) interesting sessions. I’m still not really used to people in the audience having their laptops open surfing the web wirelessly. It looks like more of a distraction than a benefit and most people seem to use it to check their e-mail and visit the blogs of the panel participants when bored. This, of course, leads to some unavoidable voyeurism as it is pretty much impossible not to look at a neighbor’s screen as they surf.

    During the “Blogging Showdown” panel this morning, I noticed that an attendee from “Blogger” was checking an application called “Caribou”. The logo and interface were clearly Google, looking much like a Gmail clone. There was a small “alpha” under the Caribou logo, but other than that I couldn’t really make anything out before the laptop was closed.

    So, what is Google Caribou?

    Well, after some initial excitement that I had a scoop on a Google RSS reader or something like that, I find that (“in all likelihood”) Caribou was the pre-beta name for Gmail. Still, it seems odd that an online version of an alpha release is still available. Is it possible that Google is recycling the name and using it for internal alpha versions of Gmail upgrades?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 14, 2005.

February 28, 2005

  • URLs As Marketing Tools

    I was just looking at “Answers.com”, the latest incarnation of “GuruNet” and I was impressed by their intelligent use of URLs.

    If you haven’t used answers.com yet, know that it is an interesting variation on standard search engines in that it aims to answer questions directly whenever it can rather than pointing at relevant external pages. It makes money by providing sponsored links and affiliate programs alongside the proprietary and third-party content presented for each term.

    As you would expect, you can go to their site and enter a term like VoIP in their search box. What impressed me was that you can also type “http://answers.com/voip” into your browser and it will come back with the same results. In effect, every term they track is given a unique virtual folder on the site making for incredibly clean URLs. You can even type strings like “http://www.answers.com/viral marketing” (with the space) into your browser, and get results.

    In these days when more and more people are creating content (blogs, forum posts, e-mail, IM, etc.) this URL strategy makes it very easy for people to link to answers.com to quickly define their terms. This is certainly a conscious strategy on GuruNet’s part. In fact, each term also has a “link tool” that provides cut-and-paste linking options. “Here’s the Link Tool for VoIP”. Any other good examples of the smart use of URLs?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 28, 2005.

  • Flash Shopping Cart Boosts Conversion Rates

    Forrester Research just released a new study on how Flash shopping carts increase conversion rates over traditional HTML carts. You can “pay Forrester US$345 for the report” or you can thank “Pixelbox” for doing the same thing.

    Before you get too excited about Flash-enabling your e-commerce site, note that Forrester recommends eliminating known flaws from your current HTML process as a starting point.

    Any good examples of Flash-based shopping carts out there other than Forrester’s “TJ Maxx example”?

     


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 28, 2005.

February 22, 2005

  • Canada Post Launches Fetch

    Canada Post is recently launched Fetch. The “site is now live”.

    There was a brief Globetechnology article back on January 25th about the fact that Fetch is being piloted in Calgary (which is somewhat unusual). (The article is no longer on the site)

    This quote from the article does a good job of explaining the service at a very high level:

    The Fetch service allows a user to set up an account with Canada Post, and input personal contact information in confidence. When users see an advertisement from a company participating in Fetch, they request that information be sent to that on-line account, either by entering a text message on a cellphone, or through an interactive voice system. bq. Advertisers would pay only when a consumer requests one of their offers, and individuals would pay nothing for the service.

    Congrats to Warren and Tim for getting this off the ground after a huge amount of internal work. It will be very interesting to see how this turns out. My guess is it will be a fundamentally new way of protecting consumer privacy while letting marketing through the veil, or it will be a flop. I doubt there is a half-way for this type of model. I’m hoping for the former as I like the idea of bringing greater interactivity to the offline environment.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 22, 2005.

  • What We’re Watching In 2005

    Here are a few of the top trends I’ll be watching closely in 2005:

     

    1. “Web First” Marketing Strategies — Forget integrating online into the marketing mix, I’m seeing more smart companies *starting* with the web and working out from there. For some of my clients this will be the first year where they have moved almost all their efforts (and dollars) to the web. Look for offline media to play a supporting role for many more savvy marketers in 2005. And look for web AORs to take the lead as other agencies fall in line with the online strategies set by the web shop.

    2. Rich Internet Applications — With Gmail, Flickr, Basecamp, Bloglines, and the brand new 43 Things I think we are really seeing the dawning of a whole new class of online experience. By bringing far greater functionality to their sites, these services are showing that online applications can rival desktop apps. I think 2005 will see a blurring and stretching of our concept of what the terms site and software mean. Look for ways to turn content sites into tools that users can use instead of read.

    3. Desktop Apps — The flip-side of the web-based applications trend is the rise of net-centric desktop apps. Think of iTunes and RealRhapsody, FeedDemon, or Google’s Desktop Search. 2005 will also see more sites creating custom Firefox extensions and IE toolbars to keep top-of-mind with consumers. Don’t expect all your marketing to happen in a browser or e-mail client anymore.

    4. Firefox — With over 15 million downloads since November 9th, the best web browser on the planet will stir things up as it rapidly gains marketshare on the old, buggy, unsecure Internet Explorer. One of my clients (with a non-tech audience) had over 8% of December traffic arriving via this open source app. This makes the move to standards-compliant sites even more essential as “IE Only” sites will alienate too many visitors to be worth the risk. As a side-note, let’s see if heads roll over the dreadful non-standards redesign of Indigo’s site.

    5. RSS Hits Mainstream — Feeds were the hot tech topic in 2004 and 2005 will find this incredibly powerful tool gaining broader awareness. If you’re not using a feed reader to stay on top of the industry already, you are definitely missing the boat, and if you are not thinking about a corporate strategy to benefit from feeds in 2005, then shame on you.

    Of course, search will be *the* online marketing success story for 2005 as it was for 2004, and blogs will continue to grow in importance. What do you see for 2005?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 22, 2005.

  • Ajax Is The Future Of Web Applications

    One of the key “trends we’re watching in 2005” is the rise of Rich Internet Applications. I think that Jesse James Garrett’s recent article “Ajax: A New Approach To Web Applications” will really help build the momentum behind the movement. Particularly because he’s introduced a new buzzword to describe things like “Gmail” and “Flickr”. He says these applications are built on “Ajax” (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML).

    This is a topic to watch as “everyone is talking about it”.

     


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 22, 2005.

February 21, 2005

  • Marketer of the Year with No Online Strategy?

    Marketing Magazine “recently named” Tim Hortons as their 2004 Marketer of the Year. Admittedly, Timmy’s has done a great job with their offline branding and the company is a success. But their “web site” is pedestrian and for a company that outsells McDonald’s in Canada ($2.5 billion to $2.28 billion), I would suggest slightly embarrassing. And I don’t think they have ever done any serious online marketing (“correct me” if I’m wrong).

    My first thought in reading they’d won was “this could (and should) be the last year that a marketer without a serious online strategy gets named Marketer of the Year”. But in reading the article this quote caught my eye:

    The company’s low-key approach reflects the fundamental brand character of Tim Hortons, which the marketing team sums up in one word: unpretentious. “In a way it’s really how you would describe a Canadian,” says Cathy Whelan Molloy, VP of brand marketing and merchandising. “We talk about it being unpretentious, friendly, honest, caring and dependable.”

    It may be that someone at Tim Hortons believes that websites are too high falutin’ for an unpretentious brand like theirs, but I find it hard to believe that there isn’t a way to effectively integrate online into the overall marketing mix for this brand without losing their “down-homeness”. After all, if they can repeat dozens of sophisticated TV spots hundreds of times each week and be seen as unpretentious, can’t the web do the same or more? So, I ask you, dear reader, does Tim Horton’s deserve Marketer of the Year without a serious web strategy? Can one create an effective online strategy for a brand that looks to be down-home, local and unpretentious? Or is the best strategy, in this case, to stay offline?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 21, 2005.

  • Canadian Marketers Who Blog

    Recently I asked the AIMS Discussion List what blogs by Canadian online marketers they read. Here’s the list they came up with in the order they arrived in my inbox:

    • “Mitch Joel” http://www.twistimage.com/blog/
    • “m u s i n g s” http://www.themose.ca/blogger.html
    • “IM @ XIST” http://www.xist.com/01/index.php
    • “Ebizblog.ca” http://www.ebizblog.ca/
    • “For the Love of Words” http://tanja.blogware.com/
    • “davemadethis” http://www.davemadethis.com/blog
    • “zarinblog” http://www.zarinmedia.com/blog/
    • “BPWrap: A Different Point Of View” http://blog.cre8asite.net/bwelford/
    • “The Other Bloke’s Blog” http://www.strategicmarketingmontreal.ca/blogger.html (Also Barry Welford but more of a Montreal focus)

    What’s with the weird dotcommie names for many of these blogs? Are we kickin’ it old school? Is it even possible to be nostalgic for six years ago? What blogs would you add to the list? What non-blog sites do you use to stay on top of online marketing in Canada (other than One Degree of course)?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 21, 2005.

  • Subway Offline to Online Promotion

    Subway is running a limited access promotion at “Way To Dough”. The promotion is doubly limited because only stores in Atlantic Canada, Alberta, Eastern Ontario, Northern Ontario and Saskatchewan are participating and you need a game card from a participating store to enter.

    The contest is being promoted through TV and radio spots that prompt consumers to visit a store to get a game card that can, in turn, be used on the site to enter. “Marketing Daily” (sub req’d) recently said the promotion “offers players the chance to build their own toasted sandwich to win food or cash prizes. The campaign is designed to raise brand awareness and drive traffic to participating Subway restaurants…”

    The promotion was put together by “Venture Communications” in Calgary.

    What do we think of this strategy? Is the value in driving consumers in-store, or in the database they’ll build from the site? Does running the contest online vs. just doing a scratch and win in-store or via mail-in increase participation, or are there other advantages?


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 21, 2005.

  • GlaxoSmithKline Behind herpeshealth.com

    “Marketing Daily” (sub req’d) points out that “HerpesHealth.com” is a GlaxoSmithKline web site. The article states:

    The initiative, with creative by Ogilvy Healthworld in Toronto, in includes print and television ads that focus on the tagline: “Genital herpes–don’t give your new relationship a gift from the past.” Print ads, to appear in national consumer magazines, show a bottle of perfume–a typical romantic gift–with the words “Genital Herpes” on the label, along with the campaign tagline. The TV spot follows the same creative concept. It shows people passing on a bottle of perfume as if it were being passed from one relationship to the next.

    It’s unclear if the fact that the site is “GlaxoSmithKline’s” is hidden because they aren’t legally allowed to market themselves, or if they are deliberately avoiding it looking like a marketing site. Given that the legal footer identifies them as the site’s owner there isn’t much secret, but one senses that this “bury it in the footer” stuff raises suspicions in consumer minds. The average herpes sufferer (take the quiz and find out!) who visits the site will be left wondering why GlaxoSmithKline had to hide. It looks like they are up to something even when it is unlikely they are.


    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 21, 2005.

February 20, 2005

  • My Mother The Poet Goes Online

    Over the holidays we got my mother online with an old desktop PC we had kicking around and broadband. She’s taken to it like a duck to water.

    Ever since I was very young (and maybe before) my mother has always written poems about things that happen in her life. She just e-mailed me this:

    Ready for a challenge? You bet!
    I am going on the INTERNET,
    flying into Cyberspace,
    joining the computer race.

    My kids, very generously,
    provided the opportunity.
    Installed by Ken, the computer pro,
    here I am, ready to go.

    So many questions I had to ask!
    Am I really up to the task?

    But Ken, with his expertise,
    quickly put my doubts at ease.

    Compose Email, click to “Send”
    converse with family and friend.
    For info, the website is a treasure,
    finding answers a real pleasure.

    Here I am now with my biggest toy,
    having fun, so much joy.
    I wonder, should it be told,
    that I am 84 years old?

    Ilse Schaefer

    February 19, 2005

January 25, 2005

  • Canada Post Launches Fetch

    Canada Post is about to launch Fetch. The site is now live at www.fetch4.info.

    There was a brief Globetechnology article about the fact that Fetch is being piloted in Calgary (which is somewhat unusual).

    This quote from the article does a good job of explaining the service at a very high level.

    “The Fetch service allows a user to set up an account with Canada Post, and input personal contact information in confidence. When users see an advertisement from a company participating in Fetch, they request that information be sent to that on-line account, either by entering a text message on a cellphone, or through an interactive voice system.

    Advertisers would pay only when a consumer requests one of their offers, and individuals would pay nothing for the service.”

    Congrats to Warren and Tim for getting this off the ground after a huge amount of internal work.

    It will be very interesting to see how this turns out. My guess is it will be a fundamentally new way of protecting consumer privacy while letting marketing through the veil, or it will be a flop. I doubt there is a half-way for this type of model. I’m hoping for the former as I like the idea of bringing greater interactivity to the offline environment.

January 21, 2005

  • Thought

    Kevin Lee has a very nice overview of the difference between SEO and SEM in his ClickZ article Compare and Contrast: SEM and SEO. I particularly like his analysis that SEO is largely a technical issue of site visibility (a fixed task) followed by ongoing PR and reputation management (an ongoing, evolving effort).