Tag: marketing

June 19, 2003

  • Thought

    In the June 2003 issue of Business 2.0, John Battelle, wrote a great article called “Putting Online Ads in Context”:

    Let that soak in: This is a new revenue source for the entire Web, one that not only is unobtrusive but, because it’s based on relevance, might even be useful to readers. Contextual advertising “could be much larger than the paid search market,” claims Bill Demas, senior vice president at Overture. Google’s Wojcicki seconds his assertion. For the sake of independent, high-quality content on the Web, we can only hope they are right.

April 28, 2003

  • Thought

    Jakob Nielsen’s intelligent take on text-based (and contextual) advertising is called “Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?”

    Jakob has always had (justifiably) unkind things to say about “traditional online advertising”, but he likes text ads, provided they are put in context by search results. I think that Jakob overly limits the effectiveness of contextual text ads because if the ads are truly placed in context, they also become a content point, just like other pages on the site the user is visiting. His argument regarding online classified ads being viewed as content not ads by online users is spot on — but it also applies to truly contextual text ads as well.

April 22, 2003

  • Thought

    The New York Times did a big write-up on E-mail Marketing and Spam — effectively ending the hopes that the two concepts can ever be separated in the public’s mind again. The article uses “marketing” and “junk”, “spammer” and “marketer” as synonyms and offers wonderful examples of spammers making the case against anti-spam advocates (thereby limiting the effectiveness of legitimate e-mailer’s concerns).

    What a mess.

April 10, 2003

  • Thought

    Great article called “Permission To Spam?” on ClickZ. Increasingly the challenge with e-mail marketing is going to be getting past the perception that your message is spam — even if you did clearly get permission.

    In the long-run, smart marketers have to begin to temper expectations and realize that they have to make their lists cleaner and their messages more valuable to subscribers if they plan to succeed. For example, I know recommend double opt-in as standard for all lists. Even though it will decrease list size, it eliminates any chance of people not knowing what they signed up for. And you eliminate anyone with over aggressive filters because they never respond to the confirmation list, which means you’re less likely to be sending messages into spam filters.

April 1, 2003

March 31, 2003

  • Thought

    It’s interesting that online retailer Bluefly is taking their e-mail delivery in-house because of fears their messages will be caught by spam filters if they use an outside technology partner. Most people do this in the exact opposite order — outsourcing for fear of being labeled spammers. Thing is though, companies are in a bit of a bind as most large e-mail services providers are now (rightly or wrongly) on blacklists across the Net. At the same time, companies don’t want to appear on those lists themselves, so they are stuck.

March 25, 2003

March 21, 2003

March 19, 2003

  • Thought

    Great article on ClickZ by Danny Sullivan. The article goes into great detail on Contextual Advertising, including a look at what Google is doing, like the Google AdWords ads that appear within banners on BlogSpot Blogs like IsThatLegal?

March 8, 2003

  • Thought

    A ClickZ article called “Context Is King, or Is It?” follows-up nicely on my “context is the only way” comment yesterday.

    The article talks a lot about the Google “Content-Targeted AdWords” program. This new program allows advertisers to use content sites Google partners with to run AdWords-like ads within those sites. The thing that makes this different from an ad network like DoubleClick, is that the ads published on those pages directly relate to what the page is about. By using Googles massive and intelligent search algorithms, the AdWords on the partners pages are always relevant (i.e. in context for the user).

    One example Google provides is of the “How Automatic Transmissions Work” page at howstuffworks.com. The page includes Adwords from Google that sell rebuilt transmissions, etc. Of course the live execution of the page doesn’t quite live up to the mock-up because the funnel is not full of willing advertisers yet.

    The article also is the first to (kind of off-handedly) mention what I think is the real reason Google bought Blogger — big heaping wads of context to put Content-Targeted AdWords in. I think a lot of the blogging community looked at it as a technology purchase rather than an ad placement opportunity. Follow the money.

    Google is brilliant. By purchasing Blogger and implementing Content-Targeted ads within it, they have cut the two biggest costs associated with running an ad-based content site — the cost of selling the ads, and the cost of creating the content. The process is essentially automated with Google left to manage the infrastructure and cheque credit card deposits.

March 7, 2003

  • Thought

    This InternetRetailer.com article on eBags.com moving more of their marketing budget to search listings is fairly typical of what we are seeing happening with online marketing. I’ve long preached “context is the only way” for online advertising.

    People are task driven online and want to reach some goal. If you can align advertising with the goal of the user, you will benefit them, and yourself. This strategy is what’s behind the success of search engine links like Google’s Adwords. Because the ads are in context and can be considered largely “content” on the page (i.e. the ads match what the user asked to see) they are more effective at moving the user to their goal and therefore more effective for the marketer because the marketer’s message is actually wanted by these users. This has to be more effective then distracting people from their task because they meet some demographic or interest expectation in the marketer’s mind — “I’ll promote the new Malibu on this mom’s site because women visit that site and they’re my target market”. Or worse yet, just distracting anyone that stops by because the CPC deal lets you blanket the net with pop-ups.

    I’m watching for a major overhaul of online marketing towards context and tight alignment with content over the next few years. I’ve been calling for this since 1997 but with Google and Overture showing people what it looks like in reality, it may finally catch on.

March 6, 2003

  • Thought

    A few weeks ago I was watching City-TV here in Toronto and an ad came on for the Ford Focus. Nothing unusual about that, but what was unusual was the now familiar “i” logo for accessing interactive TV options that appeared during the ad. The interactive screen that came up overtop of the Focus ad after I pressed select on my digital remote asked me if I was looking for “fun”, “convenience”, “economy” or some such list and after making a selection the next screen asked if I would like to get a brochure on the Ford Focus. I clicked “yes” and the screen said thanks. End of interaction.

    Yesterday I got a really nice package in the mail from Ford that included the promised brochure along with an offer of a free gift if I went to a dealer for a test drive. They referenced the generic ford.ca site in the introductory letter and mentioned that I could “build my own Focus” and get pricing at the site.

    This to me was a great example of tying together iTV, Direct Mail, dealer-level walk-in generation, and the web into one well-executed campaign.

    If you know more about this particular campaign, especially how successful it has been for Ford, I’d love to hear from you.

  • “Doing Something” About Spam

    There is a growing urge amongst everyone using the Internet to “do something” about spam.

    The growing frustration with spam has lead to more consumer and corporate anti-spam filtering technologies. “ESPs” (E-mail Service Providers) are legitimately afraid that false positives by these filters are going to decrease the overall effectiveness of e-mail as a communications tool. And ISPs are getting very tired of the costs associated with the massive amount of unwanted messages that they have to deliver.

    Following behind the host of technical solutions to spam are the interest groups and task force groups being set up to represent the interests of each group.

    For example, the ESPs have set up a group via the NAI. And now standards body the IETF has set up the Anti-Spam Research Group to research technical solutions, some of which this CNET article says make take years to implement — because fighting spam may mean a fundamental change to the way e-mail works.

    JamSpam appears to be looking for a holistic approach, recognizing that all involved (okay with exception of the spammers) have legitimate concerns and the only solutions that will work are ones that recognize everyone’s issues.

    I have two big concerns in this rush to action:

    1. ISPs have taken it upon themselves to determine what is and is not wanted e-mail. That means that things that people legitimately want and senders have legitimate reason to send, are not being delivered by ISPs. While everyone can sympathize that they get more mail than they want to handle and that this is driving up their costs, they need to let the user decide what is wanted and what is not. Imagine of the Postal Service decided it had too much mail and these LL Bean catalogues seem to be in the mail far too often so they decided to dump them all in a big recycle bin.

    2. The other big issue as I see it is the amorphous definition of “spam” itself. Many people now think of spam as ALL marketing messages, or ALL messages from businesses, or ANY message that they are not interested in. And because people have been given the dubious advice to “never unsubscribe from spam” because it will beget more spam, we now have a situation where legitimate mailing lists have hundreds of subscribers who are submitting them to spam filters rather than use the standard unsubscribe feature to get off the list.

November 1, 2002

  • Thought

    “The legit e-mail marketing companies…are really going to hate this feature,” Smith continued. “They use e-mail Web beacons…to gather statistics about e-mail advertising campaigns.”

    Will they ever hate it.

    A recent CNET article called New Outlook to give spammers the boot details changes to Outlook (the most used e-mail application) that default to NOT loading HTML images from remote servers when a message is shown. It’s not entirely clear if this only related to “preview windows” or all windows, but for legitimate marketers this is really going to mess up the move to HTML messaging, and along with it muddy e-mail tracking stats further.

    At the same time, it’s a boon for people tired of HTML-laced spam, so it will be interesting to see how this all shakes out between now and the launch of Office 11 in the summer of 2003.

October 23, 2002

  • Thought

    Well, it looks like the “DMA giving in” on Spam is not exactly what it seems. From my understanding of reports I’ve read over the last day or so, the DMA is calling for legislation, which is good, because we’re at that stage now.

    But they are suggesting (as they always have) that unsolicited e-mail is okay as long as you have a real From and Subject line and provide a street address.

    The idea is that this law would get rid of all the dubious spam that gets sent, but would also clear the way for “legitimate” companies to spam anyone they wanted to. This was always their position and it is dead wrong.

    The DMA should follow the strategy of the CMA which has had a very enlightened policy since 1997 (disclosure: I was one of the authors of the CMA policy).

    This Wired News article called “Spam So Bad the Spammers Balk” gives a good overview.

October 22, 2002

  • Thoughts on Spam as a Marketer and a Human

    Alexander Bosika wrote recently about the DMA’s decision to “crack down” on spam. Since he baited me to comment, I’ll fall for the trap.

    Spam is a big issue that I tend to look at from two vantage points.

    1. As an individual.

    2. As a marketer.

    As an individual, spam is certainly a huge issue for most people. I think the issue has been somewhat exaggerated by the fact that the people comment on spam (journalists, pundits, those active online) also tend to have the most exposure of e-mail addresses online and therefore tend to have their e-mail addresses harvested and passed around a bit more. Good luck using your inbox effectively if you used your main e-mail address to register a domain.

    Still, for those less highly involved in online issues, spam is still a big problem for them. And certainly, the rise of hard-core spam with really raunchy subject lines doesn’t give anyone comfort that things are getting better.

    As an individual, I use Spamnet by Cloudmark. This is the best solution I’ve seen to date, building on the P2P concepts of Napster and some clever pattern recognition algorithms. The software is still buggy (it’s in beta), but it is getting close to primetime and more and more I’m seeing it listed as one of the options people list when talking about “fighting spam”. My guess is that 9 months from now (if not soon), Cloudmark will be the Google of spam-catching.

    So as an individual I see Cloudmark as a gift from above and use it constantly, even with the bugs in the beta version.

    As a marketer, Cloudmark scares the crap out of me. Because it allows users to determine what is spam, it has a tendency to give “false positives”. A False Positive in this context is a legitimate opt-in e-mail marketer getting labeled as spam. Cloudmark tends to be better than most, but the false positives it gives are very interesting. Because people vote on each message in real-time rather than identifying in advance which IP addresses or domains to block, you see the internal workings of people’s feelings on e-mail marketing.

    When the NYT sends me a book or movie updates, they always get through. As soon as they send a “special offer to NYT subscribers”, it invariably gets dumped. Amazon new release listings tend to get through Cloudmark, but the “affiliate updates” which contain a lot of promotional information, some of it for partners, gets labeled as spam.

    This means that marketers need to live in constant fear of having any given message deemed as low enough value to be spam, even if every name is legitimate. And the problem will only get worse as these tools become more prevalent and more effective.

    My guess is that e-mail marketing will change radically in the next 9 months as Cloudmark hits critical mass. When it tips, everything will change.

October 12, 2002

  • Thought

    Jakob Nielsen is of course always a sharp cookie. But in this recent article he focussed on the usability of e-mail newsletters and came up with a must read for any e-mail marketer or online publisher.

    Keep it simple!

September 24, 2002

  • Double Opt-out?

    Many e-mail marketing experts recommend “Double Opt-in” as the best approach to building your e-mail marketing list. Double Opt-in means that the subscriber must respond to a confirmation e-mail before they are put on the list (i.e. you sign up at a site, get an e-mail saying “confirm subscription”, and only if you reply to that confirmation e-mail do you get put on the list). This is done to ensure that there is no abuse of an open e-mail list (for example, some people have been known to sign up enemies to lists they know they will hate — like baptists on the Barbie Fetish list.)

    Yahoo seems to have taken this to some perverse extreme by introducing “Double Opt-out”.

    I just unsubscribed from the Tom Tom Club mailing list (don’t ask), and got this reply from YahooGroups (where the list lives):

    Subject: Please reply to unsubscribe from tomtomclubnewsflash

    Hello,

    We have received a request from you to unsubscribe from the

    tomtomclubnewsflash group. Please confirm your request by

    replying to this message. If you do not wish to unsubscribe from

    tomtomclubnewsflash, please ignore this message.

    Regards,

    Yahoo! Groups Customer Care

    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

    While double opt-in is good because it keeps consumers off lists they might not want to be on, double opt-out is bad because it keeps consumers on lists they clearly want to get off of. Another move by Yahoo! that shows that they just don’t get the ‘Net anymore. Very sad.

    (And the pop-up ad for a casino on the Yahoo!Groups homepage didn’t help much with my opinion either.

September 19, 2002

September 14, 2002

  • Thought

    I always find Clay Shirky’s writing insightful.

    The posting on his site called Broadcast Institutions, Community Values talks about the problems that publishers can get into when they start hosting communities. Communities look like natural extensions of what publishers do, but they live by different rules, and this is what Shirky points out.

    For example:

    Media people often criticize the content on the internet for being unedited, because everywhere one looks, there is low quality — bad writing, ugly images, poor design. What they fail to understand is that the internet is strongly edited, but the editorial judgment is applied at the edges, not the center, and it is applied after the fact, not in advance. Google edits web pages by aggregating user judgment about them, Slashdot edits posts by letting readers rate them, and of course users edit all the time, by choosing what (and who) to read.

    This also applies to blogs which seem to be to be like online communities without an organizing body or software of any sort.

September 11, 2002

August 24, 2002

  • Thought

    Many people focus on the personal and journalistic uses of blogs. But they are also very useful for companies to use to enhance (or establish) communications between themselves and their customers.

    A great example of the power of weblogs in business is Oddblog by Oddpost.

    Oddpost itself is an amazing company that I’ve mentioned before, but I found that I loved them even more after finding their idiosyncratic blog, which on the face of it tells you about bug fixes, but in reality, if the personification of their brand.

    Cupcakes!

August 13, 2002

  • Thought

    Jim Sterne, who is always a great read, has an article on Boxes and Arrows called “Customer Experience Meets Online Marketing at Brand Central Station.”

    The only weak thing about the article is the title. Jim starts out discussing branding in general:

    “A brand is the culmination of all of the interactions that all the people in a marketplace have with the firm.

    He then goes on to talk in more detail about how this plays out online and what measurements you can use to judge your effective you are at reaching those overarching branding goals.

August 10, 2002

  • Thought

    Tessa Wegert disagrees with me on the iVillage pop-up ban in her ClickZ article “Why Nix Effective Formats?”

    I think the reason to “nix effective formats” is to preserve the long-term value of the iVillage audience. If iVillage keeps going against the strong disapproval of over 90% of their audience they won’t have much of an audience before too long.

    The problem here is that a lot of things that work for marketers (at least in the short run) are not good for the Net (in the long run). We all need to work on ways of making money online that let the Net work well for all concerned. I can’t see how Intrusion Marketing will fit into this (in the long run).

July 29, 2002

  • Thought

    iVillage is doing the right thing.

    Pop Go Those Blasted Pop-Up Ads, iVillage Decrees says the New York Times.

    It’s good to see one of the original niche content sites setting a positive trend and formally moving away from pop-up ads:

    Now, iVillage, a network of Web sites for women, says it is heeding its readers’ complaints and plans to eliminate most pop-up advertising by Sept. 30 on all its sites.

    IVillage said a survey of its readers in March indicated that “92.5 percent of iVillage women found pop-up advertising to be the most frustrating feature of the Web.”

    It seems that more and more these days, publishers’ desperation to make an ad dollar is turning them into carney hucksters, using any tactic they can to foist whatever product they have on an unsuspecting public.

    Hopefully, other publishers will follow iVillage and we will see the emergence of more contextual, likable advertising online.

July 27, 2002

  • Thought

    Ooh, it’s 1998 again!

    I thought I’d taken a ride in the way-back machine when I read this InternetNews article (Miller Launches Branded Calendar)

    Here’s a quote:

    “Miller Brewing Company is extending its brand to a free online entertainment calendar that it’s hoping will become a central part of consumers’ social outings.

    … the Miller Time Network online calendar offers local information on music, bars, clubs, sports, food and movies. The calendar also lets users download local maps, buy tickets for events or send invitations to friends.”

    I’m not saying it’s a bad idea — it just seems that the appetite for these funky branded apps has decreased considerably. Hope it works for them so I can brush of my “misheard lyrics” site business plan.

July 16, 2002

  • Thought

    Watch you mouth! At least if you want to make sure your e-mails get to the intended recipients.

    Strom has an article about the perils of on-the-server spam filtering to the free flow of conversation. Note that they couldn’t even spell out the word “viagra” in full in this article that originally went out by e-mail because the message would likely have been filtered out of many inboxes.

January 25, 2002

  • Thought

    This E-Commerce News article called “E-mail Campaigns: From Trash to Cash” is brilliant. AMR Research did an indepth analysis of what is happening in permission-based e-mail marketing and came up with some answers that we’ve been saying all along.

    Here are some highlights:

    1. “The world of e-mail marketing is constantly changing,” the report said.

    2. AMR concluded that the outsourced model is the best choice for at least some, if not all, of a company’s e-mail campaign needs.

    3. AMR found that response rates to targeted campaigns are seven to 12 times higher than response rates to mass mailings.

    4. Fifty-five percent of respondents reported response rates of 11 percent or more when mailing to in-house lists, while just 26 percent said they had the same level of success with purchased lists.

    5. Unfortunately, what works today will be old by next week. The word “free,” for example, used to result in high response rates. Now, unless it is coupled with “shipping,” it is a surefire way to make sure the e-mail gets trashed, according to AMR.

    6. “Marketers need to make sure the e-mail systems they choose can not only send both types of messages [HTML and text], but they must also be able to detect what format the recipient is capable of receiving. This functionality is known as sniffing, and it should be a key criterion of your selection process,” AMR said.

    (Internet.com did a good article on this study as well. Similar story but some different quotes and stats make it worth a look.)

October 18, 2001

  • Thought

    Another example of advertising beyond the web is Adbank’s use of P2P networks to distribute ad-laced content. The Globe And Mail did a feature on them back in October, which may still be on their site (they only archive articles for a limited time).

  • Thought

    Instant Messaging may be a new advertising frontier.

    A lot of adults are still a little unclear about the value and pervasiveness of Instant Messaging (applications like AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and MSN Messenger). But ask a teen about IM and you’ll discover that this is an essential part of the Net for them. (For those really not in the know, Instant Messaging or IM allows you to chat with “buddies” via a small application that is always on in the background when you are online.)

    An interesting company called ActiveBuddy is getting a lot of press lately for their IM “bots” that allow companies to deliver marketing messages and content via IM. I suggest we keep an eye on ActiveBuddy and the use of new online technologies as ad-bearing vehicles.