Illuminating Marketing Blog

I am very excited to be speaking at a small business event in Seattle on September 23rd at Washington Mutual Center.  You can learn more about the event at   http://www.xbarit.com/events/efficient_smart_business_event.html if you would like to go to the registration site directly you can go to http://xbar.eventbrite.com  or register below.

Here is a video, although poorly lit, of Rick Rochon speaking at the Microsoft Small Business Week event in San Francisco.
rick rochon - illuminate.com from aline dinoia on Vimeo.

When Google bought YouTube, the match seemed perfect. Take the most efficient advertising network system in the world and marry it to the most popular video sharing site online and watch the money roll in.

Sometimes blue sky daydreams are harder than you'd think to make real. CNet today looks at the Google / YouTube advertising problem, and suggests that a lot more dry-erase ink will need to be spilled before all the kinks are worked out.

Marketing online means that you can tie your message to whatever content a user is viewing in their web browser. You can pay to have your ad for umbrellas show up on pages that forecast rain. Or you can market that house you're trying to sell on every article that mentions a specific neighborhood or town. Targeted ads mean that the user is confronted not only with the article they wanted to read, but also with some kind of marketing message that relates to that article.

And that can be a great thing. The ability to target opens up the door to focus your marketing just on those people who are most likely to be interested in what you're selling. Unless, somehow, your marketing finds its way onto an article that goes against what you're trying to sell.

Take, for example, the problems that occurred online during the Eliot Spitzer scandal. Users looking to learn more about the former New York Governor's relationship with a high priced call girl were automagically linked to websites that played to more prurient interests.

The takeaway here is to make sure that when you're targeting your ads, you're doing it in a way that's not going to link your company to anything that's going to go against your brand. Targeting is only as good as your targets.

When you check in - the next time you check in - to a hotel, you may find something surprising in your nightstand.
Aside the Gideon's Bible, the plastic portfolio of hotel services, the tiny pad of paper and the unsettlingly chewed pencil, you'll find an empty space. An empty space formerly filled by the local Yellow Pages.

In an age when increasingly optimized local searches are becoming more relevant and access to directory information is easier find via your keyboard than through a finger-walk, it seems that the last best use of your Yellow Pages may be one of comfort over function.

It makes sense. Business travelers bring the world with their laptops. Casual travelers have their cell phones. When you bring all your communication toys with you, there's less of a reason for the hotel to provide those services. Consider this a sign of the future. Publications need to prove to advertisers their value, while proving their worth to the audience of people who continue to use their books.

Think about the last time you sat down with your remote to watch TV. After settling in on a show, you watch until the screen turns black and that guy from Subway pops up with this ten year old very large pants. The black screen, the break in programing, caused an involuntary response in your hand. You reach to the remove and immediately start flicking through the channels. You plan to come back to your previous show, but as you're bouncing around the cable system, you get distracted and forget what you were watching before, and move on to another show setting the cycle to repeat again.

Television networks hate this. Your channel surfing means their loss of audience. A loss of audience that occurs at the exact moment when networks need that audience most - to view the advertisements placed on the network. Managing breaks - between shows, inside shows, during commercials - has become a huge problem. And as a smart marketer you should know how the networks working on solutions.

Let's introduce Lee Hunt. Lee's a former television branding executive who built a reputation as being the creative powerhouse behind repositioning networks like PBS Kids, Lifetime and XM radio. His company's focus now is on helping these networks find better solutions for managing audience break migration. Last year, TVWeek sat down with him to talk about ways that subtle management of programing transitions can minimize audience shrinkage.

If you're going to place an ad, you need to know that you ad is being seen. If the publication, television network, radio show, website or outdoor placement is ignored by the audience, you've just wasted all the time and money that it took to create your ignored ad. At least, in the case of television breaks, the networks are as concerned as you should be.

Consistency. Each week, each day, you know what you need to do to finish your bit for your job. Say you own a gas station. You know that each week, based on the kind of ebb and flow of your business, you can adjust the prices of your gas to ensure a steady stream of revenue. And each week, your customers think they've won - or lost - the gamble of when to buy.

What happens when your consistency is noticed? In the case above, what would your customers do if they realized that every Tuesday your prices were at their lowest, and every Wednesday they were at their highest?

The Cincinnati Enquirer published an exhaustive report today that investigated the pricing practices of 716 gas stations in the Greater Cincinnati area. The results mean a couple of things. First, that if you need to fill up, wait until Tuesday. More importantly, however, the report shows how consistency can be a trecherous trap.

Think, for a moment, about the sliding scale pricing strategy enacted by these gas stations. If every week, the stations fluctuated their price by 3 cents - between Tuesday and Wednesday prices - how much are they losing? As more people shop on Tuesdays to take advantage of the sale, less people shop on Wednesdays to pay for the sale. Perhaps the consistency the gas stations should maintain is one of pricing. each day at roughly a penny above the Tuesday prices would yield a higher average sale than the constant fluctuation. And create a relationship with their customers based on price consistency, instead of the hob-goblin of foolish consistency that seems to be this constant fluctuation.

Just a thought, as we stare down the barrel of another set of failing banks, rising gas prices and scared creditor - when you treat your customers with respect, they'll stay your customers.

When markets change, so do businesses.

For years, print publications have seen a steady erosion of their reader-base. Despite more magazines being published now than ever before, the time (and money ) spent by readers is decreasing. The magic of the internet has taken the luster off the traditional print publication.

And as a reaction to that, in the hope that it can muster a bit of positive publicity, Esquire Magazine is upping the ante. Since some things can only be touched, Esquire has decided that the best way to publicize their 75th Anniversary is to bring some future tech to the newsstand. Behold the ePaper cover.

ePaper - like the kind developed by the good folks at E Ink Corporation - is a low-power, flexible display screen that looks and feels like paper. The idea for Esquire is to get you to buy their magazine (and support their advertisers) by offering the special edition with a powered cover.

While the effort may just be crazy enough to work - for this issue anyway - the real story isn't how this technology could be the harbinger of all future magazines, but rather whether even with portable/disposable displays people will continue to support print publications at all.

Seth MacFarlane - the guy behind Family Guy -  joins the ranks of John K - the guy behind Ren And Stimpy - in the world of online advertising.

Where K has been developing online animated ads for a while, as his blog will attest, MacFarlane has the step-up afforded him by a distribution partnership with Google.

The question arises, will cartoons be the future of online advertising? In part, the new Google deal is about entertainment. MacFarlane will create and supervise a new series that will show up in the place an ad normally would in a web page. But the real secret behind this isn't about entertainment, it's about changing attention.

If Google can get you to pay more attention to the ads that are placed on pages, they believe that they can make those advertising spaces more valuable. How many ads do you actually notice during a day's trip around the internet? If you made a point to pay attention when a new ad was displayed - if only because it might be a new cartoon or something you'd want to see - think that number would change?

It's a strategy as old as radio - where soap companies created serialized stories to keep listeners attentive between commercial breaks. If it worked for radio, it may just work for the web.

Building a marketing  campaign combines a lot of moving pieces. You need to know who you're targeting, You need to know how you're going to reach them (outdoor? print? broadcast? internet? some mix thereof?) Most importantly, you need to know what you're going to say to them.

Creative is the part that hangs up a lot of marketers. You know how you want to talk to your potential customers, you just haven't quite nailed down  what you're going to say.

A fantastic tool in the hands of smart marketers is stock images. Places like Corbis and Getty Images allow you to search for imagery that matches just the mood, idea, product or services you're interested in so that you can place those images in your marketing.

Just make sure that when you choose an image, the image you choose isn't one that's already being used everywhere. Such was the case for Jennifer Anderson, who's images have shown up in ads for competing computer companies, travel systems and on books. So many places that she's now called The Everywhere Girl.