I read this today: “In your face disruptive ads could ease inventory, creative woes”
A snippet:
Web publishers have always treated their users as a sacred flock. But last week at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., Payne, the CEO of ShortTail Media and former senior vp & general manager at CNN.com, issued a daring challenge for the industry: stop worshiping, and start interrupting the almighty user. Read Further
I thought this was very interesting – At World Wide Creative, we struggle with “banner blindness” on the media placement campaigns that we run. The answer is really to think creatively about the delivery, and so I read Dave Duarte’s blog with a smile on my dial. This is exactly the kind of thing we’re looking at for our client’s campaigns – it’s a useful way of aggregating content on the ad to make the ad more compelling, less intrusive and more authentic. Read Further
Could this be the next Million Dollar Homepage idea – you know, when after the idea hit mainstream, everyone was scratching their head going ‘I wish I’d thought of that!!’
The idea is that Jason, some dude in the States, wears a different shirt each day of the year. He will then blog about, talk about it, link to your website and generally parade himself in the public eye in the name of your brand.
The first day is charged at $1, the last day sold $365. Read Further
Fact is 2009 is going to be a tough year no doubt, with the grim global and local economic outlook taking centre stage.
However, an offset of these circumstances is that 2009 has a couple of things we can look forward to – specifically within the digital environment in South Africa… Read Further
One of the most famous marketing blunders of all time happened in the 80’s when Coke rejigged the secret formula that had stood them so well for 100 years and packaged it as ‘New Coke’.
The result: worldwide comdemnation and almost unanimous customer revolt.
The apparent lesson: company focused design should NOT leapfrog user-centred design.
This mistake has been repeated time and time again, from product design to food to advertising jingles.
The problem is, people in the firing line will tell you, is that they tried the user centred design. Coke, for example, trialed thousands of customers with their new cola recipe twenty-odd years ago. The feedback pointed overwhelmingly in favour of the new recipe, but to their surprise, their audience contradicted their earlier answers and went back to saying that the new Coke sucked.
Recently, a successful 9 year old website in the US called UrbanBaby.com went through a design overhaul and their audience fled to a new site called YouBeMom.com.
So what happened? Why did all these people suddenly leave after almost a decade of faithful support, dragging the site owners over a bed of hot coals for changing its look n’ feel.
Did their research lie?
Well, in a word yes. I believe Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal book ‘Blink‘ holds some of the answers. Gladwell reminds us that people behave differently under controlled circumstances.
Online marketers will do well to take heed of this when conducting user-centred-design research.
This is why as a company or an online agency, if you’re looking to truly connect with the personas visiting your website, you cannot only rely on stats. You need to go out and get personal. Get in touch with your audience. Have a drink with them and understand the emotions behind why they’re interacting with your brand.
This underlying understanding can then be taken into account when making decisions on your website strategy.
barack kicks ass
At World WIde Creative, we’re pretty stoked that Barack Obama won. Partly because he’s of African descent, partly because the guy rocks the house, and partly because he brings a fresh breeze to a world smogged up with serious issues.
We have one more selfish reason for being elated for the win, however. World Wide Creative uses Barack Obama’s internet strategy as a case study in almost all our presentations, so it would have been pretty crappy if the non-internet-savvy old white guy had won! Read Further
obama
Obama just kicked off the week with two killer pieces of digital marketing news. For those of you with heads in the sand, Barack Obama is leading the most pervasive, penetrative marketing campaign in political campaign history… and he’s centralised his strategy on a community-focused internet approach. Read Further
Hec.
Tic. Read Further
transparency
[via ReadWriteWeb] Read Further
ideate
…IF the authors posting on www.ideate.co.za (about Small Business in SA) DIDN’T participate in the conversations taking place on each of their posts…
Fortunately, the “mild-mannered alter-egos” behind Ideate, Fred (The Heaviest Chef of them all!!), Andrew and Shane, as well as some of their other guest contributors, ARE participating – and this, to me, is the primary reason behind Ideate’s success.
Don’t believe me? Case in point, I randomly went throught 10 posts and this was the level of participation from them… Read Further
Wikipedia thinks ‘marketing’ means this:
Marketing is an ongoing process of planning and executing the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion often referred to as the 4 Ps) for products, services or ideas to create exchange between individuals and organizations. Marketing tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. Read Further
avril
Read this article. It’s a fascinating insight into how Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend‘ became the number 1 most viewed video in history – beating ‘Evolution of Dance‘ with over 100m views. Read Further
For those of you that don’t know, Google isn’t developing a mobile phone in terms of hardware. Instead they are sticking to what they do best. They’re creating an open source operating system for mobile phone manufacturers to make use of.
There’s an article on Techcrunch telling the world that we should expect to see the first Google powered phone: the G1, hit T-Mobile stores next month. Read Further
I’ve been called into several ‘viral video’ brainstorming sessions since Mike and I started World Wide Creative. It’s a big buzz word, now that marketing people have seen examples of tiny budgets converting to huge results.
The truth is, there’s no way you can make a viral video. You can only make a video. Your audience will make it viral. Read Further
marlboro
Despite the growing gloom in the industry, advertising still works.
I’ve heard in meetings recently that the time has come to start casting the net out wider and cutting advertising budgets. I think in some cases this is true (and plays nicely into our hands being a web marketing company) but to believe that the advertising industry is dead, as some pundits have called it, is foolish. Read Further
One of World Wide Creative’s success stories, Verity was highlighted on the prime time television programme Carte Blanche this evening. It’s a great example of how a good web marketing strategy with great determination and even greater belief can reap rewards. Read Further
I know we all hate spam but sometimes you have to admire the creativity and thought that goes into some of the subject titles. I must admit, I’ve never been inclined to click on “get your viagra today” or “grow your schloong to extra lengths”, but today I had one sent through that I just had to click on:
“Grow a kangeroo in 2 weeks”
Brilliant! Read Further
During last night’s Heavy Chef Session, Rui Esteves answered one of the questions about marketing his brands by mentioning their early efforts to start a viral video campaign in 2000. After the Session, I was asked by some of the folk who attended to get hold of the videos.
Rui kindly sent them through to me and I’ve posted them to Play.24.com – check these out… Read Further
firefox downoad day
I reckon this is a good cause: Firefox Download Day. If you’re still on Internet Explorer, well, sort yourself out. This is your chance for redemption. Read Further
Saw this on TechCrunch; it’s a demo of iPhone Earth.
Interesting, especially since the iPhone is now going to be available across all our fellow developing countries*. Read Further
Canon
So it’s competition time over at Smashing Magazine again and this time round you can win yourself a fancy Canon DSLR.
Unleash the creative within and go out this weekend Read Further
Test
You may have seen this already, but if you haven’t, do yourself a favour, click here to do the test. It’s guaranteed to make you tell someone else to check it out. Read Further
Since moving to Cape Town at the beginning of this year I have had more and more exposure to traditional ad agencies. We have been approached by quite a few to work with their clients. They understand the web design and build part of the process, but I sense some anxiety when we get onto the topic of search, and more importantly, measurability. What is the agency’s incentive to precisely measure what’s happening with their customers money? This is something that’s only really possible with online ad spend. Read Further
Since placing our profile on Biz-Community* pitching World Wide Creative’s services as a web marketing company, we’ve seen an increase in online referrals by around 150% (not a confirmed stat – this is using my overtaxed, non-administrative brain). Not sure if the traffic through our site has been generated by the Biz-Community website, since not a lot of the visitors to the World Wide Creative site actually come directly from their site – but maybe our increasing number of people ’stumbling upon’ us results from better search results for marginalised words. Read Further
World Wide Creative is excited about the big web marketing drive we’re on. Pawnee is working full tilt on SEO, Mike is on the case with Pay per click and we’re all on the case with optimising our latest sites for optimal ranking.
A good article on the basics, check this out: How to optimise your business online.
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