Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Marketing Musings: Google Exits Radio?
Google announced today that they wouldn't be pursuing their transformation plans for traditional radio advertising. That goes some way to answering the questions I pondered two years ago linked here. Having recently pulled back from the same initiative in the world of newspapers, I have think that the future is all about creation of media, rather than the conquering old existing (old) media using new tools. Everything we do on-line is potential media, heck every Tweet is media – those who can organize and sell this media in a way that supports the community rather than interrupts it, will probably win.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Marketing Musings: Things to Know About Marketing
Seth Godin just re-published his list of things “he knows for sure” about marketing…my 9 favorites are:
- Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
- Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
- Products that are remarkable get talked about.
- Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
- People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
- Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
- Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
- Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
- You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Marketing Musings: Shape-Shifting via Facebook
My usual stance on ANY advertising that does not result in a lead that has a chance to be converted into a sale is, don’t do it – especially if you are a small business with limited resources. In general this has resulted in me viewing “institutional advertising” or general branding messages (without a call to action) as simply a waste of money. This month in Fast Company magazine a new Facebook VP really got me thinking about whether or not this type of advertising is truly dead in the water.
Read the paragraphs below - it makes complete sense that there will always be a place for the emotional pull of a generic branding ad in forming opinions in the first place. Not all companies are lucky enough to benefit from extreme word of mouth marketing and for them, spending somewhere remains a necessity. I love the phrase "shape-shifting".
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...The primary accelerant is a Facebook feature called News Feed, which automatically shares information across friend networks and groups. As a result, "News Feed optimization," the art and science of writing a compelling News Feed announcement, has become an industry itself. "News Feed is as important to Facebook as AdWords or AdSense is to Google," says entrepreneur and blogger Dave McClure, who is teaching the Stanford course.
Harnessing the power of News Feed, the new apps, and the booming user base to make money for Facebook itself is the task of a new hire, VP of product marketing and operations Chamath Palihapitiya. Zuckerberg brought him aboard this summer to help figure out how to exploit what Facebookers call the "social graph"--those thousands of threads that make up users' connections to other people--and to create Facebook's coming targeted advertising program. Palihapitiya, 31, is tall and whippet thin, with elegant manners and a ready smile. A former electrical engineer, born in Sri Lanka and raised in Canada, he ran AOL's instant-message group, then jumped to the venture fund Mayfield. He is part Sand Hill Roadster and part freethinker; he appeared in an art film last winter making pointed comments about Silicon Valley's "old boy's club."
It is only day 67 for Palihapitiya at his new job when we sit down to talk, but he already sounds like a true believer. While cagey about details, he isn't shy about the potential he sees for targeted ads to fill Facebook's coffers. He madly sketches on a notepad, drawing a fine distinction between demand fulfillment (I want a cheap ticket to Hawaii. Now!), which the Internet has become quite good at, and demand generation, the shape-shifting set of marketing messages that conspire to get a consumer to want something. That, he says, is where he sees serious money on the table. "Facebook users are more engaged with each other," he says. "Aren't you more likely to be interested in what your friends are doing?" Google, which focuses by and large on demand fulfillment, is a $160 billion company. "For every dollar that goes into fulfillment, there are hundreds that are spent on generation," he says, particularly by the big brands. So what could Facebook be worth? Five times Google? Ten times? "Could be," he smiles.
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Read the paragraphs below - it makes complete sense that there will always be a place for the emotional pull of a generic branding ad in forming opinions in the first place. Not all companies are lucky enough to benefit from extreme word of mouth marketing and for them, spending somewhere remains a necessity. I love the phrase "shape-shifting".
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...The primary accelerant is a Facebook feature called News Feed, which automatically shares information across friend networks and groups. As a result, "News Feed optimization," the art and science of writing a compelling News Feed announcement, has become an industry itself. "News Feed is as important to Facebook as AdWords or AdSense is to Google," says entrepreneur and blogger Dave McClure, who is teaching the Stanford course.
Harnessing the power of News Feed, the new apps, and the booming user base to make money for Facebook itself is the task of a new hire, VP of product marketing and operations Chamath Palihapitiya. Zuckerberg brought him aboard this summer to help figure out how to exploit what Facebookers call the "social graph"--those thousands of threads that make up users' connections to other people--and to create Facebook's coming targeted advertising program. Palihapitiya, 31, is tall and whippet thin, with elegant manners and a ready smile. A former electrical engineer, born in Sri Lanka and raised in Canada, he ran AOL's instant-message group, then jumped to the venture fund Mayfield. He is part Sand Hill Roadster and part freethinker; he appeared in an art film last winter making pointed comments about Silicon Valley's "old boy's club."
It is only day 67 for Palihapitiya at his new job when we sit down to talk, but he already sounds like a true believer. While cagey about details, he isn't shy about the potential he sees for targeted ads to fill Facebook's coffers. He madly sketches on a notepad, drawing a fine distinction between demand fulfillment (I want a cheap ticket to Hawaii. Now!), which the Internet has become quite good at, and demand generation, the shape-shifting set of marketing messages that conspire to get a consumer to want something. That, he says, is where he sees serious money on the table. "Facebook users are more engaged with each other," he says. "Aren't you more likely to be interested in what your friends are doing?" Google, which focuses by and large on demand fulfillment, is a $160 billion company. "For every dollar that goes into fulfillment, there are hundreds that are spent on generation," he says, particularly by the big brands. So what could Facebook be worth? Five times Google? Ten times? "Could be," he smiles.
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