inluminent

Carlton Draught’s Big Beer Ad. Great execution on a WOM marketing campaign. I’d try Carlton today based on this effort.
(Hat-tip to Scoble)

I sat in the Admiral’s Club at O’hare airport for 4+ hours today… rediculous how a little rain can totally screw up the air traffic to Texas for that long, but anyways…
I was quite impressed by the paper quality of the New York Times here in Chicago… Amazing paper quality, and I used to [...]

Dave Hamilton posted an interesting comment on Branding online with this memorable quote:
“Lose sight of branding, and you lose that customer.”
Read his entry for the whole story behind that quote. Good post Dave.

This Wizard of Ads article is dead on. If you sell media (any kind) read it and learn.

Sam Decker gives us a lesson in the art of offering people a lesser choice:
Think about the choices we give customers. On a call, a visit to the site, a visit to the store – in that experience are they presented with an alternative to go up or down on any purchase? Do you have [...]

Ding! is dangerous. Very Dangerous.
Ding! is Southwest Airlines latest push into the consumer’s life. It’s a desktop application that alerts you to Southwest’s latests travel deals, and it’s wonderful marketing.
This is user invited desktop travel advertising at it’s best folks. I trust Southwest because I’ve never had a bad experience [...]

Branding is dead. I agree, buy you know when a brand is really a brand when it invades even the jokes your brother emails you:
—
One day, in line at the company cafeteria, Joe says to Mike behind him, “My Ý elbow hurts like hell. I guess I better see a doctor.”
“Listen, you don’t have [...]

I just discovered Gapingvoid Blogcards by Hugh Macleod.
Fucking awesome idea. Gonna have to order a few.

update: I ordered 100 cards with the above image printed on them and my name and email address on the back… I figure they’ll be great as conversation starters at parties and the like. Figured I’d share that with [...]

I just wanted to point out how funny it was to watch K-Mart commercials when you live in a market where there are no K-Marts anymore. It’s just funny. About a year ago K-Mart pulled completely out of Austin, TX. The closest K-Mart to my house is 1 hour and 20 minutes away. [...]

I got this email today from a professional marketing group (emphasis mine):
Dear Marketer,
Please accept our invitation to participate in a short web survey for the American Marketing Association. As a valued member of the industry, we would like your opinions about ways to reach more marketers and increase our membership. Your answers will [...]

This is the coolest web page header design on a ‘news’ website I’ve seen in a long time.
On this page, and doubtless on the rest of the International Herald Tribune web pages, they have this really cool header that is the whole header at the top of the page, but becomes just the useful part [...]

I’m lazily stealing this post from Rick Bruner:
MarketingSherpa has called for nominations for the best marketing blog:
We’re launching MarketingSherpa’s Reader’s Choice Award for Best Blogs on the subjects of marketing, advertising and PR. A blog must [...]

Angie McKaig again inspires me with “please stop making my eyes hurt“.
Angie underscores the importance of readers to publishers that support their work with advertising, and she also makes clear the importance of good advertising to readers. Advertising and editorial have to work together on the web more than in any other medium, in [...]

…overheard today on a mailing list I’m subscribed to, in response to a question about a particular statistic:
Sixty-four percent of all the world’s statistics are made up right there on the spotEighty-two-point-four percent of people believe them, whether they’re accurate statistics or not.
     – Todd Snider, The Statistician’s Blues [iTunes Link]
Too funny… I’ve seen that happen [...]

Pretty cool.

What brand are you?

Niche publishing really isn’t just for Nick Denton anymore… Peter Rojas, the original blogger behind Gizmodo has broken out of that gig to start Engadget… a competitor to Gizmodo.
Denton still has a leg up (first mover advantage we used to call it) on individuals launching one or two focused sites on their own, as he [...]

A few links from the month:

ADHD Observations - interesting comments from a parent of children with ADHD.
CSS Dropshadows - from ALA #172.
The Lowering of Loyalty from FastCompany (great first comment).
How Not to Win Customer Loyalty from Business2.0.
Top 25 Cities in the US for Doing Business from Inc.
The Three C’s of Personal Branding from brandchannel.com.
MacRumors [...]

Quoting Jeff Jarvis in full (because the information is that important to me:
The Internet is now bigger than cable, according to eMarketer (via MediaPost and LostRemote).
…eMarketer now estimates U.S. household Internet penetration is about 67.9 percent. That compares with a 65.8 percent U.S. household penetration level for cable, according to an eMarketer analysis of Nielsen [...]

This spot for Nutri-Grain is great. It’s the little things that put a smile on your face at the end of a long day… [via This is not your practice blog]
ps. check out the other spots they’ve got on that site by clicking previous and next.

Today was definitely Friday the 13th.
I don’t post about the office on this weblog very often, but today was just one of those days. I’m a sales manager at work, and today, my “star performer” told me she had been offered a job at another company.
That means she’s leaving.
Ugh… can’t tell [...]

Tom Hespos has posted some pretty enlightening reading on the subject of “what’s next in marketing” in his post title Expectations of Relevance.
“…what do advertisers do when the broadcast model fails to deliver? I’d argue that they first need to learn more about their target audiences. What interests, conditions and behaviors are strongly correlated with [...]

The last day of Connections was really just more of the stuff you’ve read in my past two accounts of my experiences at the conference.
I attended fewer sessions on Day Three than I did during the other two days, I think mainly because I realized (or percieved) that I wasn’t really getting anything out of [...]

Hmmm… I have mixed feelings about the second day of the NAA Connections meetings… Where should I start?
I guess I’ll start with the fact that the official NAA blog hasn’t been updated to actually reflect anything happening at the conference on Monday. It jumped from Sunday to an advertisement for the Tuesday session. [...]

San Diego is a beautiful town to fly into. Wow! And it’s gorgeous to walk through the touristy area close to the harbor too!
I spent the first day at NAA’s Connections today. It was fun… but it was also a long day (nothing like boarding a plane early in the morning, then [...]

I attended the Central Texas Direct Marketing Association luncheon today and the topic was “How to maximize the Internet for Direct Marketing”. The luncheon was moderated by Lee Sellers of Dell, and the panelists were include Bill Cutshall of Tocquigny Advertising, Interactive + Marketing, Curt Finch of Journyx and William Leake of LCG.
It was a [...]

Wow!!!
If you haven’t seen IRobotNow.com, then you’re missing the best online advertisement I’ve ever seen…
IRobotNow.com is a website where you can order your very own robot, completely configured the way you want it. You can watch videos of the NS-5 in action and learn more about how a personal domestic assistant can improve your [...]

The public posting by Noel from a few days ago about Nick Denton ’stealing’ his work has taught me some great lessons, and might teach the rest of us a few too. I’ll try to list a few of them here:
1. Free never means free.
It’s become apparent that Noel did some work for free [...]

On Wednesday, I flew to Minneapolis to meet with potential clients, and I have to say that I was impressed. We met with one of the largest retailers in the country, and they’re finally starting to ‘get it’ when it comes to the importance of the internet, and online marketing.
I’m looking for big things [...]

If there is one guy I’d hire based on something I’ve read that he wrote, it’d be Chris Heisel. I’d hire Chris Heisel to be an online advertising sales person, because he gets it. Example:
Heisel: Beyond the click-through.
Well written article about branding and online advertising and its long term effects… The article is [...]

Here’s a few links to stuff I’ve read over the past month or so:

Advertising
Deciding On The Advertising Media - good pros and cons list of different advertising mediums, but leaves out online advertising
The On-line Marketer’s Secret Weapon: A Site that Works
Salted Wound : Perfect Weblog Ads
Seth’s Blog: Why Web Ads Don’t Work
Fresh Inc: [...]

Adam Kalsey has purchased BlogSnob from idya [Press Release]. Congrats Adam… hope it works out well for you.
BlogSnob is a neat little text based advertising system that operated (in my opinion) much like LinkExchange did back when it first launched. Kalsey’s using BlogSnob to upgrade his Textad Exchange service.
You know what the fun [...]

Top Advertising Recruiter Reveals Job Trends & Tips from MarketingSherpa. Great tips.

Found at MarketingWonk: Feeding Ads Through Feeds
A reader of Lockerknome wrote this:
If RSS just becomes another polluted source of noise, it will be no better than email or the Web are right now. If an RSS feed is going to have ads interspersed with content, itís not saving me time. What made RSS feeds unique [...]

Well, Andy finally spilled the beans about Up2Speed becoming MarketingWonk. It’s a really funny story, if you’re interested in what’s happening with the old MarketingFix (why we didn’t go back to the original brand, I have no idea).
Read on…
Oh, and always listen to marketing professionals because they always know what they’re talking about

Wow, talk about a great marketing move.:
Arial Software is giving away Campaign FREE permission email marketing software as a marketing tool… I downloaded my free copy today and will be testing it out, as I’m looking for an easy, inexpensive way to publish a quarterly newsletter at the office… I’ll report my [...]

In So much for branding Seth comments on an article about how irrelevant branding can be in today’s over-advertised world in which “17 top CEOs shared their elevator pitches, but few understood them”.

Dave: How to Name a Product. Five steps to naming a product… definitely worth a look if you’re the kind of person that gets dragged into product naming meetings or brain-storming sessions. I’ve failed miserably at naming products in the past…

Here is a great article entitled “Markets” by Doc Searls that really ought to be read by advertisers, marketers and the general public:
There also is a problem with conceiving broadcast service–especially the commercial variety–as a “marketplace”. Its customers and consumers are different populations. The customers of commercial broadcasting are advertisers, not viewers and listeners. In [...]

I saw an ad for Tinderbox on the sidebar of my website as I was re-reading an article I wrote. I clicked the ad and just downloaded the application (again - I played with it once for about 10 minutes before I got tired of it the first time). (So, AdWords has worked [...]

Did you know that on Windows unscrupulous marketers can make Notepad (the text editor included with Windows) open and display a message using javascript or other forms of auto-execution in IE? Did you know they can make Notepad open specific files on the hard-drive of that unsuspecting PC? They can. While [...]

12 days into my test of Google’s AdSense program, and I’m happy to report that according to the latest report, I’m looking at a payable of about $52.00 … keep this up, and my server costs should be covered by months end…
The beauty of this advertising program is that I haven’t clicked an ad yet, [...]

Here’s a great british parody entitled “Tyre” of the ‘amazing Honda ad‘ that has been circulating around the internet since April.
I have no idea what the “118118 Experience” is promoting, but if you’re british, and can shed some light on the subject that’d be cool. It seems to be a spoof just for [...]

Adam blogs a quick diddy about how Major League Baseball is turning away customers. The kicker for me is this line:
“Go ask your dad how many words would fit into 2314 bytes.”
The sad thing is I bet my dad (in-law) would know.

A series of three article (so far) about marketing targeted at the small ‘Independent Software Vendor’ where the “central theme is that if we demystify marketing, it can be competently done by technical people”:
Choose Your Competition
Marketing is not a Post-Processing Step
Act Your Age
Good job so far, looking forward to more. [via [...]

An interesting approach to running Google AdSense program on a weblog, and an applaudable one at that. (it’s much like my images on/off switch in the top right navigational bar). [via Zeldman]

First Monday’s Business models of news Web sites: A survey of empirical trends and expert opinion, by Frederick Schiff, is a fantastic read for anyone looking at revenue models on the internet, specifically of the major content producers out there in media land.

Heads up: I’ll likely be adding Google’s AdSense program to this weblog in the coming week or two, mainly as a test. I’m encouraged by this article about boosting your AdSense revenue. I’d recommend you read the article if you publish a website at all, and are interested in getting their program on [...]

“Holy Shit!”
That’s the sound I think you’ll be hearing in network TV boardrooms across the country for months and years to come…
I’m an internet advertising sales person, and you know what’s the hardest thing to sell? Reporting. Data. Trackability of the advertising medium.
Why? Because it’s damning to sell people advertising that’s [...]

Tom Coates wrote an article that says people don’t need Search Engine Optimization companies to help them get good rankings in Search Engines. I’d say that I disagree with such a blanket statement.
A lot of companies do need SEO consultants as long as those consultants are trustworthy and will help those company’s build [...]

A good rule to follow when marketing.