Defending Your Creative Ideas
Defending Your Ideas - A little sketch from the corner of my notebook, as we were brainstorming new ideas.
If you want to get into the business of marketing, you’re going to need to develop (a) a thick skin and (b) a strategy for sharing your ideas. Neither of these tasks are easy, but trust me when I tell you, they are necessary.
Many people think that marketing is easy, since just about anyone can come up with one good marketing or advertising idea. The real challenge, of course, is to come up with multiple ideas. Ideas that adapt to evolving strategic direction and new media channels. That’s not quite as easy.
In a brainstorm, there are some good ideas that everyone agrees is on target and makes sense. If there’s a whiteboard, it gets written in big bold letters as “an idea.” Kudos to you if you were part of that brainstorm session.
If you’ve ever been part of a brainstorm session, it can be fun and exhilarating, but it is also a little scary. Why scary? Well, if all of the ideas are safe, the group may not be trying hard enough. There may be fear in the room. Nobody wants to share their best idea, only to be rejected by the whole room. Making it to the whiteboard builds confidence. Not making it to the board is depressing. Read more
Historic Gas Prices – 1992 – 2008 – Log at Pump
Back when I was a kid, my father used to keep a log of his gasoline expenses. He would meticulously record the cost of the gas, how many gallons he put into the car, and the total amount he spent.
He maintained several different notebooks, most of which were lost over time. He found two or three of these tiny notebook from 1992 – 2008. He took the time to transfer them to Excel. And here is this data, through the magic of the web, now available to you.
My dad’s historic gasoline logs from 1992 – 2008. Read more
Marketing: It’s Just Too Easy
A friend of mind and I were talking about how to first brand and then market his company’s brand. We had a long, rambling conversation about marketing channels like YouTube, Vimeo, blogs, Twitter, etc.
When he told me, “on Twitter, anybody can build up a massive following, so it’s not really worth doing,” he stopped me in my tracks.
Upon further clarification, he told me that on Twitter anyone can follow a bunch of people and then unfollow them to build of your following. That traffic building technique, he explained, was one of the reasons Twitter didn’t really matter. It just seemed too easy. That, and anybody can get 50,000 followers, if you know how to work the system.
Anyway, the conversation continued normally until my kids got hungry and began demanding dinner. So we broke off the call and went to our respective families.
My friend was being honest and candid as he talked about the marketing channels that he thought were most effective. This was due, in part, with his feeling that Twitter was too easy. Read more
Marketing Obscure Comic Book References
Captain America The First Avenger Movie Poster
Superheroes are back! Well, at the movie theaters at least they are. Love ‘em or hate ‘em epic comic book battles are generating big buzz and big dollars on the silver screen.
As a marketer, it’s easy to observe the big, obvious things about movies based on comic books. There’s a built-in audience: check. There are usually top stars and/or directing talent: check. There’s usually some impossibly large budget: check. That’s the obvious stuff.
Then there’s the geek stuff. As you may know, I am a big comic fan, so I get into these tiny references that are like catnip for fans. It’s small stuff (and some big stuff) that won’t even register for the average moviegoer. But for the devoted comic fan, it can be pure joy. Read more
3 Easy Email Marketing Tips to Improve ROI
Few things in the modern world are as ubiquitous as email. In a few short years, the medium of email went from being a small part of the online experience to a centerpiece of our professional and personal lives. And yet, oddly enough, many marketers are unsure of how to properly utilize email as part of their branding campaign.
Here are three tips for getting the most out of your email marketing efforts. (Why only three? Well, for starters, email marketing is a massive topic that is far too important to tackle in just one blog post. So let’s just start with three and see how that goes.)
1. Understand How Images Load
These days, many of your target customers have the ability to receive HTML email, which means that you can include snazzy images. But many email programs do not show images when the email is opened. That means your splashy email may not display as intended until the user clicks “load images.” Be sure to design your emails, so that key messages display on the preview mode.
This video by my friend and technical advisor Chris Cullmann details how to optimize the images in the body of an HTML email. Note how certain techniques that work well on a website (white navigational text on a black background), just doesn’t work on HTML emails. Listen to Chris. He’s smart. Read more
Viral Videos Can Launch Your Brand
Karmin is having a good year. A really good year. Don’t know who they are? First, check out this video.
This is a talented young duo doing a cover version of a song by Chris Brown featuring Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes. It’s catchy, fun, and very watchable.
As of this posting, this little video has garnered over 10 million views in less than one month. That’s a lot of views for something that’s being spread word of mouth. Read more
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