Category: Advertising

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Networking, People Helping People, Technology, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, I asked for your comments on three inspirations for innovation and creativity. If you missed the original, please take a moment to go back and read it first. If you didn’t, be aware that I give away the ending to the Caine film below.

I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:

1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.

Examples:

2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:

  • Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
  • For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
  • The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.

3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.

Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.

As a green marketer, I constantly say that marketers need to hit both the self-interst and the planetary interest, especially if they want to reach beyond the deep greens. In fact, I wrote my last Green And Profitable column on this very theme. The ad is a nice example, and the opening slides give us some very good framing about the power of art to influence thought, in many contexts.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business-general, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People Tagged with , ,

I recently discovered that my pages have vanished from the top couple of pages for searches for résumé writing in my local area.

From 1985 to 1995, résumé writing for local clients was the biggest chunk of my business. At this point, it’s a very small percentage of what I do—my focus is far more on marketing consulting and copywriting for authors, publishers, and small businesses (especially those with green products and services).

But even though it’s a tiny fraction of my business, it’s work that I enjoy and am good at, and for local clients, it provides me with some human contact that I don’t get through a lot of my other work. And I do want to be found if people are looking.

For years, Google has brought me an occasional résumé client. I hadn’t noticed any drop off, but the résumé portion is such a small part of the operation these days, that it’s hard to measure real drops.

So, in December, I made a special page, just for resume writing in Western Massachusetts, and crammed it full of place names for cities, towns, and counties around here. And added Like buttons for Google+ and Facebook.

Google is known to “sandbox” new pages: to let them sit outside the index for a while until they determine the page to be legitimate. And a page with this many keywords may be particularly at risk.

You can participate in this experiment at https://www.accuratewriting.com/wmass_resumes.shtml. Please click the two buttons; let’s see how long it takes for Google to notice. I will report back the results, whatever happens.

So far, in the three months since the page went up, Google has sent me one résumé client. I think the page is still in the sandbox. However, if you beleive in the Law of Attraction, here’s some validation: I’ve had a noticeable uptick in résumé work generally, but from other sources.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

I received this tweet from a stranger today:

@shelhorowitz , please follow me, and check me out. Thank you. [URL]

To which I tweeted back:

Give me a reason

As a marketing consultant and copywriter, that’s one of my mantras. I think “because” is one of the most important words in marketing. I’m always probing the why with my clients, and using that to create compelling marketing strategies and materials.

The days of “oh, look at me, I’m so cool, I have a website” were probably gone by about 1996, if not before.

Your prospects are busy people. They want to know why before they click on your link. They want to know why before they give up even 30 seconds of their time.

Specifically, they want to know the benefit. Will you make them laugh? Give them a tool they need? Solve a problem? Give them celebrity gossip? Help them go green (as I do)? Make a specific offer. They will thank you—and some of them, the right ones, will visit.

This will serve you well in any marketing medium: advertising, freebie information, socialmedia, and lots more, as well as your website.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

In the Dumb and Dumber department: I opened a letter marked “Personal Correspondence,” knowing full well that it was not. It used a very obvious handwriting font, nonprofit bulk-mail indicia instead of a postage stamp, and a sprayed barcode, and on the back was a Washington, DC mailing address with no name.

Personal correspondence, my arse! I opened it up because I wanted to find out who was lying to me.

Turned out to be a charity group that works on gay and lesbian rights issues, a group I’ve previously donated money to. Inside, there was no longer any attempt to look personal. It was a fairly standard fearmongering letter, some slick full-color inserts and a decal. I separated the decal into the trash, put the rest of it in the recycling—but I kept the postage paid return envelope. I’m going to print this blog post and mail it back to the org at their expense, to make a statement that I don’t like being lied to, do not condone unethical marketing even from causes I support, and to make it a few cents more expensive to treat me as a fool.

Doesn’t anyone vet this stuff before it goes out?

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Entrepreneurship, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

In Part 1, “Steve Jobs Introduces the first Macintosh, January 1984,” I discussed why “the computer for the rest of us” was such a big deal at the time. Now, I want to show you how the Mac allowed me to completely reinvent an old business model and dominate my local market for ten years. You might find some marketing lessons you can apply to your own business.

In 1984, when I bought my first (and one of the first) Mac, the bulk of my work was typing term papers and writing résumés. The difference for résumés, even with the dot-matrix printer that was all the Mac had back then, was amazing. Being able to bold or italicize, having the words appear on the screen exactly where they’d show up on paper, and most importantly, knowing exactly where the bottom of the page was and being able to adjust typographically to make things fit—W O W !

Up to that point, I would write a draft of the resume without worrying about formatting during the first interview, send the client away, type it up on an IBM Selectric typewriter (which sometimes took two or three tries, although it got better when I realized I could type on legal-size paper for photocopying onto letter-size and not worry so much about matching the top and bottom margins), and then bring the client back in to review the final product. Changes either required whiting out the error with a special paint, letting it dry thoroughly and very carefully inserting the correction, or retyping the whole bleeping page.

Now, here’s the lesson: Having access to this better technology meant I was not only able to change my business model, but create an unstoppable marketing advantage—and even back then, I was thinking like a marketer.

I went into the Yellow Pages with a little half-inch in-column listing that said “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” (Couldn’t do accent marks in the Yellow Pages at that time.) Almost instantly, I had the busiest résumé shop in my whole three-county-area. And that slogan was my USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for the next decade. Résumés were not only more lucrative but a lot more fun than typing term papers, and within a few years, they (along with the growing percentage of students who had access to a computer) pretty much pushed out the term paper portion of my business. We rode the résumé train as the bread and butter of our business until Windows 95 started to catch on, with a résumé template that let people think (incorrectly, in most cases) that they could do their own résumés. And oddly enough, none of my local competitors offered the while-you-wait service that attracted so many people to us.

If you missed part 1 of this two-part series, https://greenandprofitable.com/steve-jobs-introduces-the-first-macintosh-january-1984

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Demographics/Psychographics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

The other day, I was checking my e-mail from the B&B I was staying in during a short visit to the Ft. Meyers, Florida area—and what do I see but a spam mail with the headline, “Sanibel Vacations.”

Normally, I’d delete this unread. But as it happens, Sanibel was about fifteen minutes’ drive from where I was, and I was planning to go there the following day. I actually opened up the e-mail, to discover that it was about lodging options. Not of interest; I was very happy with the B&B.

In the same batch, there was quite a bit of other travel spam: Hawaii, Italy, and I forget what else. These show up every day. But I don’t remember seeing spam about Sanibel more than once or twice in the past. Could this ad actually have been triggered by my logon from so close by the previous day, or was it actually random? It didn’t occur to me to check the sent time or other clues before hitting delete.

I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to get a popup or banner ad; that’s old news. For years, for instance, Facebook thinks I live in Alaska part of the time, because my virtual assistant sometimes logs in for me, and that’s where she lives. I regularly see ads from both Alaska- and Massachusetts-based advertisers. And I’ve noticed that my son the oboist will get classical music ads, while I get business and environmental messages, even though we log on through the same wi-fi network.

But this wasn’t a popup; it was an e-mail. Which means if it wasn’t an accident, someone has developed a rather scary system that matches a network’s IP address, an offer the robot thinks is relevant (which didn’t happen to be true this time—but would have been if the ad had been for restaurants or attractions)—and the address I was checking in Mail2Web, which doesn’t happen to run through my Gmail account and is not the dominant address associated with my iPad (I don’t expect any privacy when Google is involved).

To make it even more spooky, I’m writing this on the airplane back homeward, and this month’s Southwest Spirit has an article on predictive marketing, of all things, and the coming revolution in targeting enabled by smartphones. I have an old-fashioned dumb cell phone that never goes online, and I don’t have the phone features enabled on my iPad. Yet I got that particular ad.

Just a coincidence? I really don’t know. What do YOU think?

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, language, Politics Tagged with ,

Who would have expected this ad from quiet, quirky Ron Paul? It’s edgy, active, engaging and very young-seeming. And it makes a very bold promise.

His son Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s influence, perhaps?

NOTE: sharing this ad is not in any way an endorsement of Dr. Paul or his drastic remedy. While I actually agree with about 20 percent of his positions as he’s expressed them over the years (particularly the parts about cutting military spending), that leaves 80 percent where I strongly disagree. (And concerning Rand Paul, I’m not aware of a single point of agreement.)

Living in a state that will go big for Obama without any help from me, I’ll probably vote Green Party.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , ,

Political advisors spew so much crap about the need to tear down your opponent. Here’s a refreshing case study that proves the opposite is possible.

Congratulations to the newly-elected mayor of Northampton, Massachusetts, David Narkewicz. While his opponent went negative to the point of craziness (even going so far as to attack him for riding a bicycle, with an ad that talked about training wheels as a metaphor for inexperience), Narkewicz stayed positive, focusing on community-building, achieving widely held goals, and his own civic history. He was also deeply issue-focused and very articulate during the numerous debates (more than I can remember for any previous local election, in my 30 years in the area).

As a marketing consultant who has occasionally advised politicians, I have long held the opinion that such a positive campaign could be quite popular. I used this positive focus writing the press releases for the successful first mayoral campaign of a different mayor, who won in 1989 and went on to serve four two-year terms.

And while I predicted that his opponent’s strategy (using the considerable talents of a very good local ad agency), would fail, even I was pleasantly shocked at the margin of victory. Narkewicz took 70 percent of the vote, sweeping every ward, even the traditionally conservative western parts of the city. And he had coattails for progressives in every other contested race, as well as a ballot initiative to keep a land-preservation bill that the right had attacked.

Bravo.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Green Marketing Tagged with , , , , ,

Here’s a company that’s been selling hand-made recycled art papers since 1998 (think about really cool and classy invitations)—and has just developed a new paper line using post-brewery barley as one of the ingredients—and being smart marketers, billing it as the first beer paper. They sponsored this morning’s HARO, and thus, I learned about them. I clicked over half expecting some very rough page put up by a few carousing fratboys–boy, was I wrong! These people love the earth and love what they do, which is obvious on every page of their site.

The firm is called Twisted Limb, out of Bloomington, Indiana. I love their sustainability page, too.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Publishing, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

In this month’s newsletter, I wrote about the most elaborate press kit I’ve ever received, including a video player, a bottle, and more. To see, please click the link above and then click on “current issue” (that should work until about November 15).

I’d love to know what you think about it. Meanwhile, I got a reader response, and permission to share with you. If you have a response, please share it at the bottom of *this* page.

Wow, I’d wonder how many of THOSE packages the author or his minions had prepared and sent out. I would definitely want to at least scan the book to see where such marketing techniques are discussed, and I’d certainly (based on my own curiosity having been so piqued) be interested in a substantive discussion of such marketing and the strategies and principles that underlie it.

I’d also like to know if such a strategy gets results, or just a momentary interest.

Or if those two are actually the same thing.

And then, how does one translate principles at the heart of something like that — targeted to people interested in the very fact of the marketing campaign (a marketing expert!), who might be expected to look deeper into the marketing itself even if it were not so intricate — to selling, say, hair shampoo or breakfast food, where the motivation to look deeper would be less ever-present?

And finally, for us po’ folk, how do WE do something in any way similar to THAT! (Without being served a cease and desist order from Heinz Ketchup). Pat. PS- You can quote me, if you’ve a mind to and anything I said was not said by ten or twenty other people more concisely or entertainingly.

— Pat Goudey O’Brien
PGO Editorial Resource
The Tamarac Press
141 A Tamarac St
Warren, VT 05674
802.349.7475
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