The Direct Marketing Voice

Tag Archives: Advertising

When Business Slows Down, Agencies Need to Look Forward

Posté par Cynthia Fedor le June 1, 2011 – 3:59 pm

dans Integrated Marketing, Marketing Strategy, News & Trends

For many marketing and advertising agencies it’s a constant challenge to maintain healthy business growth, especially as clients are pumping the breaks on spending. There are lessons to be learned, however, that can help you prepare for changes in the quickly evolving advertising and marketing landscape and find long-term growth opportunities.

Some of these lessons were shared during QuantumDigital’s 2011 Marketing Innovation & Discovery Summit. Highlights from the summit are available in a new whitepaper titled, “When Business Slows Down, Agencies Look Forward.” The whitepaper download is free and offers the following information:

7 factors that lead to stalled business growth
3 essential questions to ask before starting any campaign
Why metrics and tracking are more important now than ever
Mobile and location-based marketing trends, and more.

Popcorn! Highlights from the 2011 Marketing Innovation & Discovery Summit

Posté par Cynthia Fedor le May 3, 2011 – 5:55 pm

dans Integrated Marketing, Marketing Strategy, News & Trends

This year’s Marketing Innovation & Discovery Summit, presented by QuantumDigital, brought together leaders from top advertising agencies and world-recognized brands to share valuable information about the tools, technologies, and strategies that are shaping the future of direct marketing communications. The breadth and wealth of ideas exchanged was so great that I often find myself looking back at my notes and re-watching the recorded sessions to pull out more wonderful nuggets of information.

Here are some highlights:

“Speed of adoption of technologies is rapidly increasing. This presents many opportunities for success and/or failure.” – Jeff Swystun, CCO of DDB Worldwide

Jeff Swystun cites changes in marketing audience: First there was the pre-consumer era. This generation believed everything that they were told/sold. Next came the consumer era which were focused on buying the next best thing. They questioned authority and embraced new technologies to communicate with peers. Now, we are in the post-consumer era. Audiences are choosing which marketing messages to NOT listen to.

Word of mouth and peer-to-peer recommendations have never been more important than now. Sixty percent of the 500 billion media impressions today are shared on Facebook. And, that trend is still in its beginning stages: 16 percent of online users generate 80% of the 500 billion impressions.

Data is the new currency. Value is in the data that’s being shared, collected, used to target consumers. Read More »

What’s Next in Direct Marketing?

Posté par Cynthia Fedor le April 18, 2011 – 5:30 pm

dans News & Trends

Top-level executives from respected advertising and marketing agencies along with leaders from world-recognized retail brands will meet in Austin tomorrow (April 19, 2011) for the 2011 Marketing Innovation & Discovery Summit. Although it’s an invitation-only event, you too will have a chance to get tuned in to the latest communication strategies and digital technologies that will rock direct marketing in the coming years. Read More »

5 Ways for Agencies to Strengthen Business and Boost Profit

Posté par Cynthia Fedor le December 7, 2010 – 11:01 pm

dans Integrated Marketing, Marketing Strategy, News & Trends

Looking for ways to strengthen business amid a shifting direct marketing landscape? Take a look at the tips included in QuantumDigital’s whitepaper titled, “5 Ways for Agencies to Strengthen Business and Boost Profit.”

Here’s an excerpt:

A permanent shift is happening in the marketing and advertising industries; one that is heavily focused on efficiency, return on investment, and the ability to provide enhanced value to clients. Here are five ways you can satisfy your clients’ needs while increasing billables to grow your bottom line.

1. Focus on Delivering ROI Metrics to Your Clients

Right now your clients are evaluating the cost benefit of every expense—including the cost of maintaining their relationship with you. In reality, agencies are in direct competition with marketing consultants and PR firms that have the ability to provide ROI metrics in concrete ways.

Now is the time to blend technology with creative in order to track campaign elements, collect valuable lead data, and generate the metrics businesses are craving. Doing so will empower you and your clients to make strategic decisions toward achieving campaign goals, and will enhance your agency’s value proposition.

2. Stop Advertising, Start Motivating Response

Especially with so much attention on data collection and ROI reporting, agencies need to go beyond the role of hunter and become the gatherer. In other words, targeting audiences with personalized and relevant messaging is half the battle, but getting them to give you additional data will make your agency an indispensable resource for your clients over time.

This shift in the communications approach is already happening and can be seen as new direct response technologies are integrated with traditional channels. Think about the various TV shows, commercials, billboards, direct mail pieces and print ads that are starting to incorporate…

Want to continue reading?

Download the complete whitepaper by visiting QuantumDigital’s download center.

Enjoy!

Google’s “Goggles” App Gives Consumers a New Way to Respond

Posté par Luis Paez le November 17, 2010 – 10:53 pm

dans Leadership & Innovation, News & Trends

If you’re familiar already with QR Codes, a couple of us on the blog have been detailing how this mobile mechanism can be a useful complement to a marketing campaign. One extremely interesting new tool released by Google this week may give companies (and marketers) something more to think about in terms of how you are using your logos and products. It’s called Google Goggles, and the easiest way to explain it is to direct you to Google’s own video:

As you can see, it suggests that any physical thing that can be photographed by a cell phone can now be used as a search term using Google’s image search technology. This applies to landmarks, bits of text, and more importantly to this discussion – logos and products. Someone using this app could take a photo of an image on postcard they received, or of a product pictured in a full page print ad, and “goGGle” it. Or they may take your logo and goggle it. This was so interesting, I had to test it out on my Android phone. Here are my results:

A twist on the AOL logo – I took a photo of a full page ad that AOL had on the back of AdAge promoting it’s new advertising system, Project Devil. The Goggle app didn’t recognize the AOL logo or the word “aol”, possibly because this logo version was so different than the standard AOL logo. It did, however, recognize the text ”A better web is coming” which was on the ad, and gave me an option to search that text via google. I rate this as a #fail, because the first link that appeared when you search that text had nothing to do with AOL.

EA Sports’ videogame “Active 2″ – Next, I took a photo of this ad from today’s Fry’s.com newspaper ad, and the app found this product exactly matching this image. It presented me with a product search for the “Active 2″ video game on the PS3 system, enabling me to comparison shop on Google Products. It didn’t recognize the tiny Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii logos below the image, so would have made me refine my search with the appropriate video game system. From a marketing perspective, however, it was disappointing that no search results appeared relating to purchasing the product on Frys.com – I was presented with a product search first, then the websites for the video game manufacturer… but never the original retailer (Frys.com).

Corel’s Paintshop Photo Express 2010 – this software brand has been around a long time, so I thought Google would make quick work of finding it. However, when I took a photo of the Fry’s ad containing it, it didn’t recognize the image in the ad (even though I was able to find the exact image on Google’s Image search). It did recognize the text in the ad, or at least the large font text. The trouble was that the smaller font was recognized as unintelligible characters (might have been another language) and was appended to the product’s name, making the resulting search useless. A #fail here too.

I shouldn’t be overly harsh on the team working on this product, as this product is only a “beta”, a part of their product experiments that sometimes make it as a full product release, and other times get killed in favor of stronger applications. They are trying something truly unique with this, that may challenge marketers and brands to re-examine how we are marketing ourselves in print, and force us to do the work necessary to ensure our imagery extends to the web, thus supporting our traditional ad vehicles with images that can be recognized by any mobile phone.

Hopefully there will be a discussion forming as to how brands would have to change the way they create or release ads in order to anticipate consumers’ use of an app like Goggles. Should all print ads be archived? Should they be sliced up for easy indexing? How does our SEO change? What questions spring to mind as you consider Google’s new experiment?