April 18, 2008

A view into marketing:

The control of communication continues to shift toward consumers. Amy Africa of Eight by Eight spoke about this regarding email at a DMA event. Some points: Nearly a third of the recipients throw out the email if they don't know or 'really' know the sender (from line). Personalization in the 'To' line works. The final reminder: the purpose is not to be read, but to be clicked - ah direct response copy at its finest. In part due to this trust issue, Pepsi identifies people who forward their emails as part of the Pepsi Extra program.
In-stream video ads may halt the whole experience. According to Burst Media 51% of the respondents stopped watching a video once they came upon the in-stream ad. And even worse for the publisher, 15% leave the site.
If your thinking about mobile campaigns - here's why the carriers are draconian with respect to set up and locking down applications. It takes just two calls to support to turn an account from profitable to unprofitable. And people call the carrier -- not the app developer, the marketer, or the manufacturer. So, if planning mobile campaigns be ready to offer to intercept customer service calls with a hot swap.
The newspaper website with the highest local penetration is the Washingtonpost.com according to Scarborough Research. In other news if you already own your market in terms of reach adding a website doesn't increase reach drastically, but probably impacts frequency much more heavily. The increased reach for the top five newspapers in terms of print reach averaged 2-3% points more. For those properties without significant reach, the web property has a much stronger impact.
Even in the B2B technology sales world content is king. In the 2007 IDC survey of technology buyers - education outpaced both features and price in terms of value and influence. Frank Cutitta over on Performance Insider suggests coding information widgets with attributes like content sophistication, sales process stage, consumption, format, forward/delivery.
Google allows patients to store their medical history and conditions on line. A pilot program with Cleveland Clinic kicked off last month; something to watch.
Google owns the most popular video property - Yahoo which garnered 3 billion video views back in December, 2nd place to MySpace (Fox) at nearly 1/10th the views.
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