A question that all marketers and business people should be constantly asking themselves is: How much do I believe in my product? Of course, everyone will SAY they believe in it greatly! However, actions speak much louder than words. This is particularly evident when making decisions based on segmenting and targeting.

In my experience, the first sign that a marketer does not believe in his or her product is a desire to hide the product from the world. The most successful brand in the world does not hide themselves from anyone. In fact, Coca Cola has been criticized for advertising too much! Coke doesn’t believe that it does anything wrong in telling people in distant lands that “Coke is it”!

Even with a local restaurant, you should be thinking about all the reasons people from foreign lands will want to know more about you and even travel to your country to eat at your establishment. This has a lot to do with attitude and with your own standards. Do you believe that your restaurant is worth traveling for? Do you believe that your product is something that should be given as a gift, even it it’s not Christmas? If not, maybe your marketing strategy isn’t the problem.

New York’s Mediapost is the leading online trade publication for media professionals.

We knew there would be more videos. But this many????

Camera phones and digital cameras have completely blown up the video market, as well as a new generation of tech savvy youngsters and wanna-be marketers who are clogging the bandwidth with literally billions of uploads per month!

Here are a few examples:

If you type in “I’m on a boat t-pain” to YouTube, there will be over 1000 videos returned, with anywhere from 15 to 6,000,000 views per video. That’s 50 pages of video, including all the parodies, copies, imitations and the one original.

Assuming you want attention, is there any way to insure that you’ll be on the 6,000,000 views side of the equation and not the 15?

The answer, unfortunately is: not really.

Today, you can blog, share in social media, syndicate across other video channels, post on your website while optimizing SEO friendly copy, buy clicks to your video, and even drive traffic to your video via traditional media buys.

It’s common knowledge that for every $1 spent on creating content, another $3-$4 is spent on media, in order to arrive at an ROI. In other words, if an advertiser were to spend $250,000 creating a commercial, it would be expected that they should spend $1 million in total, which in its entirety is compared against sales targets.

But how the heck do you spend media money properly in a world that’s so incredibly fragmented as online video?

To make matters worse: consider that 70% of YouTube viewers will not watch a video at all if it contains a pre-roll ad, you’ve got a recipe that spells disaster for any company considering a pre-roll buy-in! They hate your pre-roll so much that they won’t even watch the video they were intending to watch!!!

So, the stage has been set for the Adjoy video platform. This is the perfect mix of push/pull marketing, and just the right platform for anyone interested in gaining attention to differentiate themselves (and their business/brand) from the masses!!!

STAY TUNED For May 1st!

Pull marketing is more of an event than a strategy. This occurs when someone finds a product because they are already looking for it (or something similar). This type of marketing is more about placement  and optics than volume and frequency of exposure. This can be as simple as a shelf talker on a bottle of wine! We know you want to buy one, but -for related reasons- you should buy this one!

Push and pull work in concert with one another. Once your psyche is adequately served with images of the perfect burger or perfect vacation, and you’re ready to buy those things when the time has finally come, all other elements of the business funnel will hopefully converge to draw you in the right direction (or away from competitors).

What we’re launching in May is a form of media that combines the best of push and pull marketing! Stay tuned to find out how this revolutionary platform works. Customers are lined up for a very controlled and beautiful launch, that will hopefully have you pulling for companies that are pushing us further towards our honourable goals!

Read the whole article, published in Mediapost’s Marketing: Green here.

NY based Mediapost is the leading online trade publication for marketing and advertising professionals.

Excerpt:

“A summary of radio then: lack of solid student base; tied to the automobile and consumerism; and right-centric. If this is true, common sense would dictate that radio would not be fertile ground for anything greener than the lettuce on a Big Mac.

A recent success story, however, offers deep insight into how pervasive green is becoming, even across a typically non-green medium.”

The entire article can be found here.

NY based Mediapost is the leading online trade publication for marketing and advertising professionals.

Ironically, the value differentiation technique has not been officially announced, but is being launched in May 2010.

Stay tuned.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=121388

Fate really jammed in a lot of extras over the past year, just to confirm that the Big Zero truly lived up to its name: global pandemic flu, the great recession, the collapse of the American auto sector.

“Fear” and “desperation” were the operative terms of the past year and half. Swine flu in Canada had grown men queue-jumping in front of pregnant women and infants. In the innovation sector, money flew the coop and the big got bigger, while the small got leaner and meaner. This meant an increased reliance on customers as funders, which then turned companies of all sizes against one another. In March of last year, I saw non-web companies developing websites to stay alive, while web development companies were getting into branding in order to keep their customers in their silos. Even some of the big players migrated into service offerings in order to subsidize their product companies.

Google still charges virtually nothing for any of its services. I’m starting to wonder when there will be a ticker somewhere on the web to count all the small companies that the Big G has killed with its freemium philosophy. I’m also wondering when people are going to start paying for only a few small, but aesthetically pleasing and really reliable services.

The good news for innovators is that the customer list of the big companies has grown, but relatively little has changed in terms of product offerings. I’m beginning to notice that these huge companies in new spaces used the recession time very poorly. Rather than forge ahead with innovative new offerings, instead they scrambled for a bigger customer base. This means they essentially wasted 10’s of millions, with little to show except a few dozen more big brand logos on their websites and in their demo videos. Meanwhile, the little guys have come out of the fog, realizing that they have the same (or more) technological capacity as the big guys. Plus, since their focus was innovation (out of simple desperation), they now possess the intellectual property of the future. (NB: I’m excluding Google from the talk of these companies… they innovated and innovated and innovated again.)

I think we’ll see some seriously increased M&A activity as the big players in various innovation spaces buy up smaller startups, either to increase their customer credibility (as these startups are now landing big deals), or to up their innovation curve.

I highly recommend that every small tech company out there revisit any plans it may of had to forego patent filings and to begin taking intellectual property seriously again. This doesn’t mean the emergence of “the stealth startup” again. Just make sure that if you do talk about something that you’re about to launch either a) you know it’s already been launched somewhere else, or b) you already have a provisional or some trademarking around it.

Because, when the money starts to flow again, people start to act quite a bit differently.

Hopefully, we’re moving into more respectful and responsible times.

Here’s to surviving the worst decade of our lives!