Have you missed us at the soon to be completed Ad:tech 1mpact series?  We were in 10 cities… shame on you.  Just to show we’re softies at heart, we’ll let you in on a little secret…

Bryan Eisenberg is keynoting the eComXpo next week, and it’s FREE, and you can attend without leaving your desk!

Ok, so what’s the catch you ask?  Nothing, really.  You simply have to click your way over and watch the digital presentation LIVE.  There is no free access…

...continue to read "Who says nothing in life is FREE?"

A large part of the marketing battle has traditionally been fought over traffic versus impressions. The more people exposed to the marketing, the better. So to improve marketing results, marketers typically bought more traffic.

In an age of media fragmentation and customer control, this approach works less well each passing minute. It simply costs more to reach fewer people.

Tomorrow’s successful marketers must find a way to do more with less traffic.

TV Packs Less Punch

According to a Forrester poll conducted in partnership with…

...continue to read "Traffic Cost Inflation, Coming to a Marketing Budget Near You"

You would be hard pressed to find a more competetive industry on the marketing front than automakers.

Automakers spend big bucks building their car brands and promoting offer after incentive to get prospects onto car lots to take test drives.

In this GrokCast we dissect and compare two different marketing campaigns.

Are these automakers getting their marketing money’s worth?  You tell us.

Watch the new GrokCast (21mb Flash movie, 19 minutes)

...continue to read "GrokCast – How are the automakers doing?"

Lately, everywhere you go analytics industry folks are talking about AB Testing. That’s a good sign, since it means the industry is focusing on an overlooked leverage point in their web analytics investment.

But as so often happens, achieving full buzzword compliance has become the goal rather than the means; what lies behind the words is often lost. In this case, “AB testing” – the buzzword – has become a euphemism for plain old “testing”, which, like ordering liver on…

...continue to read "AB Testing: Too Little, Too Early?"

My last column broke down the elements of a persuasion scenario and highlighted the need for more robust scenario planning, rather than today’s overly simple conversion funnel.

Marketers are venturing into new, unfamiliar territories, juggling multichannel strategies, allocating ad dollars among media, and trying to maximize new technologies, all at a time when consumers seem to find it easier than ever to bypass and ignore those efforts. These are just a few of the challenges.

Though marketing choices have increased, ad budget dollars…

...continue to read "Measuring and Analyzing Persuasion Scenarios"

Dave Young took some pictures of us, at Tuscan Hall in Austin, filming the two hour question and answer session that will appear at the back of our book. For those of you who don’t know Dave Young, he is one of the  Wizard of Ads partners trained to do Persuasion Architecture; check out his Branding Blog.

...continue to read "Filming the DVD at the back of “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?”"

One of the most popular tools we offer is the WeWe Monitor or Customer Focus Calculator. This week, our friend Gerry McGovern wrote an excellent column about customer focus and websites:

" Spend a few minutes on the websites of most large organizations and you will learn a lot. You will learn how they really are, how they really view you, the customer.

You will learn if they are self-centered or customer-centered. Is the website structured so as to solve your problems fast,…

...continue to read "Websites reflect true face of an organization"

Chief Marketer has an eye-opening for some, sad for others, (but hardly surprising from this corner) article on many CMOs utter lack of ability to measure what they must- marketing ROI, specifically that of the online variety.  We’re getting tired of speaking over the dull roar of today’s online successes, regaling tales of traffic cost inflation (btw, Piper Jaffray reports Online Advertising to top $55 billion by 2010), but if the shoe fits…

Citing WebTrends 2006 CMO Web-Smart Report, they report…

...continue to read "If you fail to plan success in advance, how do you know when you’ve arrived?"

That’s the cover of our new book being published by Thomas Nelson. This week it’s being sent to the printer. They will print the galleys and have them back to us in two weeks. Then the book will be in bookstores on June 13th. It sounds a whole lot easier than it is.

...continue to read "Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?"

How To Buy Word Of Mouth is worth reading and then rereading if you are interested in WOM. This is not a throwaway, Roy Williams doesn’t do throwaways. Every instance of WOM that I can come up with falls into the  three categories he defined. What can you do with this information in your business?

...continue to read "Overlooked Gem on Word of Mouth"