Archive | November, 2012

Cue Dramatic Slow Motion Effect

Its always good to see brands not taking themselves too seriously. In this Footlocker ad, NBA player Kyrie Irving prepares to make a spectacular dunk Until the slow motion effects set in. This leaves him free to kill some time with non-basketball related activities in this hilarious ad. Including changing into various Footlocker outfits, of course. .

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MRM According to Adnovate

Managing a marketing campaign means juggling budgets, ad agencies, distributors, translators, production houses without even thinking about your own team.

Marketing software vendorAdnovate offers a solution for keeping all these different balls in the air. Their online service platform promises instant control over all you marketing campaigns and an overview of campaign essentials such as budget, staff, and planing. This can help speed up time-to-market, and ensure brand consistency. The vendor offers seven different packages, each suited to a specific need. From Brand Asset Management to localization, to all-round campaign management. .

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Marketers See Brand Engagement Differently Than Consumers

Forbes Insights. Forbes surveyed 250 marketers and 2000 consumers about the perception of brand engagement from both sides. For example, 49% of marketers consider forwards or shares of ads or other content online as a strong influence on their engagement measures, whereas just 15% of consumers say they feel engaged or invested in a brand when they share an ad.

Data from The New Rules of engagement: Measuring the Power of Social Currency reveals that there are numerous similar instances of disconnect between what marketers measure and what consumers feel is important. One that stands out relates to brand recommendations. 45% of marketers say that consumers’ proactive efforts to recommend a brand is a strong measure of engagement for them. But, just 24% of consumers report feeling invested in a brand when they convince others to use it.

The only measure in which both groups agree concerns opt-in messaging (subscribing to email alerts, newsletters, or other loyalty programs), which marketers think is the most influential engagement measure. At the same time, signing up for special deals or email updates ranked as the top way that consumers feel engaged with brands. Read More

Keys to Software Durability – Security

This post is part of our series discussing the topic of software durability. As I wrote earlier, software durability refers to how long a software solution will function effectively and meet your business requirements. The durability of a software solution depends largely on its ability to address unpredictable future needs, and this, in turn, results primarily from the architecture of the software application.

Durable software exhibits several key characteristics. I discussed scalability in an earlier post. This post will discuss the importance of a flexible and robust security model.

Why Security Matters The continuing evolution of marketing software systems has elevated security from an administrative task to an issue with major strategic implications. Today, software applications touch almost every aspect of marketing, and they have become vital to effective marketing operations. Read More

Trillions of Dollars Lost in Translation

Dakwak. Dakwak is urging businesses to optimize their websites for the global market, and claim 11 languages enable access to 85 per cent of the world’s wallet.

In the past two years the economic potential of making money online has grown from $36.5 to $44.6 trillion. However, just one third of that figure is available if websites are only available in English. And that figure is even less with websites solely in languages not as widely used as English – for example Portuguese, Russian or Japanese. This leaves $30 trillion in potential untapped sales which businesses could be cashing in on.

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The Business Marketers Guide to Instagram

Instagram is more than a place for hipsters to share pictures of their latest lunch order. In fact, its a full-on business opportunity. Since its launch in 2010, the community has accumulated over 50 million members. Its the perfect platform to engage potential customers and to build up a personal relationship with consumers. This quick guide to Instagram for marketers shows you how to best present a company on the site. Just remember the golden rules: curate, snap, hastag, engage, repeat. .

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Clear Sailing with Marketing Resource Management

The situation: a cruise line has 5000 cabins left to fill and 120 days to fill them in, before the season starts. What to do?

Marketing Resource Management vendorSproutLoud tackles this case study and shows how their MRM system works in practice. The cruise liner sets up a large discount campaign and needs to get the word out to holidaymakers around the world. Via the central marketing calendar, travel agent partners are informed about the offer. The cruise line makes marketing material available to the travel agencies, who in their turn can send it to their clients in the medium of their choice, reaching a combined audience of 200.000 people.

This case study shows in a nutshell how an MRM system can support such a complicated operation, involving multiple marketing materials in multiple languages across the globe. The rest is clear sailing.

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Why Big Data is The Next Big Thing

Publishers and marketers are aggregating more data, from more sources, than ever before. And in order to realize the full value of that information, they require a technology-driven solution — a central hub — to collect, integrate, manage and activate those large volumes of data. The data management platform (DMP) emerged just a few years ago as a response to this need.

As the promise of Big Data plays an increasingly significant role in the digital marketing landscape, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Winterberry Group published The Data Management Platform: Foundation for Right-Time Consumer Engagement, a whitepaper revealing that DMPs could potentially serve as a principal technology solution for multichannel data aggregation, integration, management and deployment. DMPs are technology tools that normalize disparate data sets so that marketers can better understand and utilize data from multiple sources.

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Does Your Company Have a Chief Marketing Technologist? Do You Need One?

For the past four years or so, a small but growing number of marketing thought leaders have contended that companies need a senior-level marketing executive to oversee the selection, implementation, and management of marketing technologies. The title most often used for this position is chief marketing technologist.

One of the leading proponents of this strategy is Scott Brinker, the president and CTO of Chief Marketing Technologist blog.

Brinker argues that marketing has become deeply entwined with technology, that there are now thousands of software applications available to marketers which touch almost every aspect of the marketing function. For this reason, Brinker contends that marketing should no longer rely on the IT department for all its technology needs. Instead, marketing must take ownership of its technology platforms and strategies. Read More

B2B Marketing Subject Lines That Work

Adestra, which analyzed almost 1.2 billion B2B emails sent within the past 12 months. The study examines performance metrics across a number of subject line themes – including discount, news, and content – and also looks at subject line length and personalization.

Adestra’s subject line study takes a look at subject line keyword metrics across a variety of themes, scoring them by relative open, click, and click-to-open rate.

Parry Malm, Account Director at Adestra says:

Our new subject line research has produced some incredibly interesting stats. It’s only one aspect of your email marketing arsenal, but when approached in the correct way subject line optimisation can prove to be an effective, and quick, tactical winner to help drive response rates.

The report covers 6 sectors: Read More