Anyone that knows me, knows that I’m a gamer. You can read all about it on my other blog. Sometimes I spend some time looking through videos on YouTube of games that I’m interested in buying so that I can see if they’re worth the purchase or not. Why then are video game companies forcing YouTubers to take down videos of playthroughs and such? Don’t they understand that this is how gamers find their products? I just saw a video by a well known YouTube commentator that pretty much sums up my feelings as well. He uses some vulgar language so it may not be safe for work, but here’s a link to the video anyway.

This is what happens when you let accountants and financial folks take control of your business. They do a great job of organizing, and re-investing your money. But why are marketers letting them do their job for them? As a marketer, it’s your decision as to how your products and / or services get promoted. I’m of the philosophy that you should use any and all tools in the box to get your message across.

In this day in age where consumers (especially gamers) are spending less time watching / listening / paying attention to commercials, why would you want to take your products out of a media that they are paying attention to? It makes no sense to me. I was just talking to a friend yesterday about how video game marketers usually do a horrible job (someone please hire me, I won’t let you down), and today I see yet another example of that.

If you are a decision maker at your company, please do not limit your marketing opportunities, or alienate your customers by trying to stop them from using current technology to promote your products or services. Use these guys to your benefit, and profit by them. 

What do you guys think? Agree, disagree? Are there any other examples out there that you can think of where companies have done this? Let me know in the comments below. 

I struggled to make a point about advertising the other day, but there is really quite a bit more to the discussion than what I had originally posted. One of my friends saw the post and sent me a link to a recent article by buysight.com (thanks Francisco). They post a graphic and host a discussion about how advertising has changed over the last 50 years or so.

This is some interesting stuff, so if you haven’t checked it out already, I recommend doing so now. There are a ton of interesting viewpoints on display, and really got me thinking. Not only is advertising more targeted, but people actually opt in for advertising and marketing messages (using twitter, facebook, and all that stuff), which was unheard of back in the day.

Also, check out the amount of spending on media (according to the chart). There are some interesting things going on there. I was completely surprised to see that spending on newspaper ads was significant in 2000 then started dropping off (coincidentally) as the internet spending started increasing. I think many advertisers used newspaper ads to communicate with local consumers, but now are starting to use the internet to reach these local audiences.

Anyway, check it out, and let me know what you think.

We all know what advertising is, so there really isn’t much to say here. The first thing most people think of when you talk about marketing is advertising. It’s been such a big tool for marketers in the past, and continues to be one of the dominant weapons in the arsenal. Over time though, the nature of advertising has changed quite a bit. In the old days, you simply had to reach a mass audience and sales would follow. Today however, advertisements are much more focused. With the maturation of digital, online, and social media, this trend will not only continue, but will be taken to the next degree.

Targeted ads are when a company places ads in a location where they will reach their intended audience. If you’re selling toys, sponsor a children’s program on TV. If you’re selling to women, put an advertisement in a women’s magazine. Stuff like that. Even those are kind of broad examples, but you get the idea. This same philosophy works for online media as well. Look at how Google AdSense works. If you’re page is all about sports, then sports ads will pop up on you page. All of this is really a no brainer for marketers, and is simply the natural evolution of the advertising model.

One of the biggest advantages to targeting your ads is that you are not wasting any resources. By focusing only on media that your target audience relies on, you are not wasting money on people that don’t care about your offering. Of course, there is still a huge focus on mass appeal, but this is usually for products that have mass appeal themselves. Things like beer and food for example.

Personally, I think that we’ll see even more segmenting and targeting as time goes on. And why not. I think in the future we’ll see more advertisers decide to sponsor specific websites (instead of relying on AdSense), and make online ads more interactive. When you focus your ads on the people that are most interested in what you’re offering, then only good things can happen.

I read an article in the Dallas Morning News today about retailers using Facebook as a platform for building online stores. You can read the article online here. People have been attempting to monetize social media since the phenomenon began, but this is the most direct effort I’ve seen. With over 50 million people active on Facebook, there’s plenty of incentive for retailers to get in on the action. However, I think that it would be a mistake to only focus on sales, and therefore overlook the social aspects of Facebook.

Why are retailers doing this? According to the article which quoted Henry Wong (CEO of Adgregate Markets) “Because this is where the customer is hanging out. They’re not hanging out on websites.” Hmmm, why could it be that customers aren’t hanging out on websites? Could it be that mindset which refers to visitors as customers? I think that has alot to do with it. It’s been a while since I’ve visited a website with no advertising; one that isn’t just trying to sell me something. Facebook is a place where people go to goof off and check in on friends that they may not see on a daily basis. No one goes to Facebook thinking, wow, I hope I can find something to buy. Retailers need to be aware of this and remember not to press the sale too hard. Otherwise, they could force visitors to move on to other time wasting websites.

The big boys are doing it, but what about small business? I think that Facebook and social media in general could be a fantastic avenue for small businesses to create awareness and even sell their products (or services). Why? Back in the old days, if you wanted to sale something, you advertised. If your advertising budget was substantially larger than your competitor (and you weren’t a total buffoon) then you would take home more profits. Today though, when a youtube video of some kid playing a video game can go viral and generate hundreds of thousands of views, it seems like there’s a more level playing field. There’s nothing to stop small businesses from taking advantage of social media to generate sales, and if they are creative about it, they could even outsell some of their bigger and badder competitors.

So, is “social retailing” the obvious next step in monetizing your social media success? Actually, I think it is. It’s a fact in business that if business can make money doing something that isn’t against the law (even that doesn’t stop some) then they will do it. Retailers can and will sell on Facebook, and they will generate some income. The bottom line though is that people only have a finite amount of disposable income, and I don’t think setting up another sales channel (which incidentally will compete with your own storefront / website) is going to have a dramatic effect on sales unless retailers start getting creative in leveraging the social aspects of social media.

Think I’m full of it? You know what to do.

You’re in business to make a profit. Profit = revenue - costs. We’ve already discussed how to find the lifetime value of a customer. The other half of the story is finding out how much it costs to acquire that customer. Here’s the formula…

Add up your direct marketing and advertising dollars and divide by the number of new customers you acquired as a result.

This will give you a price per customer. If you’re price per customer is more than the lifetime value of a customer, then you’re in trouble. Even if the lifetime value is higher than the cost of acquiring the customer, you still may be in trouble (you do have other expenses afterall). But this at least shows you a ballpark way of figuring out if you are spending your marketing dollars wisely. Once you have your numbers, you can start to look at ways to tweak things to make your business more profitable.

Do you know of any other tangible ways to find out if you are making the most of your marketing budget? Share the knowledge my friends and email me at edwardviator@evil-marketer.com

Back when I was in college studying marketing, they showed us the marketing funnel. I’m not sure if they still teach this, but if you’ve studied You’ve probably seen it too. It’s basically a process where you start with a large number of prospects then proceed to a shorter number of qualified leads, then to customers, then to clients. This is the old way of doing things. In the past, marketers had no choice but to interrupt people and inform them about your company’s offerings… whether they were interested or not. The focus was on mass. Marketers needed to constantly fill that funnel with fresh prospects constantly. My how things have changed. Seth Godin discusses the shift away from mass (yet again) with his twelfth trend in Meatball Sundae, “the shift from how many to who”.

We’ve talked about it before, and we probably will again. Now is not the time to waste resources spamming people. Instead you should focus on exactly the people that are interested in what your company offers. Think of it like this. If the old approach to marketing was a hand grenade, then the new approach is like a phaser from Star Trek (or a laser for my readers that aren’t cool enough to watch Star Trek). It’s very focused on individuals not on random groups. These individuals, if targeted correctly will be your biggest fans and will go out and spread the word to others in the community. If you’ve segmented the market properly, finding these communities online should be a piece of cake.

Even if you have a product that appeals to a large group of people (say beer for example) it doesn’t mean you should spam random people. There are appropriate places for your message, and it’s your job as a marketer to find them. Maximize your resources (time and money) don’t waste them, marketing to an audience that doesn’t care or can’t afford you’re offerings.

The problem with a lot of online marketing is that many companies try to focus on using the new tools of the internet to focus on doing things the same old way. They look at things like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and online ads to interrupt masses of people and spam them with their message. It just doesn’t work that way, no matter how much you want it to. Especially online, it’s very easy to click away and ignore your message. In order for me or any other consumer out there to be interested in what you are offering, it must be relevant to what I’m looking for at that instant.

Anyways, you get the point. Focus on individuals not on mass. Only two more trends to discuss!

Notables quote from this section:

• “Let’s be really clear: the web is the single worst medium ever devised for interrupting people who don’t want to be interrupted.”
• “Marketers who are in sync with this new tool realize that it won’t let you do the old thing better, what it will let you do is find people to spread the word for you.”

First of all, I’d like to congratulate the Saints on their first Superbowl championship. As a matter of fact, congratulations are in order for both teams for delivering one of the most exciting Superbowl games I’ve seen. Yes, the game was exciting, but what about the commercials? It’s a fact that many viewers only watch the game for the ads. According to various online sources, advertisers spent about $2.6 million on a 30 second spot during the game (which is viewed by an estimated 150 million people). With that much money being spent for 30 seconds of marketing, I’d expect to have my socks blown off, but yet, they are still here on my feet. As a matter of fact, the ads were so lackluster, that I can only really recall the ones that were so bad that I made mental notes.

I’m not a fan of big money ads. I’ve said it again and again that I’d spend that money a little differently. This “let’s spend millions of dollars to reach the largest possible audience” mentality is ancient history. It’s the old way of marketing, and it’s a waste of money. Like I said before in my discussion of old marketing versus new marketing, you can make more of your efforts by telling a story directly to customers interested in what you are offering. Why then did Dove advertise a soap to make a man’s skin silky smooth DURING THE FREAKING SUPERBOWL!? You know, one of the most macho events of the year. Wow, great job there guys. You really did your homework. If you were going to waste $2.6 million dollars, you could’ve just given it to me. I would’ve turned that money into a profitable company (or early retirement, hahaha). If you’re going to make a product like that, advertise during figure skating or something.

So why do I think the Superbowl ads were garbage? Because they completely missed the opportunity. You are in front of millions of people. It was an opportunity to launch a new product in an exciting way. It was a chance to pull off a promotion that is so original that it would move millions of people to take advantage (well, to be fair, Denny’s kind of did this, but they already ran that promotion last year, so it wasn’t as exciting). It was a chance to launch a new viral campaign. No one really took advantage of this opportunity; instead all of the companies focused on the old rules of marketing: make an average product for average people and reach the widest audience possible to promote it. Not very exciting. That worked back in the old days when advertising was one of the more important aspects of marketing. Back then we had effective ads like the 1984 commercial and the classic Budweiser frogs campaign. But those days are history, and it’s time that companies get with the new program.

You know there is one ad that I kind of liked. The Miller High Life ad were they promoted some local businesses was interesting. In these kind of tough economic times, it really spread a bit of goodwill out there, and I think it was very cool of them to do that. Of course, Miller High Life still gives me massive headaches and tastes like… well, let’s not go there. My brand of beer will probably always be Rolling Rock. Not because of their marketing (or maybe it is, but they are just so good at it that I don’t realize it), but because it tastes the best to me.

What do you think of this year’s Superbowl commercials? Thumbs up or down? What was your favorite or least favorite ad during the game? Hit me up in the comments below or email me privately at edwardviator@evil-marketer.com