In 2009 there was a lot of buzz about the potential opportunities offered by location-based applications and functionality for local marketing use. What if a coupon could be delivered via your cell phone as you walked by a Starbucks? Read More

Know your target market: Even though you may be tempted to go for a logo design that is pleasing to you, it’s important to remember that your logo is for your customer and not you. Focus on your market segment, design for that demographic, and your brand will be successful.

Corey Meyer and Scott Rowe will make a presentation titled “Internal Branding and Communications” at the AIM Institute, IT Leadership Academy April 2, 2010.

The AIM Institute and its business members have collaborated to create an annual IT Leadership Academy. The goal of the Academy is to help IT managers develop and enhance their leadership skills to more fully leverage the talents and contributions of the local IT workforce.

Kim Mickelsen will present “Outsmart the Competition” at an education workshop for the La Vista Chamber on March 26.

Today there are so many creative and low cost opportunities to market your business that with some thought and perseverance you can outsmart the competition.  In this session we’ll talk about some strategies to target your best prospects, to leverage the power of the internet and especially search and social media as well as provide some tips for few unorthodox but effective (and inexpensive) guerilla  marketing measures.

According to MediaDailyNews.com the long-predicted tipping point has arrived, with total U.S. digital advertising and marketing revenues set to surpass print revenues in 2010, according to a new study from Outsell, a consulting and research group serving the information industry.

Altogether, U.S. advertisers and marketers plan to spend $368 billion in 2010, Outsell found — up 1.2% from about $364 billion in 2009. Within the 2010 figure, 32.5% ($119.6 billion) will go to digital, versus 30.3% ($111.5 billion) for print.

While the digital figure includes online advertising mainstays like display and search, it also includes direct marketing, represented by email, as well as investments in company Web sites, which will 53% ($63 billion) of the total digital spending.

As in previous years, print ad revenue declines will fall heaviest on newspapers — with Outsell forecasting total ad revenues of $27 billion in 2010, down about 8% from 2009. Outsell also sees revenue for print directories falling about 8% to $11.6 billion. But it’s not all bad news for print, as Outsell predicts a 2% increase in ad spending for magazines, rising to $9.4 billion.

Not every part of the digital market is buoyant. One surprising prediction in the report has mobile advertising revenues sinking 16% in 2010 compared to 2009. On the television front (combining broadcast and cable), Outsell has total TV ad revenues falling 6.5% to $59.6 billion.

So where do you fall into the picture?  If online advertising is not in your current marketing plan I would strongly suggest that you look into it.  Online advertising allows us to marry consumers with brand involvement.  And in this day and age brand involvement and engagement is key.  

With online advertising you are able to target your market much more efficiently and effectively than with many traditional advertising strategies. Online advertising also offers the benefit of providing detailed and thorough statistics that allow you to tweak and optimize your campaigns to the fullest.

With traditional advertising, there is little you can do to track the success of small changes within campaigns or one campaign as compared to another. However, with online advertising you have a huge array of information at your fingertips.

Over the past few weeks I have been writing about who has actually been watching the Olympics and how viewership has been influenced.  Here are some interesting post-Olympics viewership statistics provided by the Nielsen Company. Read More

Feeling data rich and insight poor? We’re inundated with data. It’s everywhere. We have performance data from our marketing efforts. We can slice and dice it every which way. Drill down into minuet detail. Yet, the sheer volume can sometimes be more confusing than helpful. Making it easy to overlook the obvious.

I was talking to a marketer today who was struggling to glean some insights from a mass of campaign data. He had an impressive amount of data on every imaginable part of the campaign, but he simply didn’t know what the data told him that was of value in moving to the next step of a comprehensive rollout plan. After a few minutes I asked him about the overall CPA (cost-per-acquisition) of the campaign versus that of various segments within the campaign. I could literally hear him slap his head and sigh. Because of all the rich data he had at his fingertips and could mine, he overlooked a basic metric that could provide a simple insight into ROI.

Make sure you look at the basics first, before you do the data deep dive. Looking at cost-per-acquisition is a great place to start. CPA, also referred to as cost-per-action or cost-per-sale, is a metric used to measure your spend rate per conversion and answer the question “How much do I have to spend to get a sale?”

CPA is a metric that matters because you need to know if the cost to get a new customer is within your margin or if you are investment spending. Plus it’s a quick and simple way to look at the effectiveness of a campaign and its parts. And it’s one of the easiest to measure. Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) = Cost of campaign/Number of sales.

So let’s say you spend a total of $20k and you get 250 sales.  Your overall CPA is 20,000/250 = $80. And if your margin per sale is $99, then you are making more than you are spending on the overall campaign. You can then dissect each part of the campaign in the same way to see the effective CPA of each piece. Below is an example of a CPA on a PPC campaign.

In this instance we see that the PPC campaign had a lower CPA than the campaign overall. You can look at each piece of your campaign to see how each stacks up and deep dive into the other metrics to see if there tactics you should cut or can optimize in some way.

If you start from this simple premise, you may save yourself from spending too much time looking at data that simply doesn’t matter.

Here’s a nifty little CPA calculator from ClickZ to calculate your CPA from your search campaigns (with cost-per-click [CPC] pricing) versus your display campaigns (often priced by cost-per-thousand [CPM]).

For more on turning data into intelligence, check out this article from our quarterly newsletter.

Ok, so we all know the results from last nights’ Oscars: Sandra Bullock was awarded best actress, Jeff Bridges was best actor and Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win Best Director. But here’s something that may surprise you that I found while doing a quick scan of the news today.

In the 44 films in 2009 that topped the box office for at least one weekend, an Apple logo or device could be seen in at least 18 of them. (That’s almost 41%.) In some, Apple products even eclipsed their human scene partners.

The Awl put together a great piece examining the popularity of Apple products in film. Not editors, effects specialists, composers, or photographers using Apple products, or even celebrities owning iPhones–but the insane frequency with which Apple shows up in movies, without it being official product placement.

Apple’s Greatest Cinematic Achievements from The Awl on Vimeo.

Product placement for Toyota was thought to be a sure thing with more viewers making use of ad-skipping digital video recorders but this was not the case.

Toyota vehicles have been appearing in ABC’s hit show “Modern Family” as part of a product-placement deal struck with ABC that covers the entire 2009-2010 season.  The Toyota pact was struck well before the automaker recalled millions of its cars across several models.

The problem now is that Toyota simply can’t pull out of the deal since they are essentially part of the story line.  Usually when a crisis involving a particular marketer or product arises, common practice is to remove all commercials as soon as possible.  Toyota is now stuck.

Placing products into shows, however often requires months worth of planning.  The goods are made part of a script or storyline and are often captured as part of key scenes in an episode. Pulling a product appearance from a key scene simply is not logistically possible — and can be expensive, when it is.

Toyota’s reasons for keeping its cars in “Modern Family” are simple: After spending a lot of ad money reassuring the public, it wants to get back to selling. Hopefully the show’s strong ratings can help the automaker regain the trust of the American public.

New research indicates that the long-held promise of TV/Internet convergence is gaining traction, albeit slowly. Leichtman Research Group data shows that just over 24% of all U.S. homes have a Web-to-TV connection, while 5% of adults are watching YouTube and Hulu on their TV screens each week.

Leichtman data measured homes with Web-TV connections via video game and Blu-ray systems, as well as compatible TVs. Add in homes that can connect with a TiVo, Roku player or computer, and the amount is estimated to come in just north of 24%.

Leichtman research shows that while 5% of adults watch Web video on the TV weekly, the figure is just 1% on a daily basis. Since game consoles are so widespread, the viewing is largely among young men. Among men ages 18 to 34, 16% are viewing Web video on the big screen weekly via a console, Blu-ray or compatible TV.

The findings come from a survey of 1,250 U.S. homes.

Research from the Yankee Group shows that 23% of homes with an HDTV set have the ability to link the Internet to that screen. Still, only 5% of all homes are watching Internet video on TV.

There have been suggestions that the opportunity to watch video from YouTube, Hulu, ESPN360, CBS Sports and a slew of other sites on a large TV screen could prompt people to cancel a cable or satellite subscription.

But Bruce Leichtman, who conducted the research, said that’s unlikely. The people with the Web-to-TV devices are likely to covet the typical run of TV channels and be willing to pay the price to keep a subscription.

A New York start-up company called Boxee is jumping into the mix.  Boxee bills its software as a simple way to access multiple Internet video and music sites, and to bring them to a large monitor or television that one might be watching from a sofa across the room.

Some of Boxee’s fans also think it is much more: a way to euthanize that costly $100-a-month cable or satellite connection.  

The software, which is free and available for download at www.boxee.tv, works on Mac and Linux computers, and on Apple’s set-top box, Apple TV. A version of Boxee for Windows PCs is being tested among a limited group of users.  Boxee gives users a single interface to access all the photos, video and music on their hard drives, along with a wide range of television shows, movies and songs from sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CNN.com and CBS.com.

The most ardent Boxee fanatics — almost all of its 200,000 early adopters seem to have turned into online evangelists for the company — then connect their computers to their living room televisions.

The challenge for the cable industry is how they grapple with the fact that this is in some way a substitution for some of the things they do.   So will this replace cable subscriptions?  I doubt it but it will certainly be interesting to see how many homes this influences in years to come.  Services like Boxee will come into the mix but will be used to supplement the entire television viewing experience. 

Face it we are a society now that demands content be accessible whenever and wherever we wish.