by Next Wave Team | Oct 8, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns, Marketing & the Web, Web strategy
Every week The Dayton Business Journal publishes a “list” of the top 12 or 24″ players” in a field from Hospitals to Title firms, and once a year they publish their “List of Advertising Agencies” which is always good for a few laughs by those of us in the business.
As I am fond of saying, “Good research is expensive, bad research is more expensive” (in case this is instantly apparent- the cost of doing the wrong thing because you did your research poorly is always more expensive than doing the right research to begin with). The Business Journal’s methodology is suspect at best. They fax a questionnaire out to the agencies they have identified- never telling us how many it is sent to then they take the responses, without verifying the answers, and compile a “ranking” based on number of employees, or gross billings as reported, and this creates their “List.” I don’t claim that my list of agencies that aren’t The Next Wave is complete, but I update it every time I run across another firm, and it has links to other resources.
I was going to buy the 10″ x 1″ ad at the bottom of this Years Agency list to promote my list- but they only are going to have 12 agencies this year- a half page, because they didn’t get enough responses. How lame is that. I admit, after not being included last year (when I had my largest employee count and billings) and seeing smaller firms on the list, I wrote “why bother” on my questionnaire and sent it back.
The wonderful ad rep that I deal with at the Business Journal suggested I talk to the publisher. She transferred me, I left a message and got a call back from the Editor, who was about as flexible in her thinking as a brick wall. So, according to the Dayton Business Journal there are only 12 Ad Agencies in Dayton. End of story (except here).
Not only that, I tried to explain to them how a list could be complete and useful like my list, but they aren’t interested. They have to be able to rank agencies by size or employee count, I feel that alphabetical works just fine. I offered other ways to rank- number of awards won per employee was one 🙂 No matter, they will republish their list in an annual publication called “The Book of Lists” which is just as worthless. They hawk it for $29 and describe it as:
“PERFECT for: Sales Prospecting, Job Search, Fundraising, and Business Research”.
I call it a poorly researched advertising vehicle.
If you are looking for a list of advertising and design firms in Dayton OH, and surrounding areas, Agencies that aren’t The Next Wave is your best resource. You can contact their publisher to let her know that incomplete lists are a waste of your time and that a complete list would improve their publication. Or you can just use our List of Advertising Agencies in Dayton.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Sep 30, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns, Marketing & the Web, Web strategy
How long does it take for a campaign to launch for the big boy of media- network TV? How do you reach a lot of people fast? Is the Superbowl ad the way to go?
Forget what you know- and what you think you know- blogs spread faster, especially among cutting edge opinion makers and early adopters.
Today these stats were being bandied around on adrants:
that 29 percent of traffic to a site created as part of a recent Audi A3 campaign was generated by advertising on the BlogAds network. The kicker is that 29 percent was achieved with just one half of one percent of the overall media budget. Let’s say it again, advertising on weblogs deliver Audi 29 percent of all responding yet took just on half of one percent of the budget to do so.
It’s no longer the size of your budget that matters, it’s the quality of the content. Mckinney Silver of Durham NC created a scavenger hunt for the new Audi A3 they used a variety of media- including network tv to launch, but the numbers showed that on day 10- in the case study- that the interest was coming from blogs.
And- as a note- for a big-time agency- that “gets the web”- their really expensive Flash based site gets them 8 pages indexed in Google- with no real content showing up in the search results- another example of an agency telling people to do what I say- not as I do.
Blogs connect you with customers. Learn it, repeat it, do it, and link away.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Sep 24, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Marketing & the Web
I’ve tried to explain this too many times in meetings, so here it is on paper. Just because you can “Blog” on a WordPress powered site, doesn’t mean you have to.
The word “Blog” is still not understood by a lot of people, they think it has to be like a journal, a daily entry of whatever one feels like writing. Yes, it can be, there are a lot of very bad, very boring “Blogs” out there.
That doesn’t mean it has to be like that for business.
WordPress is an open-source (meaning the code that runs it is open to the developers who work on it collectively for free) software program that runs on the server (the computer that hosts a web site). It can run on any platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) but I prefer to run it on Linux- another open source solution. It requires the backend database, MySQL and PHP (both open source software solutions). It takes very little time to install and have up and running compared to trying to do a conventional HTML site in something like Dreamweaver (or GoLive or if you are desperate: Frontpage) even using templates.
Wordpress is a database driven display system for information that one, or multiple users can enter data in easily- and have it display as properly coded HTML that is searchable and works well with search engines like Google, Yahoo and the like.
This allows any company to keep their information up to date, quickly, efficiently, and with “good” code that is readable by search engines and even people using screen readers (who are visually impaired).
It does this by generating code that uses CSS (cascading style sheets), which is a lot like using a style sheet in a word processing document. This allows the owner of a WordPress site to change the look and feel of a site instantly by changing the CSS- or “Theme” by checking a check box. How easy is that? Try doing it with a hard coded site without CSS. Days, weeks. CSS is the smart persons way to build a site.
We have integrated the WordPress engine into other sites so you can barely tell it’s there: see the Rogero Buckman Architects news section, or this section of our site. Since adding the WordPress driven news section to our site hits have grown almost logarithmically every month. Not all hits generate business, but it has taken our site from being someplace that people stumble across, to a place that is actively showing up on the top page of Google search consistently.
One of the ways we have added to our sites popularity is our list of competitors. We had this on the site before, but it was static HTML, and was edited infrequently. Because of the ease of edit in WordPress, we update it as soon as we find a new firm. Why do we list our competitors you may ask? Well, we’re not afraid of competition and comparison to start off with, and because many ad agencies and design firms don’t use code that works well (or at all) with search engines. It’s actually kind of embarrassing. The point of the web is to deliver information- quickly and easily. We offer the list as a public service, since people searching for an ad agency or graphic design shop or marketing consultant in Dayton/Columbus/Cincinnati could be looking for us. It’s a basic part of marketing- being part of the evoked set- the set of options that comes to mind when thinking about purchasing a product or service- but I digress from the advantages of a WordPress blog. Soon people won’t turn to the Google local is on the upswing, but until it is more reliable, we provide this list as a service.
Another thing we’ve learned from our WordPress section of the site is that we can’t predict what search terms or phrases people use to find our competition or us. People type in odd things, and with our large numbers of marketing related words in our news section, we seem to hit more searches than our cheeky copy on the static part of the site.
It won’t be long before almost all sites are built around active engines like WordPress. Just as video production has been demystified by Apple with iMovie, and DVD creation with iDVD, WordPress is a tool that puts the power of the web into the hands of every business.
The ease of inserting links into text in WordPress also serves as an incentive to do it often. It may seem silly to some, but the frequency of links in and out are a key factor in search engine optimization. While incoming links are better than outgoing, links begat more links- trust me.
Every article in WordPress is a separate page. This is very important to your site’s visitors. How often have you navigated deep into a site, found some information that you wanted to share- and tried to send that page to a co-worker and couldn’t do it? The site was probably either built in Flash or Frames- both bad for Search- and bad for bookmarking and sharing. You can click on the title to this article and send it as a link to as many people as you want. It will also show up in Google as a complete, single page, with a descriptive snippet of text under it. A simple way to see what Google sees of your site is by going to Google and typing in site:yoursiteurl.com (or biz or net etc.) and seeing how many pages you index and what they show to visitors- I’ve made the link to this site so you can see how The Next Wave.biz site indexes.
This is a longer article than I planned to write, but this is an important subject. There are a few other key strengths to WordPress: the content is searchable, it’s organizable (using categories) and best of all, it provides RSS feeds that allow people to subscribe to you site and be notified every time you post- saving you from having to PUSH your message out with e-mail (which more people are starting to consider SPAM if it isn’t addressed individually and customized- but that’s another story).
I found this short article, “WordPress, or “How I finally built the website I needed” on someone else’s experience with WordPress and it inspired me to write this. Hopefully now, I won’t have to spend as much time explaining why a Blog is a site and is a highly effective business tool. And maybe a few of my clients will finally understand why I want to update their sites to use it.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jun 21, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns, Marketing & the Web
If there is one industry that believes in advertising- but doesn’t understand it- it’s car dealers.
Formulaic, stupid, boring, and inept. If I have to hear “drive a little, save a lot” or “home of the low priced cars” one more time, I think I’m going to puke. Face it, they all sell the same thing as everyone else- a car- made in some factory far away- that’s exactly the same as the car their competitor has on their lot.
So, price and product are not the way to go. But, they still do.
Big egos also are hard at work in this business- so the owner of the dealership thinks that they need to be in the ad, on the marquee, and even stick their name on the back of your brand new car with some cheap sticker.
So, when I found these “Trunk monkey” ads at first I thought it was a production company poking fun at car dealers- but low and behold- it’s for real. Suburban Auto Group in Sandy Oregon is the home of the “Trunk Monkey”- a chimp who lives in your trunk and can do everything from buy off a cop to deliver your baby- I’m not kidding.
Entertaining- yes, enjoyable- yes, makes you want to visit the site- yes, makes you feel good about Suburban Auto Group- yes- and they even have a hip logo.
If only the car dealers in Dayton- especially our nearby neighbor, Frank Z Auto Group, who spends crazy money in the Dayton Daily News, would wake up to the power of good advertising.
Enjoy!
A little more research- and of course I find more to the story: The ads were created by R-west.com in Portland OR (their site sucks btw- all Flash- practically kills Firefox on the Mac) and then syndicated to other dealers. In Canada- they were banned for violence, and then PETA complained. For more than you can stand to know about Trunk Monkeys- see of course: trunkmonkey.com
Still wouldn’t hurt for Frank Z to take a look.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jun 17, 2005 | Advertising, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns, Marketing & the Web
You’ve never heard of Ruder- Finn- but, you will.
Sooner or later- someone is going to e-mail you a Mr. Piccassohead- and then you will want to do one too.
What is a Mr. Piccassohead you ask? Well, it’s a Mr. Potato head in 2D online- with Picasso inspired parts to assemble. When you are done- you send it to someone- and they go to the site- and admire your work. While you are at Mr. Picassohead you see the Ruder-Finn logo- and you can click to their site- and read about how their creativity delivers- which it did- it delivered you to their site.
This is an example of viral marketing- where each person you contact, then contacts someone else- and it spreads- just like a virus. There have been other examples of viral marketing- subservientchicken.com for Burger King by Crispin Porter Bogusky helped up the sales of the new BK tender crisp chicken sandwich jump over 270%, Carl’s Jr. is scoring points with a naughty Paris Hilton video that is “too hot for TV” to hawk their latest belly buster. If CKE Restaurants had run the spot on TV it would have cost them millions, by producing a spot that was controversial, they got millions in free media exposure. This is what viral marketing/ PR ploy’s are all about.
The difference between Mr. Picassohead and Spicy Paris- is the difference between art and porn. But, considering the audience for fast food is hormonally charged young men- they are both effective.
Viral is here to stay. The original online viral campaign was for free e-mail, with a message on the bottom of every hotmail delivered e-mail asking you to sign up for hotmail. It’s come a long way since then. We’ve only just seen the beginning.
“I love you too, but…. (ode to Roy Lichtenstien)
a Mr. Picassohead drawing by Atalie Gagnet
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jun 16, 2005 | Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Web strategy
Really Simple Syndication, RSS, is another reason a blog is a great addition to any website.
The biggest problem for our clients is that they think they have to write about everything themselves- and they hate to write. Not so-
you can fill your blog up with links to what others write-
like this really insigntful piece by Kevin Hale of Particletree.com on the importance of RSS- I suggest you take a read- “The importance of RSS”
I wrote earlier about people acting as guides to content- filters- Kevin calls them “Salesmen/Connector/Maven” - I’m sure there are other terms out there, if you hear of them- let me know.
RSS is the mechanism for portals that will do what portals are supposed to do- but, the other part of it is that they can replace sending out opt-in e-mail. Apple has integrated RSS into OS X 10.4 “Tiger” and there are lots of other reader options. I use the extension “Sage” for Firefox and track about 40 feeds. When browsing in Firefox, it you arrive at a page that has a feed, a small orange RSS icon appears in the bottom right of the window next to the window resize handle, click on it and it will bookmark the feed- which you save to a feed folder in Firefox. Before long, RSS will be as ubiquitous as a browser.
What do you think?
