I hate taking stuff off TechCrunch, since you probably already saw this report there. But you need to know these ad spending stats, so it’s worth seeing twice. So, here’s the question I have for you – Will Online ad spending keep going up, or are we about to get nailed by the recession so all ad spending, including online, goes down next quarter?
I promise, if the Seattle Sounders do something like try to move to Oklahoma City, or spend $117 million on players I wouldn’t add to a Fantasy baseball team, I’ll complain about it. But as long as they keep doing things that impress me as a marketing professional, I’m going to keep sharing how impressed I am.
This week, I went through the pleasurable and fun process of selecting my 2009 season ticket package. In comparison, I’ve completely given up on using Ticketmaster.com due to its inflexibility and 75% Convenience charge. It’s amazing that you can’t choose your seats on that site, but instead are held hostage to a weak algorithm that supposedly gives you "Best Available" in a certain section. Plus, I honestly don’t understand how I can order 5 books from Amazon Marketplace from 5 different people and pay like $15.00 total in shipping, but if I try to use Ticketmaster to buy 4 concert tickets, they want to charge something like $50 just to print out a couple of ducats and stick them at will call. Why? Are my tickets taking a limo from TM HQ to the arena? Is the paper laced with gold? What could command $50 in service charges? Anyway, now I just take the time to go to the stadium, pick out seats I want and leave happy.
But I digress.
The Sounders experience was as close to "Anti-Ticketmaster" as I can find. Even if you don’t care about soccer, I encourage you to go through the process at 
http://tickets.soundersfc.com/ . Choose whether you want to sit or stand during the game. Or if you want to be in a section that sings or not. Take a virtual tour of every row in every section. It’s a very fan friendly experience, and trust me, the fans appreciate it.
Let me know if you have found any other ticket places with convenient tools such as this.
I’m not one to think that Marketing is free. I think you can be effective on the cheap, but you have to commit to at least spending SOMETHING.
I liken it to a party. You need one of these to be extremely great – location, people, food or music – to make it worth talking about. But no matter what, you need to spend some money on booze to loosen things up.
Marketing is similar. You either need extremely great product, creative, design or placement for a campaign to be noteworthy. Take a boring product, give it a standard design, a few relevant pieces of copy and stick it in tradional media and you have something to put in your portfolio but not much else.
But I digress.
Here’s a company who is executing a very nice campaign on the cheap, but they are nailing the creativity and placement attributes. They spend some cash on shipping, but have potential to have a lot of "free creative." designed for them. Here is a copy of the email below:
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Hey fellow Magnifier –
We’ve had amazing response to the Mascot’s first week out and about in New York City. He’s been on the Subway. He’s been to Columbia University. He came to a Magnify.net board meeting. He event had a night out with Obama Girl!
Now, he’s ready to travel the world. So, invite him to your place – we’ll pay the way.
Magnify Mascot will travel first class (fed ex) to you. He’ll bring a gift (a brand new American Apparel Magnify T shirt), and he’s ready to have a photo take with you.
We’re going to feature some of the best photo’s, most glamourous locations, and most creative channel admins on our homepage over the next few weeks. So, if you’re looking for a house guest who is flat, and orange – we’ve got a guy who wants to visit you.
To apply to be a stop on the Magnify Mascot World Tour:
1). Send an email to: WorldTour@magnify.net
2). Tell us the name of your Magnify.net site(s)
3). Tell us about some great photo op (famous tourist destination he can visit?) or neat photo location.
We’ve got a backlog of Channel Admin’s who have already invited the Mascot to come to their unique and wonderful part of the world – so get on the bandwagon now.
We’re excited about coming to you!
Best,
Steve, Simon and the Magnify.net team
Here’s a picture from our latest Board meeting, with Board Member
David S. Rose giving the Mascot a ‘Hi Five.’
PS… yes, we know he needs a name… we’re still accepting suggestions for the Name the Mascot contest. Expect more news shortly on this.
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Vizu is a neat little app that you can use to add a touch of functionality to blog posts and the like. It’s probably been around for a while, but recently hopped on my radar screen thanks to a friend in the ad industry who uses it for quick polls. I don’t know how they make money, but for the rest of us, it’s a pretty slick little tool. If I had to nitpick, I’d ask for a few more size options. In the case of a short blog post like this one, the Vizu poll doesn’t really fit. So, even after playing with table widths, I still need to drone on and on just to fill up some more space with copy so the poll fits in better. But on the plus side, you do have plenty color options, so it can work it’s way design-wise into just about any web template. And it’s a breeze to use. The whole process takes less than 2 minutes. |
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There will be no jokes about the Sounders having to restart the game every 30 minutes to reboot. Nor will anyone talk about them having a bloated team of 476 players. And certainly no one will complain that every MLS team must have 10 players from the Sounders roster included with every installation.
No, we won’t make those jokes because despite getting Microsoft money, the Sounders now have the coolest sponsor in the MLS and the best uniforms in the league.
In fact, I may go as far as to say that the MLS has the coolest sponsor in all of Professional soccer, with the announcement of Xbox 360 deciding to be the face (or chest as it were) of Seattle soccer.
Think about the great teams in Euro soccer and then think about their sponsors:
But until I see Sony, Gucci, Rolex, Ferrari, Gulfstream, Prada, or BMW on the front of a jersey, I’ll take Xbox 360 as the coolest sponsor in soccer. (How does Apple not get that they need to do this…)
Even better, the sponsorship and company are here in Seattle. And tell me it’s not a great looking jersey. Just tell me how to order and I’m in.
(This photo was taken by Courtney Blethen of the Seattle Times, and I grabbed it from this article. Seattle Times: If you need me to take it down, please just let me know.)
I tell you what. You hear complaints about the mainstream media being out of touch at times. But thankfully the Wall Street Journal is able to restore my faith in their relevance by coming up with scoops such as this:
More Digital Ads Are Produced Offshore
Marketers Ship Work To Costa Rica, Bulgaria; AvVenta Reaps Rewards
Really? People are offshoring their creative? I had no idea. I mean, when I used elance.com last month to have 35 ad banners made for $400, and 25 different firms bid on my project, I just thought I was unique. It never dawned on me that there was an actual industry around connecting American companies to leverage affordable and talented creative folks from abroad. Thanks to the WSJ, my eyes have been opened to this 5-10 year old phenomenon.
Among the many sad parts of this article, is the fact that the story was obviously planted by a firm called avVenta Worldwide. So not only does this WSJ writer, Emily Steel, make it appear that she just found out about creative outsourcing, she also makes it appear that she thinks that avVenta Worldwide is somehow revolutionary in the space. The article basically tells this story. "Agencies needed a way to cut costs and bill their Fortune 500 clients the same amount. So they hire avVenta Worldwide, who has a team of creatives in Costa Rica, Bulgaria and the Ukraine. The agency margins grow, avVenta Worldwide margins grow and no one knows the difference."
Well, no one knows the difference until your PR team gets an article placed in the WSJ and all of those Fortune 500 clients who thought they were paying for Madison Avenue heavyweights with Masters in Graphic Design say, "Uh, WTF?"
Dear MLS,
I must admit, I’ve been trying to get excited about watching your games this year in anticipation of Seattle’s entrance to the league next year. But I’m having a hard time tracking you down on the TV dial. Also, it seems like your games are generally on in the middle of weekend afternoons, and frankly, there’s just too much other stuff to do.
May I offer a quick suggestion that would fit better with my schedule?
Monday Night Soccer. Remember the old days of Monday Night Baseball? Think back before ESPN, when the only ways to watch baseball were Saturday’s Game of the Week with Kubek and Gariagiola, and then MNB with guys like Cosell. Drysdale and Michaels.
Here’s why this works.
Monday Night Soccer. Excuse the mixed metaphor, but this is a slam dunk.
Since this is supposed to be a marketing blog, here are a few ads I saw in Hong Kong. (I only have a few minutes, so I’ll add more later)
One of my favorite things over the past four years has been the UW Business Plan Competition. As a grad student, in 2005, I had two ideas and we went nowhere. In 2006, I jumped on another student team and we won "Best Consumer Product." Last year, I was a first round judge and merely observed the rest. And this year, thanks to the kindness of some of my favorite people, I was invited to judge the tradeshow round.
Quick moment of clarification for those who don’t know anything about this. Every year, about 60-80 teams submit a business plan. Some teams are made up of 4 students, some teams are established companies with a student consultant. It’s a broad range, so you see a lot of neat ideas. These 60-80 teams are whittled down to 32, who then fill a room and pitch their idea to about 100 judges in a tradeshow type setting. That list gets cut down to 16, then down to 4, and a winner is chosen. So, Wednesday, we had the tradeshow round of 32, and our job as judges was to "invest" 1000 fake dollars into at least 5 companies. You are free to split that 1000 however you like, as long as 5 or more companies are given money. The 16 teams who receive the most money move on to the next round.
Now, my favorite part about this whole competition is that since most of the people you talk to are undergrad, MBA or PhD students, they still have this sense of optimism and naivety. For example, you ask an undergrad with a dream, "What’s your exit strategy?" and his response is pure and good. He says, "Exit? We’re going to make this a profitable business. I don’t want to sell it. This is my idea, and it’s going to work." Wow, as a human being, you love hearing that. But then you have to crush his hopes and dreams, and invite him to join the real world. You have to tell him, "Well, here’s the thing. If I’m a VC, and I put money in, there better damn sure be an exit. Because I’m not really in the business of giving you a bunch of coin so you can build a company that doesn’t make me rich. You will sell, and you will sell when I tell you to."
Anyway, the whole thing is great. Wide eyed, naive students getting creative and coming up with some crazy cool ideas. It’s the kind of place that you walk out of wishing they all would get the money they need to build the product they want to build. Sure, there were some plain dumb ideas – but only dumb from the standpoint that they were unfundable. Every idea itself had merit. Even the ideas with terrible business plans and execution were at least interesting ideas.
I’m being lazy and not going through the whole list of companies. But here were some ideas that stood out for me. I’m not saying all their business plans were great, but the ideas stuck in my head
Congrats to all the teams who made it to the next round. And I hope those teams that didnt make it, continue to tweak their plans and shoot for success.