T-mobile has a girl in pink

T-mobile now uses a model-like woman to be their spokesperson, and people like it! It is actually working for them, when someone says t-mobile we are going to think, "girl in the pink dress". Who knew the color pink would be so red hot with consumers. I once never even thought about t-mobile any more, they weren't huge competitors but now they are everywhere, i see the commercial with the girl in the pink dress almost every day. Good work T-mobile. 

The Company For Women

Avon's target audience is clearly women. They do a great job at selling their products, especially with the help of a celebrity spokeswoman like Reese Witherspoon. They also give women a chance to have another job with Avon by becoming a seller. It is fast, easy and fun money. They know who they want their audience and customers want to be, and they directly sell to them and find women around the states to sell their products as well, making it almost a family unit among women. 

Everyone's getting one

Facebook is a great way for businesses to get their message that they want to send to the public out in the open. It has been able to link us to everyone around the world and is a great marketing tool. I find most businesses on facebook, where you can "like" their page and "stalk" them to get to know their brand/company better.

New York Times goes digital

The New York times is now, not only a newspaper, but they are offering digital services to their customers as well as home delivery of the paper. They have stepped up their marketing to accomodate the new digital future of media. The New York Times can now be viewed online, on your smartphone, or on your tablet. This is a great step toward a better future for the success of The New York Times. 

Toms Give Back

TOMS is a shoe production that gives a pair of shoes to a child in need with every shoe purchase we make. They have used thier brand to rase awareness of poverty and children in need and have become a hugely successful brand, along with helping others along the way. I find it inspiring. On their website there is a part where you can get involved and has steps and activities to do to help in giving back. They have grown to so successful throughout the United States, and their main marketing plan is all to benefit children in need. This is inspiring.

When do you pull an ad?

Should advertising during specific shows or programs be subjected to boycott?

“Advertising is a way for programs and issues to be supported,” said Waite, “Just because these brands were helping bring light to issues that have generally been shunned from society, it doesn’t mean that the brands are turning against what they believe in.”

Perception is everything and advertisers should not take into consideration other audiences when advertising. Advertisements generally cater to a specific audience they want to reach but if a customer uses your brand and thinks your company is supporting a controversial issue, your company could lose that customer. It is worth the criticism to pull the ad or should companies continue to run it? My opinion is you cannot make everyone happy, so continue on.

Pull the ad if it no longer reaches the target audience, not because a customer perceives your ad as questionable to their beliefs.

http://www.talentzoo.com/beyond-madison-ave/blog_news.php?articleID=12495

Is the media helpful or harmful?

We all know the name Kardashian, because they are EVERYWHERE! From Sketchers, perfumes, a clothing line at Sears, a book deal, commercials, and not to mention their TV shows based on their everyday "lives", Keeping up with the Kardashians, Khloe and Lamar, Kourtney and Khloe take Miami, Kourtney and Kim take New York, and the taping of Khloe and Lamars wedding on E and the infamous wedding special for Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries. They have pretty much, sold themeselves to the media.
This family is a great example of how to spin things in your favor. They took a chance by putting their lives on camera but it worked for them. Now they have endorsement deals, books, and clothing lines. They really know how to market themseleves to the public. I am just wondering what's next for the Kardashians?

Give the Power to the People

  Marketers are constantly looking for a new way to have social media work for them. I think Converse may be on to something big. The only questions is, how many customers will put in the time and effort to make this profitable for Converse and the customers creating the next masterpiece in footwear? 

  Converse is venturing out on a new frontier. They are creating an app on Facebook where the fans of converse can create their own Converse shoe and sell their creation to their friends. They can create their own storefront to sell their shoes and then as a reward they can get shoes free based on their sales. 

  The customers become the designers and the marketers of the product. This opens the door to possibilities for customers and it will allow Converse to see what people are wanting in a new research method. Converse could have millions of designers creating shoes combinations they never thought would sell. 

   Some people may not be happy arguing that they are paying for a Converse product so Converse should create it, but others are excited for the chance to create something personalized and see the response from others. If this works well for Converse, I wonder how many other designers will follow the trend. The next option, designing our own cars. Maybe we should wait on that one.

Information Gathered from the Following article: http://bit.ly/twGR5j

Measuring the Success of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is growing. However, this new medium is still in its infancy. While it is developing at an exponential rate, there are downsides that accompany new marketing media. Perhaps the largest downside of social media marketing is the lack of key metrics to measure the success of a marketing campaign.

With the wide reach and immediacy attached to social marketing, it is easy to see why it has become an essential tool to organizations. Clay McDaniel, managing director of Spring Creek Group, outlines the three big questions surrounding social media marketing:

What should we measure?
How do we measure it?
What does success look like?

McDaniel describes three tools that can be used to measure social media marketing success.

One: Total Online Community Size
How many people are following your twitter account? How many have liked your brand’s Facebook page? How many are following your blog? The collection of social media followers gives marketers a good place to start counting. While sheer numbers may not mean a lot, McDaniel points out that any growth of these numbers is worth noticing.

Two: Monthly Referred Social Traffic to Site
Focus on traffic coming to your website from links shared through social media outlets. This can show how far your brand has branched into the digital world.

Three: Number of mentions
While followers may be important, how often is your brand the topic of conversation? After all, social media is all about communication in the digital world, and you want to be part of the conversation.

Einstein once said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Perhaps many companies share this view and simply think that an online presence is all that is needed.

Dexter Bustarde, senior web analyst with Digitaria, shares his thoughts on the measurement of success within social media marketing:

“…social media measurement could mean anything from PR and reputation management to Twitter reports to broad “engagement” measurement to looking at Facebook Insights day to day. In truth, all of those things should inform a social media measurement program, but at the same time, if we’re talking standardization, it’s a lot of work to get it all under one umbrella.”

Having worked in a data management position in the past, it is easy for me to see the importance of data and the effect it holds on business decisions. In order to see their money has been well invested, employers want to see the return on their marketing funding. This is particularly difficult with social media. However, one of the key steps to a marketing campaign is the follow-up evaluation. As social media marketing steps out of its infancy, I expect the measuring metrics of this media to evolve with it.

Image compliments of searchenginewatch.com

Added Value for Print Advertisers

In a recent interview, Vogue Chief Anna Wintour stated that she doesn’t really follow market research.  Wintour relies on instinct and picture ads for advertising success.  This goes against common industry practices but it has worked well for winter so far.  In a recent move, Vogue has offered access to its archives through a subscription priced at $1575 dollars.  According to the Wall Street Journal the archive will contain roughly 300,000 ads and thousands of images.  This will force many people to view print ads in a different light.

Print ads have an advantage of permanence that other channels, such as radio, do not.  The ads and the images contained in them can be viewed repeatedly by the reader.  Print ads reach beyond the subscriber to include family members, guests, customers and friends.  When these publications are digitized the ads can be shared easily with a greater number of people.  The real question is how many people see the ad after the initial purchaser and how does this translate into revenue for product makers and advertisers?  Wintour’s success would seem to indicate some added value for advertisers who place ads with magazines using archive subscriptions.  The key to problem will be quantifying this added value.     

Are Consumers Really Reading Your Email?

Ninety-seven percent of small businesses are using email marketing to reach their consumers.  Having a core group of subscribers and appropriate content are essential, but why put in all the time and effort if they’re not even opening it?

The hurdle of actually getting your consumers to open the email can be hard to overcome.  One thing small businesses should ask themselves when using email marketing as a tool for engagement should be: 

Would I open this email if I received it from another company?  

To increase your open rate:  

Are you making a good first impression?  Typically recipients see two things when sifting through their inbox:  Who the email is from, and what the subject line is.  This step is probably your biggest chance to increase your open rate.  Does the consumer know who you are?  Has your subject line enticed them enough to want to inquire further? 

Timing can be your best friend.  How are you ensuring your email doesn’t get lost in the inbox shuffle?  If you send too early, it could get missed.  If you send too late, the reader may skip over it with the intention of coming back to it later (they almost never do).  Experimenting with time frames will be essential for small businesses to develop the appropriate time to reach their target audiences. 

Don’t spam your subscribers.  Spam filters analyze a huge list of criteria.  How is your business avoiding this trap?  Some suggestions include:

·         Don’t use all CAPS

·         Avoid using too many:  !!!!!

·         Stay away from spam phrases like “Once in a lifetime opportunity!!!”

Purge your dead weight.  The more targeted your subscriber list, the more likely they are to engage and open your emails.  They signed up for a reason.  Some email marketing programs allow you access to see who or how many people are actually opening your email and how many are bouncing back.  This can ensure you are utilizing your time and investment wisely. 

Are you making it easy for consumers to sign up?  As a growing small business, you owe it to yourself and your customers to make it easy for them to receive additional offers and information from you and your business.  The harder the sign-up process, the less likely they are to do it. 

Once you’ve worked through and fine-tuned these steps, I’m sure you’re questioning what a successful open rate actually is.  Email marketing campaigns will differ per industry and your target market. 

When Viral Media Backfires

Viral marketing and social media are two phenomenons that we extensively talk about utilizing in class. The prospect of having these two mediums work together to potentially reach thousands, even millions, of people fast by just sending out one viral ad has began has been used to market everything from Doritos to movies. So it should come to no surprise that politicians also try to utilize this revolutionary combination to reach potential voters. So when Rick Perry's latest ad went viral and reached more than 3 million views in less than 5 days you would think he would be ecstatic. However, in this case viral media may have come back to bite him.

    His latest ad seems honest enough, Perry is shown walking through what seems like a wooded area wear a jacket to seem like a down to earth guy. However, when he utters the phrase: 

"I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school."

It's not hard to see why things could go very bad, very fast. On YouTube, Perry's ad has only 13,000 likes and over 500,000 dislikes.Worst of all, Perry's ad has become the launching ad for several scathing parodies that have become just as viral. Using the same background and format as Perry's ad these parodies range from a fake Perry describing his more explicit reason for disapproving of homosexuals (160,000), an atheist slamming Rick Perry running on a Christian  platform (1,500,000 views), and even Jesus himself refuting any connection to Rick Perry (150,000 views). So the question remains: What the hell was Perry thinking? With all the advisors are individuals on his staff, wouldn't you think one person would step up and say, "Hey Rick, you know this could make a lot of people mad and ruin everything you worked for right?" Ask Howard Dean. All it took was the simple exclamation "BYAAAH" during an event to go from top of the back to bottom of the polls thanks to Dave Chappelle turning it into a skit on his show. So will this ruin Rick Perry's entire campaign? My guess is yes, but only time will tell.

Attacking Ads

After reading this article I was confused about why it was considered crude and offensive. I would think a company would do some research before placing an advertisement that could possible offend others. Although, we see this attack almost every day with politicians amongst themselves, it is considered politically incorrect.

Clicking on several links I finally found the answer to my question, why is this offensive? Seems this company put up a billboard, which, if you can’t make it out, reads: Christmas Quality, Hanukkah Pricing. Although the company that placed the ad was only looking for it to be perceived as funny, it has offended the Jewish community.

While the Jewdars all found it pretty amusing, the ADL had this to say: “In a crude and offensive way of trying to make a point that their vodka is high quality and inexpensive, the billboards evoke a Jewish holiday to imply something that is cheap and of lesser value when compared to the higher value of a Christian holiday. Particularly with the long history of anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews and money, with the age-old notion that Jews are cheap, to use the Jewish holiday in dealing with issues of money is clearly insensitive and inappropriate.”
The ADL is an Anti-Defamation League for Jewish people. http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/6176_12.htm

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