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.