Do you think that Advertising has become too parochial, too introspective, too convinced by its on hyperbole?

Two or three thousand, what would be described as, creative people, dominates advertising.
However, a major change is afoot and advertising, long regarded as the ultimate weapon in marketing – particularly the once mighty television commercial – is now seen as complacent and increasingly ineffective.

Consequently, the power of the creative is diminishing. And why is this a good thing for clients and their customers? Because, very often, these creatives have been the ‘barnacles on the bum of progress’.

It is amazing when you consider the many excellent marketing ideas that have been available, however the promoters of such ideas eventually gave up selling to advertising agencies because all advertising agencies wanted was to get their clients onto television.

That it might not be the ideal medium was totally ignored.
Our experience was typical; we developed the most potent, effective and accountable marketing communications programme – ever.
When we started the business we were introduced to Alvin Toffler who, when hearing of what we were doing simply said “Persevere but remember vested interests will be against you”.
Was he ever right!

Interactive Marketing Communication

allows you to explore the multi-dimensional benefits of understanding customer needs in a digital era.

Customer loyalty is seeing several trends rapidly overtaking existing

understanding. Platforms of the future will record every interaction - they will

understand consumer preferences and pre-empt evolving needs.

Interactive Communication, properly executed, includes the next generation of

loyalty schemes. Embracing the fourth dimension of loyalty Interactive Communication comprises

every aspect of digital advertising and is totally accountable!

　

　

Interactive Communication finally allows the revolution

to commence.

The revolution against one-size fits all advertising; the bland

all-knowing corporate voice, the lack lustre politicians busily furnishing their

own nests from our money. The fact of the matter is your customers, you,

me and everybody else, do not trust business. We find it highly insulting to

be treated this way and we mistrust you in numbers far greater than you or your

advertising/marketing people allow for. Dialogue, two-way conversations,

would start to change these hostile attitudes. You really do need to commence

interactive events - right now. And you can do so in existing media.

Before I go on, I must emphasise that on no account let your Advertising

Agency tempt you into spending big bucks on the Web. Already the

Advertising-as-Usual crowd is pouring billions into the Web, however be warned,

as they said in the "Cluetrain Manifesto", "So you advertise on the Internet¦so

what"? If you think you are wasting money on Advertising-as-Usual be very

careful. The Internet, possibly is a bigger waste of money than

Advertising-as-Usual, and, as we all know, right now that is one Mother of a

huge waste of money! "Why?" you may ask "has it all changed from the

safe secure way of marketing in the past". Simply put,

Advertising-as-Usual, together with its handmaiden Broadcasting-as-Usual have

treated us with too much contempt. According to a recent article in the

Times, TV executives commonly think of viewers' phone revenue as "moron tax".

And this attitude of utter contempt pervades the executives of advertising and

Broadcast-as-Usual, and expresses itself in all the offerings of a rip-off

culture, from government to TV companies. And bear in mind that

Advertising-as-Usual and Broadcast-as-Usual hold Clients in great contempt as

well. They rejoice in removing large chunks of your Marketing Budgets, to then

waste them in rip-off ventures that only worsen the publics' contempt for you,so

in effect they are spending your money to get you into a ever worsening

situation. Trust is a must have asset. You now must harness

interactive communication to get the trust, and results, because if you don't

somebody else will and they, in turn, will drive you out of business. Trust based relationship

lies between the extremes of command and control and empowerment in business.

Interactive marketing communication, using existing media, is a practical way of reaching

out and building up a powerful relationship, and trust, with every single person you need to

make your business successful...

While we in the West tries to shore up the ruins of Marketing, nobody

 

appears to want to reshape it The financial crisis has transformed the global marketing world and, at the same time, discredited many of the ideas regarding advertising, marketing, consumers and society that were taken for granted in the pre-crisis decades.  Here nobody appears to see the crisis as an opportunity to build a new form of capitalism. Nobody seems to see that the future can be  and most certainly should be better than the past. Without a doubt the institutions discredited by the crisis can be replaced with something better, not merely patched up and restored. Corporations see the crisis entirely as a threat to established ways of life and modes of thinking. Nobody is presenting a vision, or even a credible thought, about how the crisis could produce a better tomorrow. The best that  has been offered is a promise to clear up the mess created by previous  corporations.  Without a doubt the new forms of advertising and marketing that must emerge from the crisis must be very different from the systems that were so badlydamaged in the early 1980. The transformation will not just be a matter of rewriting some rules or replacing some incompetent people. It will mean changing the relationship between markets and consumers that has defined each successive version of marketing. It is time to engage with citizens' anxieties about the profound problems of pre-crisis marketing and advertising suddenly  revealed in 2008, the creation of an over informed society, clutter, lack of accountability, the Internet,Social Media and so on. Like all those packaged-upbundles of bad debt, contemporary advertising has no fundamental value. It was misplaced faith in future economic growth that drove up the values of 30- second TV commercials! The Clients spent so much money on advertising because they believed that they were living in the best of times and that it wasall just a one way street - upwards! We all now know all this wasn't true!

It can be said with confidence that Interactive Communication,

properly executed, will emerge as the New Advertising and is proven to be far more effective. It allows Clients to save huge amounts of money, it will also allow Clients to make very accurate decisions upon where to position their brand(s) in fact it will allow Clients to emerge highly successful and arguably healthier than ever before!

Interactive is a bold call for a new Advertising. The phrase "In the Clients interest" so out of fashion for a long time has returned and Clients can only benefit from it!

It also frees the best marketing people to abandon their claim that "We have the best creativity" Interactive Communication proves to Clients the utter banality of that claim, Creativity has never been the sole criterion for the success, or otherwise, of marketing communication.

Advertising-as-usual is long on self-promotion and back stabbing and very short on talent & personal responsibility. Advertising-as-usual is so conservative that it lacks entrepreneurial talent and it will only be through new ideas and new companies that marketing will pull through from from their travails.

However that does not mean that you should rush onto Social Media - all things in moderation wont hurt you, Social Media, properly executed, belongs in the media mix! However the problem is that we are in this evolutionary period, nothing is factually based, it's all new with the sole exception of interactive communication!

Barriers to Great Advertising

Advertising testing could provide a reliable feedback loop and lead to much better advertising, but many obstacles stand in the way. The first great barrier to better advertising is self-delusion. Most of us believe, in our heart-of-hearts, that we know what good advertising is and that there is no need for any kind of independent, objective evaluation. Agencies and clients alike often think that they know how to create and judge good advertising. Besides, once agencies and clients start to fall in love with the new creative, they quickly lose interest in any objective evaluation. No need for advertising testing. Case closed.

Strangely, after 40 years of testing advertising, we cannot tell you if a commercial is any good or not, just by viewing it. Sure, we have opinions, but they are almost always wrong. In our experience, advertising agencies and their clients are just as inept at judging advertising as we are. It seems that none of us is smart enough to see advertising through the eyes of the target audience, based purely on our own judgment.

A second barrier to better advertising is the belief that sales performance will tell if the advertising is working. Unless the sales response to the advertising is immediate and overwhelming, it is almost impossible to use sales data to judge the effectiveness of the advertising. So many variables are beyond our control, as noted, that it’s impossible to isolate the effects of media advertising alone. Moreover, some advertising works in a few weeks, while other advertising might take many months to show positive effects, and this delayed response can confound our efforts to read the sales data. Also, advertising often has short-term effects that sales data might reflect, and long-term (years later) effects that most of us might easily overlook in subsequent sales data. Because of these limitations, sales data tends to be confusing and unreliable as an indicator of advertising effectiveness.

　

The suits come to Social Media. Now that’s the kiss of death!


Advertising Agencies, having all but destroyed a perfectly good Old Media are set to do the same with Social Media!
In the fickle world of online chatter, yesterday’s achingly fashionable meeting points are rapidly acquiring the appearance of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s’ headquarters.
Already Twitter, becoming bogged down with fake PR tweets as well as fake advertising tweets, so much so that already the kids dismiss it as tired! And are moving on.
As soon as the buzz of innovation starts to fade the "cool" but influential people move on quicker than you can send a tweet.
As witness by the Old Media experience, essentially Commercial Television, Advertising Agencies are loath to change a medium that was to them, a money-spinner. Despite the fact that it was non-accountable. Now they are deserting terrestrial TV without even realizing that they could have made it far more effective & accountable, but they didn't understand the word "communication".
And now Agencies are rushing onto Social Media ignoring the fact that, as in the past, people don’t want their advertising in whatever form. The difference here is that they can easily move away from advertising in whatever guise, you have only to look at the experience of Second Life, that was to be advertising’s salvation. That’s why the early adopters have moved on!

CHECK OUT THE AGENCY CREDENTIALS & MAKE SURE THAT THEY REALLY UNDERSTAND THE WORD "COMMUNICATION

The Worst Possible Cure!

Every day you're exposed to more than four hours of media. Most of it is optimized to interrupt what you're doing. And it's getting increasingly harder and harder to find a little peace and quiet. The ironic thing is that marketers

have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're interrupting us even more!

Use Interactive Marketing Communication and solve all your communications problems in one go...plus becoming totally accountable and cut clutter - immediately!

　

Better Marketing Without Reform? - Forget it

The current state of Marketing is such that the need for change and "New Models" are desperately needed.

The trouble is the "New Models" will not prove to be financially sustainable without substantially changing the way advertising and media services are organised. The first thing we must do to start to tackle the problem is to embrace our lack of knowledge about the process of communication. We must allow outside organisations to question the fundamental ideas that shape current advertising. We must allow them to innovate and keep the money saved through innovation. That way there is a chance that advertising and marketing will keep improving without costing more. One thing is for sure. We can't carry on as we are.

Pretending that without reform our money will go further. This is definitely the time for creative innovation in Marketing, not the ridgid belief that Marketing and Advertising can still show us all the answers to our problems – it never has and it never will.

Our only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the Marketing values we have lived by in the past 30 years. Our future depends not on whether we get through this, but how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes.

So just when are we going to prick our bubble of denial?

Because the Advertising and Marketing world is living in a world of denial. They use rhetoric that blurs their perceptions and have become addicted to the world view it represents
At the same time reinforcing themselves by a stream of cheery models engaged in consumption and leisure, they shuttle from workstation to mall, increasingly insulated by a media consensus that leaves out the rest of the world. We have had a band of denial built around ourselves, thus this belief cost us the capacity to self-correct.

Thus this delusional self-image is finally catching up with us. And make no mistake marketing will benefit hugely when reality breaks through.

　

　

Interactive Communication, properly executed,

provides a win-win-win scenario for all participating parties.

For the first time in the history of commercial communication, participating parties can

expect to benefit from appearing in interactive communications

"Events".

For communication to be successful mutual self- interest has to

be satisfied. Consumers need Interactive Communication. People desire to be taken account of, to

affect change, learn and personalise their relationships with their environment. There are a

phenomenal number of reasons which cause people to interact, which go far

beyond just giving them things. When people participate in interactive

marketing communication "Events" they are told that their efforts and feedback

are of positive help to the advertisers. Moreover, by participating, they then

learn and understand the message from the advertiser, personalise their

relationship with the advertiser and their products (or services). The

benefits for participating advertisers? For the first time advertising

becomes totally accountable with payment by results only.

Interactive communication provides intelligent sales through feedback and involvement. Thus

allowing the building of intelligent databanks. Thus the interactive

Medium becomes accountable and more effective. By the very nature of

interactive "Events" the audience are captivated by the technique.

Interaction alters the way viewers/readers perceive advertising, instead of being viewed as

interruption your advertising becomes a pleasurable and meaningful source of

information. There is a substantial increase in the reading/viewing figures and

it readily counters zapping.

　

　

Consumers are deaf to the babble of the advertising class.

It is true to say that all the advertising in the world won't bring the customers back!

Spending a huge fortune on TV advertising?

Rest assured these days your advertising slipped into the huge gulf of

mistrust, disbelief and total lack of interest that now separates the

Advertising Class from everybody else. This gulf is so full of disbelieved

advertising and ignored blogs,sales promotion gimmicks,direct marketing and

irrelevant banners/radio commercials.

The cynicism about advertising is so pervasive that it embraces almost all

marketing activity. Use a statistic? It's a lie. This cynicism extends to

the media, all advertising is seen as fiction inside an untruth wrapped in a piece

of spin! Most advertising proceeds as if there was still a reasonable degree

of trust. As if the message was still getting through, still be listened to,

still being weighed up. It must be hard to be in Advertising and to carry on if

the truth were faced.

For example, the rubbish that the food industry has fed people for decades,

along with its (literally) toxic products and the lies and omissions that it has

disseminated, well now is the time to challenge this concerted project of

misinformation, corruption and silence together with the programme to keep

people as ignorant as possible about factory farming. Myths trotted out

regularly.

The incredible plethora of choices consumers now possess has a downside, and

it's called exhaustion. An overwhelming number of possibilities complicates

every buying decision. Add to that all the other more baroque aspects of modern

life, such as two-income households, frequent divorce.

and remarriage and blending of increasing traffic,

shortening news cycles, and 100 channels of cable television, and you wind up

with a consumer group that feels very over loaded and harassed.

Stand back. Stop thinking like the operator and start thinking like a

customer. Better, talk to real customers. Or, better still, to real

non-customers. What do they want? What is missing for them? Customer focus is

important all the time, and is one of the main advantages that small firms enjoy

over their apparently stronger and more profitable larger rivals. In good

economic times, it's almost inevitable that, for big companies, the needs of

customers will drop down the list of corporate priorities, to some degree. This

creates an opportunity for small firms with a distinctive customer offering to

move in and clean up.

　

　

It is refreshing to hear more discussion around the shortcomings...

of social media rather than the constant proselytizing of a still baby-fresh and

misunderstood communication channel. However, possibly a more constructive way

of thinking about those shortcomings is to consider the growing gap in

expectations of what social media can and should achieve for a brand.

The IBM Institute of Business Value just published a study

comparing the differing perceptions of business leaders and consumers regarding

social sites. The most interesting find from the study was the ironic business

misperception that consumer's would rank discounts and purchase opportunities at

the bottom of their list of reasons to engage with a company's social site. It

actually ranks at the top of their list.

Companies need to design experiences that deliver tangible value in return

for customers' time, attention, endorsement and data. -IBM Institute of

Business Value.

Time and attention really are the currencies of our customers. Those expenses

are precious for them and they want something in return for it. Simply providing

conversation's will never be enough. No brand is interesting enough to entice

just by being available. Although the social space is cheaper, quicker, and

ever-present, a brand still needs to provide those nuggets of material value to

drive significant engagement.

And Interactive Communication does all that...and more! To discover more contact:

Paul Ashby on (UK) 01934 620047 or paulashby40@yahoo.com. Cell 'phone 07586259605.

If you're in the business of selling stuff,

 according to one big-time research firm social media marketing is a waste of your time and money.

Forrester Research has released a report recently that concludes...

"Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers".

While the hype around social networks as a driver of influence in eCommerce

continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that

social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of

sales for either new or repeat buyers. In fact, fewer than 1% of transactions

for both new and repeat shoppers could be traced back to trackable social

links. Now think about this for a minute. This study is about

the influence of social media on sales. If the influence on sales is "barely negligible" can you

imagine the influence on retail sales (which account for about 94% of

everything sold?) What's below barely negligible? Strongly negligible?

The study goes on to say...

The reality is that even the most popular social image-sharing sites (like Pinterest) have failed to

move the needle with respect to sales for most retail sites. To tell you the truth, even I

was a little shocked reading about this study. There aren't too many people in

the ad world who are more skeptical about the magical power of social media

marketing than I am. But I thought the truth probably fell somewhere between

"magic" and "barely negligible." !! However there is one technique that continues to move the

needle dramatically and that is Interactive Marketing Communication...properly executed for

course!

Consumers see advertising and marketing as unbelievable...

... and certainly undignified. Having worked around the world over many years you cannot help wondering if society is changing in ways that are more than economic. It would
appear that advertising and marketing is losing its legitimacy .
The myopic search for profit and short term advantages has created a
corporate oligarchy whose interests are largely inimical to the average
consumer. Smoke and mirrors have, for too long, been a substitute for good old
fashioned marketing. All the while the mythology of marketing and
advertising, as institutions of enterprise, of meritocracy and opportunity, as
somewhere that didn't work like anywhere else is being compromised. Meanwhile
we seem to be forgetting the convictions that made Marketing and Advertising
great.
The rot began when we chose never to take heed of Professor Ehrenberg's
statements on advertising effectiveness! Because nothing has changed despite all
the ballyhoo about Social Media, Facebook et al. Wherever ads appear,
especially on Social Media, Ehrenberg's resolute focus on the facts " what data
actually tells us " led him to challenge many a marketing bandwagon such as
˜loyalty. You may wish to improve the brand's performance by improving customer retention, he observed, but without a higher market penetration it just won't happen. His work on advertising effectiveness was equally challenging. He argued convincingly that there was no evidence that advertising persuades anybody to do anything; advertising can only ever be a ˜weak" force that improves brand recognition and/or jogs consumers memories. Ehrenberg's uncompromising insistence on staying only with the facts is probably why his work was so studiously ignored by so many sections of the marketing community. The consequences of this has been far more lasting than any recession could ever be.
Be brutally honest, do you have any idea how advertising works? How
advertising got itself into its present mess. No? Perhaps you console yourself
with the thought that it doesn't matter that you don't have a clue because there
are plenty of smart marketing people out there who do. Well, here's the tricky
part. Yes, those smart marketing people do indeed have a shrewd prescription on
how to steer the world out of marketing chaos. The bad news is, they're not
all the same prescription. In fact they are different prescriptions. Very
different.

Does personalization have to be limited to the offline world?

Why does personal service have to be limited to the offline world?

Well, leading Interactive marketing expert, Paul Ashby (Shoppers' Voice)

can show you that it doesn't. Shoppers' Voice has been

designed to help digital and marketing professionals increase the effectiveness

of all their marketing channels through more relevant interactions with individuals.

Paul Ashby can show you the main principles and benefits of personalisation, show

examples from leading companies using it successfully and give practical advice

on how companies can develop their own personalisation strategies.

If you're looking to improve customer engagement, repeat purchase behaviour

and encourage deeper interaction across all your marketing, then you

should talk to Paul Ashby (01934 620047) or paulashby40@yahoo.com

Who's running your Organization?

Your customers, that’s who!

　

Or should be!

　

So don’t you think that you ought to start a regular dialogue with him or

her, as the case may be?

　

The word empowerment is a very overused word. However in the near future the primary strategic marketing communications battle will be to see who goes furthest in empowering their customers.

To empower your customers you will have to:
1. Provide them with far more information than you currently do.
2. Allow them to make decisions about you and your company together with your resources.
3. Give them plenty of choice.
4. Give them the perception of control!
5. Allow them to feel that they are running your organisation!

Because anything that tightens your relationships with an existing customer increases the revenue you get from your customer.

And the only form of communication that can do all the above so that you do tighten your grip on your customer is….interactive communication!

Because interactive communication allows you to have an ongoing debate with your customers and your prospects, make regular interactive conversations available where they can debate not only about your products and services but the very soul of your company. Because that will be much more powerful than just putting your advertisement on television (or wherever) or I’m going to sell my goods in Tesco (or wherever).

Then, when you get asked, "Who’s running your business?" you can honestly reply, "My customers through genuine interactive programmes!" and earn major brownie points!

The All Powerful Marketiing Guru is Just a Myth!

The all powerful Marketing Guru is based upon the complete fallacy that only he knows how to market products/services...and that advertising works.

And that amazinglngly patronising idea is based upon the fact that the public are dupes who digest all advertising...and than act upon it! This is not true now and never has been.

The foundation myth of marketing potency is the silly claim, attributed to many people, that "half my advertising works, I don't know which half"

The claim is both tasteless and factually wrong.

The idea that advertising works (together with Marketing) is only believed by people who work for advertising/marketing agencies, people active in corporations, and people who work in all forms of media, and now digital media, Facebook et al.

You can see this silliness incarnate in magazines like Campaign and Marketing week after week.

Most consumers resent the insinuation that they, along with all the rest of us, are mere puppets.

It is now time to accept that the end of Marketing and Advertising is here and that there are far more effective solutions to marketing, programmes. Programmes that will be totally transparent and will also allow Clients to half their current bloated marketing budgets and be twice (or more) as effective. For example, Interactive Marketing Communicatiom.

Click Fraud

Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising.

He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers

rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid

Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur

believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when

prospective customers click on your ads.

Now, Fleischmann's faith has been shaken. Over the past three years, he

has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as

Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. This seemed strange, since MostChoice steers

customers to insurance and mortgage brokers only in the U.S

Fleischmann is a victim of click fraud: a dizzying collection of scams and

deceptions that inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all

sizes. The spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet's

advertising gold mine and is the most nettlesome question facing Google and

Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold.

The growing ranks of businesspeople worried about click fraud typically

have no complaint about versions of their ads that appear on actual Google or

Yahoo Web pages, often next to search results. The trouble arises when the

Internet giants boost their profits by recycling ads to millions of other sites,

ranging from the familiar, such as cnn.com, to dummy Web addresses like

insurance1472.com, which display lists of ads and little if anything else. When

somebody clicks on these recycled ads, marketers such as MostChoice get billed,

sometimes even if the clicks appear to come from Mongolia. Google or Yahoo then

share the revenue with a daisy chain of Web site hosts and operators. A penny or

so even trickles down to the lowly clickers. That means Google and Yahoo at

times passively profit from click fraud and, in theory, have an incentive to

tolerate it. So do smaller search engines and marketing networks that similarly

recycle ads.

SLIPPING CONFIDENCE

Google and Yahoo say they filter out most questionable clicks and either

don't charge for them or reimburse advertisers that have been wrongly billed.

That confidence may be slipping. A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a

thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players,

making detection difficult. "Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of

members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and

dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits

automatically and anonymously. Participants from Kentucky to China speak of

making from $25 to several thousand dollars a month apiece, cash they wouldn't

receive if Google and Yahoo were as successful at blocking fraud as they

claim. "It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out

of your wallet," says David Struck. He and his wife, Renee, both 35, say they

dabbled in click fraud last year, making more than $5,000 in four months.

Employing a common scheme, the McGregor (Minn.) couple set up dummy Web sites

filled with nothing but recycled Google and Yahoo advertisements. Then they paid

others small amounts to visit the sites, where it was understood they would

click away on the ads, says David Struck. It was "way too easy," he adds.

Gradually, he says, he and his wife began to realize they were cheating

unwitting advertisers, so they stopped. "Whatever Google and Yahoo are doing [to

stop fraud], it's not having much of an effect," he says.

Spending on Internet ads is growing faster than any other sector of the

advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to

$29 billion in 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to researcher eMarketer Inc.

About half of these dollars are going into deals requiring advertisers to pay by

the click. Most other Internet ads are priced according to "impressions," or how

many people view them.

Google and Yahoo are grabbing billions of dollars once collected by

traditional print and broadcast outlets, based partly on the assumption that

clicks are a reliable, quantifiable measure of consumer interest that the older

media simply can't match. But the huge influx of cash for online ads has

attracted armies of con artists whose activities are eroding that crucial

assumption and could eat into the optimistic expectations for online

advertising. (Advertisers generally don't grumble about fraudulent clicks coming

from the Web sites of traditional media outlets. But there are growing concerns

about these media sites exaggerating how many visitors they have -- the online

version of inflating circulation.)

Most academics and consultants who study online advertising estimate that

10% to 15% of ad clicks are fake, representing roughly $1 billion in annual

billings. Usually the search engines divide these proceeds with several players:

First, there are intermediaries known as "domain parking" companies, to which

the search engines redistribute their ads. Domain parkers host "parked" Web

sites, many of which are those dummy sites containing only ads. Cheats who own

parked sites obtain search-engine ads from the domain parkers and arrange for

the ads to be clicked on, triggering bills to advertisers. In all, $300 million

to $500 million a year could be flowing to the click-fraud

　

CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR BRAND IS ABOUT TO BECOME OBSOLETE

Blockbuster had it all figured out. Kodak was America's favorite company. Tower Records was the

 place to be. Cunard was the fastest way to travel. Alas, no more. Each of these companies were

blindsided by innovation. In the blink of an eye, their entire reason for being disappeared into thin air.

Every day companies new and old, small and large, start down the path to obsolescence. Some have

no idea that they are in trouble, others are fully aware and are begging for help. It's a challenge that

can only be addressed by changing culture and behavior, and by a mix of traditional and Interactive

thinking.

1)Identify the opportunity (brand, consumer, behavior, competition)

2)Convince the right people that they have a problem (get thee to

the CEO)

3)Build things for consumers and internal audiences (useful things)

Interactive Communication, properly executed will train people to think differently about how they

approach problems, to look at fixing the big picture instead of tactical problems, and to

see the opportunity in change

Want to discover more? Contact paulashby40@yahoo.com

YOU CALL THIS WORKING?

Why Traditional Interruption-Based Advertising Doesn't Work Anymore!

Traditional advertising doesn't work well anymore for a

very simple reason - there's too much of it. There are too many companies

interrupting consumers to try and sell them something. There's so much ad

clutter and noise today that the latest studies show the majority of consumers

ignore companies that bother them with too much advertising. In addition, techonolgy provides

consumers with every manner of ad blockers, including TiVo, VCRs and DVD recorders, to

cable and satellite TV, to MP3 players and downloadable music, and now satellite

radio. Consumers are paying billions to AVOID ADVERTISING, which is why they

like it even less if you actually manage to break through and interrupt what

they are doing.

But we can change all that and, at the same time save you heaps on your highly expensive marketing budget.
Contact: paulashby40@yahoo.com