Free... As In Doughnuts

Free... As In Doughnuts

I know a guy who spends hours looking for illegal MP3s to avoid paying $.99

on iTunes. Some people are likely to prefer watching ads to paying for content

despite all the drawbacks. The point is not that advertising is

bad for everyone in every situation. But it is unfortunate that advertising is

so often seen as the best or only way to make money from digital wares.

It's worth remembering that ad-financed television came to the fore at a time

when no alternative would have been feasible. The technical challenges of the

day involved getting a decent picture on a 17" CRT without standing next to the set holding the antenna all evening. Subscription or pay-per-view models were not in the cards. Now we have the technology to meter and charge for content in many new ways, but we've gotten into the habit of expecting TV shows to be free.

One of the quirks of human psychology is that, once we get used to free doughnuts, we are enraged

by the idea that we might have to pay for them.

If we succumb willingly to disfigured television shows, psychological

manipulation and higher prices on SUVs and shampoo so that we can avoid paying a

few dollars for entertainment and internet services, we have no one to blame but

ourselves. When the most frightening hoax imaginable is that Facebook

will start charging users, we can hardly blame them for slathering more and

more lucrative ads onto their website. It would be fantastic if creative types

were to look for less intrusive ways of financing their work. But that is

unlikely to happen until consumers start to realize that free is sometimes the

most expensive price of all. And best told by interactive communication!

The biggest piece of empirical research ever conducted on consumers’

The biggest piece of empirical research ever conducted on consumers’ digital behaviour and their attitudes to social media from the world’s biggest market research company, you would have thought, would create quite a lot of buzz. After all, 72,000 consumers interviewed across 60 countries is quite a sample. Yet coverage of the report and its key findings was almost non-existent. Blink and you missed it.

One look inside the Digital Life report, however, explains the lack of attention. Unlike the overly optimistic and wildly out of touch proclamations of the social media industry and those that cover it, the TNS study was based on empirical data. And as a result, it presented a much more even-handed and objective view of the digital landscape than most marketers are comfortable accepting or forwarding to their peers.

For example, the report concludes that the majority of consumers in developed markets do not want to engage with brands via social media. In the UK, that proportion was at its highest with 61% of consumers stating they do not see social media as a place they want to interact with brands. That’s a bummer for every brand manager who spouts the usual crap about "having a conversation with the consumer", because almost two-thirds of their consumers aren’t interested in talking to them.

But these facts were probably not communicated to you because they do not fit the ideology that the marketing industry is attempting to propagate when it comes to social media. - the hegemonic forces of marketing prefer to tell a story of new apps and bold Facebook strategies rather than a more fair approach. But what also emerged from the data was clear evidence of the lack of credibility or engagement that most brands can expect from their forays into social media. A spokesman for TNS said "Many brands have recognised the vast potential audiences available to them on social networks; however, they are failing to understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and brand presence needs to be proportionate and justified."

Wise is the marketer who uses data to assess the situation. In all the hullabaloo, has anyone considered that the term social media has no place for brands within its definition? ’Social media’ literally means the communication channels that exist between people. Not between brands.

But like every medium before it, brands try to invade that space anyway. And social media, like every other medium before it, is already suffering from clutter as a result. As more brands attempt to grab attention and start social media conversations with disinterested consumers, more of them will switch off.

Our form of interactive communication...

... dramatically alters the way the viewers perceive your commercials, instead of being seen as an interruption the commercials now become a meaningful source of information (a form of programming) and thus are watched in a totally different way.

Presenting advertising within this format allows the most dramatic evolution of advertising itself. This renaissance in this period of the ongoing history of advertising will be known as advertising by true, accurate, more predictable, instant and measurable results.

Clients will pay only by results. The interactive nature of the new technology will allow InteractiveTV to measure the results and present these results as a post-evaluation of their participation. Clients will then pay for participation based upon these evaluations.Contact Paul Ashby on Tel: 01934 620047 or paulasyby40@yahoo.com

Interactive Marketing Communication - the ONLY Low-cost marketing method!

Small businesses have limited budgets but big ideas, so they have discovered the secret to making a little go a long way. By turning to Interactive Marketing Communication marketing methods, these businesses yield amazing results.

"Interactive Marketing helps smaller business expand their market reach and compete on a level playing field with all competitors." Paul Ashby, the Interactive Marketing Guru summarises research results from small business marketers who are capitalising on the effectiveness of Interactive Marketing Communication. Paul Ashby, Tel: 01934 620047 or paulashby40@yahoo.com

Whether you interpret the market turbulence...

　


...as a source of risk or opportunity, it's inevitable that it creates pressure on marketers.

Interactive Marketing Communication, properly structured, is designed to help marketers develop future-proof strategies and plans, contact the Interactive Guru, Paul Ashby, 01934 620047 or paulashby40@yahoo.com to discover the building blocks of marketing success for 2013 and beyond.

Looking at solutions to some of the biggest challenges that today's marketing professionals face,  share invaluable experiences on:

Planning, measurement and ROI: get to grips with a clear and commercially sound framework for measuring and evaluating marketing performance and ROI.
Joining the digital revolution with confidence: explore how to join up campaigns across multiple channels and integrate digital throughout the marketing mix.
Closing the gap between promise and reality: discover how to deliver a consistent customer experience and align your business around common brand value.
Only on Interactive Marketing Communication!

Failure Of Web Advertising

Failure Of Web Advertising

We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon

and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure.

While the web itself has been a massive success (influencing virtually every

aspect of our lives) advertising on the web is mostly a bad joke.

Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of

powerful consumer-facing brands.The only truly powerful brands I can

think of that web advertising has created are native web brands like Google,

Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook. It's as if the only brands television was good at

creating were CBS, NBC and ABC.After 15 years, can anyone name even

ten serious non-native consumer-facing brands that have been created

primarily by web advertising? Is there a brand of coffee, butter, beer, bread,

chicken, gasoline, soda, peanut butter, dog food, milk, tires, potato chips,

life insurance, lawn mowers...don't make me go on, you get the point...that has

been built primarily by web advertising? Display advertising is a joke.

Remember just a few years ago when they were selling us banner ads on the

promise that "interactivity" would make these ads so much more efficient than

traditional ads? Then they started measuring them and found that fewer than 2

people in a thousand were clicking. Oops.Now they're making the same

lame "branding" argument for online display ads they made against

traditional print ads. However armed with the proper understanding of the meaning of interaction,

properly executed, the web can be made to achieve everthing you have ever wanted!

THE NEXT BIG THING...

...FLOGS

　

Be careful what you believe on the internet: there’s a growing chance that you re being hoaxed by a cynical PR firm. Just as the blogging explosion was teaching us about "vlogs" (video bloggs) and "moblogs" (mobile blogs), along comes yet another trend that is far more pernicious.

A "flog" is a fake weblog that purports to chronicle an ordinary consumer’s passion for a business or a product, typcally without the company behind it declaring an interest. It is a scandalously dishonest practice.

Take Laura and Jim, an ordinary couple who recently drove a camper van across America and stopped over for free each night at their nearest Wal-Mart car park. Their likeably amateurish travel journal, Wal-Marting across America, chronicled all the decent, hard working Wal-Mart employees they encountered during their stopovers, all of whom seemed to have been stories about the company.

Lo and behold, the couple turned out to be a professional paid by Wal-Mart’s PR firm, Edelman, and folksy Jim was revealed to be a professional Washington Post photographer. Last month, Laura used the blog to come clean, admitting that she "should have done a better job" telling her story.

Since then, Edelman’s fingerprints have been found all over other related flogs. Working Families For Wal-Mart claims to be a grassroots advocacy group focusing on "the positive contribution of Wal-Mart to working families"; the PaidCritics.com blog sets out to "expose" union employees paid to "smear" the retail chain. Typical postings attack activists for denying "working families" cheap Wal-Mart prescriptions of half-price baby food.

Use Interactive Marketing Communication and know exactly what your getting!

The need for Interactive Marketing Communication

　

　
Put simply, because there is a human desire for interaction. We have created a media society during the past 40 or 50 years where there is an extraordinary reduction in interaction because of the one-way and more passive form of information retrieval that exists.

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 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).

Consumers tend to filter out information they do not want to hear and this alters the effectiveness of advertising in quite a dramatic way. The purchaser’s decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of anxiety. The worry that perhaps the purchase decision was not the best or right one. In order to minimise this anxiety the purchaser seeks to reinforce his choice and begins to take more notice of his chosen product’s advertising. And, at the same time, the purchaser deliberately suppresses data, which might challenge his decision by ignoring the advertising of competitive brands.

People are often loyal to a brand simply because they do not want to readdress a decision. The opportunity to screen out undesired data always exists when media advertisements have to stand on their own and fight for attention.

Interactive Communication takes the consumer through the barrier of not wanting to address change; and this is the ultimate market the advertiser is after – the people who use his competitors’ products.

Now the consumer can say ‘Yes, I will change my behaviour and I have a very good reason or series of reasons why", and have a well-informed opinion or image in mind.

If someone goes into a product purchase decision with a very specific image of the product and its reason to exist and why they have decided those reasons are worth its purchase, the test in reality, the use of the product, will tend to confirm that premise, and therefore conversion will be enormously enhanced.

Interactive Marketing Communication turns passive advertising into active advertising and actually alters behaviour during the communication and learning process.

Interactive Marketing Communication increases sale.

And there’s more!

It enhances relationships and dramatically improves consumer knowledge, understanding and loyalty.
1. Strong Company or Brand Values.

To be effective communication has to be single minded in choosing a specific proposition which by definition cannot appeal to all. Yet every product, service or retail outlet can offer several attractive benefits and in some cases these can be numerous. Interactive Communication presents consumers with a ‘menu’ of powerful benefits, both rational and emotional, and asks them to choose the one which they find most relevant and appealing to them.

This allows them: -

a) Personalise their relationship with the communicator.

b. To absorb and retain the majority – or even all – of those extra benefits while making their choice.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION!

With corporations under increased pressure to show that every dollar they spend delivers results, marketing expenditures are now being held to the same level of accountability as other investments.

Clients expect to see detailed, quantifiable results for their marketing and advertising efforts that demonstrate a positive return on their investments.They want to know which elements of their marketing plan helped achieve their goals in the most efficient manner—and which did not—and be able to allocate their budgets on an ongoing basis accordingly.

This corporate attitude change comes just at a moment in time when advertisers face major challenges because:

Consumers are more difficult to reach than ever.

Reasons include:

Media options available to consumers have increased. Technologies that have been designed to suit consumers’ growing desire to be in control of what they see and hear have given consumers

the option to reject advertising messages.To determine what will yield the best results in planning their advertising efforts, advertisers and their agencies turn to research and analytic tools more and more to guide them in making decisions. However, the multitude of analytic options has led to confusion about what constitutes accountability and how to measure it.

With Interactive Communication, properly executed, this confusion ends and proper accountably exists. One exposure to an Interactive Programme is far more effective than "frequency" and allows Clients to cut, substantially, their heavy marketing expediture (s).

The power of collective intelligence

Yahoo music ratings, Google PageRank, MySpace friends, Netflex user reviews – these are all manifestations of the wisdom of the crowd. Millions of regular people are the new tastemakers. Some of them act as individuals, others are parts of groups organised around shared interests, and still others are simply herds of consumers automatically tracked by software watching their every behaviour. For the first time in history, we’re able to measure the consumption patterns, inclinations and tastes of an entire market of consumers in real time and just as quickly adjust to the market to reflect them. These new tastemakers aren’t a super-elite of people cooler than us, they are us

We are leaving the Information Age and entering the Recommendation Age. Today information is ridiculously easy to get you practically trip over it on the street. Information gathering is no longer the issue – making smart decisions based on the information is now the trick .

Negative consumer attitudes toward advertising...

 ... "remain the single biggest barrier to improving return on investment for marketing spending. Until we get better at engaging consumers, they're going to continue to push back and resist what advertisers are trying to deliver to them.

Brands ‘wasting time and money’ on misguided digital strategies, study

UK social media users are among the most resistant consumers in the world towards brands invading their personal space, according to a new study, which reflects how businesses are wasting time and money trying to reach people online who, in all likelihood, probably aren’t listening.

Data revealed by TNS Digital Life found that 61% of UK consumers do not want to engage with brands in their social networks, a figure that is slightly above average (57%) from other developed markets studied.

In stark contrast, fast-growing markets, mainly across Asia, South America and Africa, are much more open to brands online. About 60% of consumers there see social networks as a good place to learn about brands.

In Europe, however, the numbers seem bleak in comparisonth TNS suggests that misguided digital strategies are generating ‘mountains of digital waste,’ from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no one reads.

This is being combined with ever-increasing content produced by consumers – the study shows 47% of digital consumers now comment about brands online.

The result is huge volumes of noise, which is polluting the digital world and making it harder for brands to be heard – presenting a major challenge for businesses trying to enter into dialogue with consumers online.

The study also sheds some light on why people do engage with brands online. More often than not, motivations of online commentators can be self-serving. 61% of consumers are driven to engage with brands online by a promotion or special offer.

About 46% of consumers motivated to post comments on companies do so for the simple desire to impart advice, while more people like to praise than complain online (13% v 10%).

According to marketing consultant, Richard Hillgrove the problem for many brands is the message.

“People in the UK don’t want obvious messages. It’s the same way Britain has largely rejected product placement on television. We don’t like things ‘in our face’ – the Americans don’t seem to mind.”

Pepsi Proves You Can Give Away Money

An anonymous blog however worth repeating here

I know I'm like totally old school and out of it and a big old dinosaur, but I thought marketing was supposed to be about selling stuff. Silly me.

So wasn't I all red-in-the-face and feeling like a dork when I read an interview in BrandWeek with Pepsi's marketing director. The interview was about their much ballyhooed "Refresh Project" -- which, in my churlish opinion is a big cynical gimmick to get some marketing leverage by giving away 20 million dollars to people with nice ideas.

Now, before you go calling me an ogre, I am all in favour of giving money to help people and communities. I even do a fair bit of it myself.

The difference between Pepsi and me, however, is that I don't go around beating my chest about it. I do it because I think it's the right thing to do.

...Call me cynical, but to me altruism loses its lustre when it seeks bouquets.

Pepsi is brazenly using their "Refresh" project for the purpose of buying their way into social media stardom and "creating buzz on social networks." Double yuk...

The thing that interested me most about the interview was that it focused on the marketing effectiveness of the campaign without once mentioning the word "sales."

"The success has been overwhelming. We have more than doubled our Facebook fans since we started the campaign. We have more than 24,000 Twitter fans"

Now here's the thing. If you're going to give away 20 million dollars to help people and communities, then god bless you...

On the other hand, if you're doing it to promote sales, then don't pretend you're Mother Teresa.

And if you're just doing it to attract Facebook friends and Twitter followers, then you're seriously demented.


This is probably the most expensive social media effort ever. I'm very curious to know what effect it will have on sales. So far all it's proven to me is that if you want to give away money, you can.

Yeah, the success was "overwhelming." I wonder what universe she is living in? I wonder how many Facebook fans it takes to cover a loss of 350 million dollars?

It was just a few months ago that the Pepsi marketing team was taking self-congratulatory victory laps at digital marketing whack-a-thons. Having once worked on the Pepsi business, I would like to give these people a little advice: Stay as far away as you possibly can from the next bottlers'

 Do visit Shopper's Voice and solve all your marketing communications in one fell swoop.   Contact: Paul Ashby on (0044) 01934 620047, visit http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com or email Paul on paulashby40@yahoo.com

The largest advertiser in the world for the past fifty years

 has watched its market share decline steadily for the past thirty years. (General Motors)

 

* One advertiser with a rock steady level of sales spent $50 million a year for five years to increase sales.  Sales rose the first year but fell back to pre-advertising levels by the third year. (Raisin Advisory Board)

 

* One advertiser faced with steadily declining sales spent $50 million a year for 15 years and continues to spend while sales continue to decline in a straight line. (Milk Advisory Board)

 

* One corporation that never advertises, doesn't permit advertising in its retail space, has grown in 6 six years from nothing to the largest seller in its field and has three times the stock market value of General Motors. (Google)

On the subject of the success of Google it is important to note the difference between advertising and listing.

* Advertising describes a message placed in front of many people most of whom have no interest in the message.

* A listing is a message placed in front of people who are looking for information related to that message. Google is pure listing, and it works.

 

But Shopper's Voice consistently lifts sales and all key elements of the marketing program.   Contact Paul Ashby @ paulashby40@yahoo.com. Visit htt://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com or call (0044) 01934 620047

The internet has changed the way the world does business.

 Let’s face it. The Yellow Pages are nearly dead. Newspaper readership is at the lowest level ever. Radio is being edged out by MP3’s and satellite radio services. Television is fragmented, making it nearly impossible to reach your target market effectively and affordable. More people spend time using the internet, especially social media vehicles than all of the other media vehicles…combined!

 More than 30 Million businesses in the US alone that are using social media to market and grow their business. In 2011, more than $2.5 BILLION will be spent in social media advertising alone.

If you’re like most small and mid-sized businesses, you are at a disadvantage because:

1. You don’t understand how social media marketing works.

2. You don’t know how to make social media work for your business.

3. You don’t have the time or the staff to manage your social media marketing

The Effective Accountable Communication Company has the experience and the diverse range of service offerings to successfully serve local companies of all sizes via social media marketing, online content development and public relations. This combination of valuable services is helping companies to generate more attention and new business through social media. As social media managers, we help people promote themselves and their business through social media vehicles like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. The results are immediate and always measurable.  most small and mid-sized businesses cannot afford to add a new employee to manage social media marketing.  Outsource your social media marketing to Effective Accountable Communication Company for a fraction of the cost of a traditional employee. We’ll create and manage your social media marketing, which will increase your web site traffic, generating recognition and potential new business. Social Media Management packages are available from £100 to £2,500 per month. http://shoppers-voice.co.uk or call Paul Ashby on (0044)01934620047.  
Visit http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com

It's strange.

With all the innovations that have occurred over the years, very few brands have anything to advertise, except the merits of individual models or products. In today's overcommunicated society, this "model" strategy is wasteful and ineffective.

And so it goes. As a brand expands into different varieties and different categories, the brand itself loses its ability to stand for anything specific. And if a brand cannot stand for something specific, it cannot be advertised in an effective way. Excet that is, through Shopper's Voice!
Contact: paulashby40@yahoo.com or

SHOPPER'S VOICE

How businesses embrace this opportunity says everything about how they view customers and the relationships they’re shaping as a result. Equally, how businesses measure success in this new frontier also says everything about how they value customer relationships. Hearing it this way makes the measurement of Likes, followers, views or +1′s seem trivial. And, thinking about customer value and how to deliver it where attention is focused makes us rethink website traffic as a KPI. Instead, businesses must embrace a new perspective, one that takes the lessons rife within social media to build a more meaningful engagement strategy for building customer relationships and growing new opportunities.
Now you can do all this at http://shoppers-voice.co.uk

Contact: paulashby40@yahoo.com