posted by Lee on Jun 14
Viral marketing involves making some quirky content and hoping people latch onto it, distributing it to friends. It’s so-named because of the way it spreads like a virus, with everyone exposed to it a potential disseminator.
I hate the concept, not because of the power of it or because of any questions of its efficacy, but because of the notion that you can engineer the viral quality.
Sure, it’s something to aim for, but to claim that you can carry out viral marketing is a big and inaccurate boast. The truth is, very few pieces of content become viral and as soon as you try and identify the qualities needed, you destroy them.
Viral content almost always comes about naturally and very rarely is it anything other than purely altruistic. Mostly it’s just pointless shit. Attach a point to pointless shit and you negate it.
posted by Lee on Jun 13
A lot of traditional marketing companies fundamentally DO NOT GET how marketing works on the internet. They see that you have some web space and they treat it like it’s BBC primetime TV.
The important thing to remember about web marketing is that is primarily about getting people onto your site in the first place. Yes, you need to have everything set up so that they can then buy things, but writing sales copy on your blog is no good to anybody. Ask yourself this: why would somebody willingly seek out that article and read it?
If you have a blog, use it to write useful articles that people might be searching for. No-one is looking for sales copy online and even if they find it, it’ll turn them off.
posted by Lee on Aug 14
The French advertising company Publics has bought Razorfish from Microsoft which is said to be worth over $350 milion but as part of the sale Microsoft still have to make future spending with its old advertising arm.
When Microsoft bought aQuantive it also took over Razorfish.
The chief executive of the Publicis Groupe said
“The acquisition of Razorfish is another step forward in realizing our strategic vision of building a world leader in digital communications, a critically important space for our clients,”
After the deal is completed digital communication will account for a quarter of the revenue for Publicis, and some of the clients that Razorfish include are McDonalds and Ford.
posted by Lucy on Aug 13
Microsoft has bought a share of Facebook which is sure to upset Google.
The deal is worth £120 million which has allowed Microsoft to buy 1.6% of its stock and also when you consider the business has not made any money yet and is less than 4 years old that’s not a bad result for Facebook.
Kevin Johnson of Microsoft said
“this is a strong statement of confidence in this partnership and in facebook”.
Facebook in the meantime hopes to use advertising to increase the number of traffic to its site allowing friends to connect to each other through messaging, facebook is still behind MySpace but due to it growing faster it hopes to overtake soon.
posted by John on Aug 10
Oxo have decided to launch an X shaped cube in a distinctive beef flavour in a £2 million campaign which is said to be the biggest marketing campaign the company has done.
Oxo has had sales grow by 3% to over £38 million in the last year.
The idea behind the X shaped cube is to appeal to the younger market following recent make overs of Mr Kipling and Hovis who are part of the premier foods brand.
In 1910 the Oxo brand was launched after a German Chemist found a way to extract large amounts of beef extracts from carcasses.
The Oxo cube was sent out to british troops in the first world war and between 1914-1918 over 100 million of them were consumed.
Lets just hope this is a continued success with its bold new look
posted by Lee on Jul 20
It is often said that in an economic depression marketers will still spend money on advertising products. However does this agree with the facts? With the continued growth of the internet digital marketing and spending on SEO seem set to increase but this is because it is a growing market, more people will find themselves connected to the internet and the convenience it offer will undoubtedly lead to greater online sales.
However, this must be tempered by the fact that people have lower disposable incomes meaning they will be less willing to spend. Marketing budgets suffer from a time lag and so while the rest of the economy is in the grips of a depression, marketers have escaped relatively unscathed so far.
In times of economic gloom, marketing is one of the first areas to be cut. It is a way of making quick short term savings. In the long term however, this can severely hurt future sales.
The expected outcome is a decreasing in the spending on traditional marketing but a small increase in digital marketing budget as companies try and achieve greater targeting for their products.
posted by Lee on Jul 8
Using the web for recreational purposes is set to overtake traditional broadcast television within the next 14 months according to Microsoft. This result is released in a document, “Europe Logs On: Internet Trends of Today and Tomorrow“.
In 2008, on average people used the web for 8.9 hours per week and 11.5 hours per week watching television . In 2010, the average number of hours for is estimated at 14.2 hours per week for internet and 11.5 hours per week for television. Using the current trends, web use will overtake television viewing for the first time in June, 2010.
On the interent, the most frequent destinations are portals to other content such as news, gossip, shopping and communication, e.g. Yahoo. Instant messaging services were also popular as were entertainment and games web sites.