Over the last couple of years I’ve offered up a few thoughts on resolutions your agency should be making to remain competitive in the coming year. Here’s this year’s installment. Continue reading article on AdAge.com >>
...Innovation is sexy. It puts you ahead of the competition because you can offer a new tool for the marketer’s toolbox. It gets you meetings with prospects and new streams of funding from current clients. It excites your employees and gets you press. In a nutshell, innovation builds agencies in today’s hyper-competitive environment. And while …
Keeping Your Job Requires Being Honest, not Nice Have you ever received the call? You know the one where the client tells you how much they love you, respect you and the contributions your agency has made to their brand but… read more
...Even More Thoughts from the Small Agency Conference It never fails. You go to a conference, and I don’t care how good it is, the best session ends up being a hallway conversation or meeting over dinner, drinks or coffee. And so it was at the Ad Age Small Agency Conference here in New Orleans… …
So you’ve likely read all the banter yesterday about how Groupon was insensitive, moronic, or just plain stupid for running the ad above. Funny though, no one really said much about their second Super Bowl spot below…. I’m not going to get into all the political stuff or why there was almost universal and instant …
I’ve been lucky enough to have clients for whom I was all in. I lived, breathed and slept their brand, their product and the product category. Continue reading article on AdAge.com >>
...A step by step guide from 20 year veteran of the advertising and marketing community, Tom Martin, on how to leverage social media tools to get a job.
...Yesterday I was having a really interesting conversation with a company that is new to social media. Like most smart companies, they are struggling to understand this new space and determine the ROI of their investment. And like most companies that are new here, they keep trying to move directly to sale even though they …
I’ve always felt like Marketing was like legalized gambling. but with all the new challenges, technologies and such, it seems one of the greatest challenges folks are having in today’s expanded marketing environment (digital, social media, traditional advertising) is understanding how to gamble their precious marketing dollars in ways that favor them and not “the …
Have you noticed how much content drives conversation in Social Media today? Take a quick scan of your Twitter stream or Facebook wall and you’ll likely notice that the vast majority of tweets and post contain a link to content — be that video, photo or even written (in the form of an article or …
What’s more important for your business right now — creating demand or the desire to demand? If you listen to the social media ROI folks, you’ll hear them beat that demand drum all day and often well into the night. And while I agree with them — ROI is important and you do have to …
What do the AMA, PRSA, IABC and countless other trade groups have in common? They all require volunteers to make them run. For many years now I’ve been a member of the AMA. And like all membership organizations, the value I receive from that membership is directly proportional to the investment I make in it… …
So this Free Idea Day winner really got me excited because I can actually use their services. Meyer Real Estate is (in their words): We are a vacation rental and real estate company along the Alabama/Florida Gulf Coast. Our challenge is to participate in social media with a product that is not an everyday use …
Have you ever thought about how hard it is to sell services? Hotels, banks, law firms, CPAs, software companies, auto repair shops, doctors, hospitals, museums, even schools; they all share an important set of product traits. Each is selling an intangible and/or technically complex service. A service that the consumer can’t touch, experience before hand …
As I’m sitting in Vegas at BlogWorld, I thought I’d share a few ideas on how to get more out of your conference or tradeshow efforts. Mostly, I’m going to give you a few ideas on iPhone apps you may want to consider downloading and a thought about how to be memorable. Because lets face …
I know it’s all PC and cool to say that numbers don’t matter. Number of fans, followers, readers of your blog — none of that matters. It’s all about just writing and sharing great content because that is the core of social media. [dramatic pause while I hug myself] Personally, I disagree. I think it’s …
Last night I had the pleasure of sharing my thoughts around how restaurants can use Social Media to grow their business. I didn’t have much time so the deck was short but the key idea was there. The most powerful marketing tool any restaurant owner has is table hopping — you know when the owner …
I find the biggest mistake folks make with a new marketing effort is the failure to plan. To do the necessary strategy grunge work before they start the flashy, cool ideation/creative work. But you have to do the grunge if you want to have a basis for truly insightful, powerful marketing campaigns. The goal is …
On Friday, I had the honor of serving on a WordCampNola Social Media panel with Tiffany Starnes,Damien Lamanna, Robbie Vitrano and moderator Chris Schultz. After the panel, I received a tweet fromPeter Rad asking, to @tommartin #wordcampnola Why do you want your tweets to go to every social site? Why repeat that over and over? Peter had misunderstood a comment I made …
As I showered this morning I couldn’t get the classic Barbra Streisand song, Send in the Clowns, out of my head. Don’t ask. The funny thing was the next image that popped into my head was the heads of Ford, GM and Chrysler sitting in front of Congress being asked about flying private planes to …
Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you probably have heard the #motrinmoms flap that started on Twitter and led to Motrin’s pulling of a nationwide ad campaign. I chose to focus my latest Ad Age post on the topic and think you might find my research interesting. I’ve reprinted the entire post below. Do …