Digital continues to prove a disruptive force in marketing and continues to force marketers to look around the corner to stay ahead of their competition. Unfortunately, for many their looking glasses (as far as social media strategy is concerned) were a little foggy. Instead of finding digital strategy advisors with strong analytical and marketing (traditional) …
Wanna know the biggest mistake companies make with their social media and content marketing efforts? Promise you won’t tell or think less of them for this obvious oversight? Ok… come closer…shhhhhh, don’t tell but here it is….. If no one finds your content, it doesn’t matter if it is interesting. Confused? Let me clarify. There …
Last night I received an email from a hotel chain asking me to review a recent stay. I’m a fan of this particular chain, like their properties, and the one I stayed at wasn’t one of their best, so I thought I’d be helpful and answer this survey. Problem is, I never finished. Like to …
Back in March, I wrote a post for Ad Age entitled, QR Codes: Game Changing Technology of Passing Fancy. Last week, the fine folks over at the TACVB Conference gave me an hour to expand on my thoughts about QR Codes in Marketing. Below is a slidecast (slides and audio sync’d) of the presenstation. The …
If there is one thing that binds all marketers together, it’s lack of enough marketing budget to properly fund all of your marketing efforts to create an optimum marketing mix. This is especially true for brands and destinations engaged in international marketing. Over the last few years I’ve experimented with combining brands and social media …
Do yourself a favor and stop reading this post for 30 seconds, drop over to your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ stream and take a peek at what you see. I’m guessing that you like most folks you’re going to see a lot of one thing: content. Content being shared in the form of links, photos, …
A DM in my stream this morning asked if I knew of any posts that specifically talk about why you shoud NOT use a QR code on a webiste. I couldn’t find any quickly, so allow me to create one for you. I’ve been doing a lot of QR Code Campaign experiments over the last …
Last week I had the honor of chatting with the Social Media Club of Dallas about the role of mobile in the future of marketing. I promised I’d upload the deck and the sync’d audio of my talk for folks to share… and here it is. Mobile Marketing | Mobile Content Creation View more …
What drives the bottom line more… gross tonnage (impressions) or fewer, highly targeted impacts? For most of my career I was taught that impressions were the golden goose. But a few years ago, back in 2008, something really interesting happened on my personal blog Positive Disruption. Here is a reprint of what I wrote. Read …
Is your social media program fully integrated with your traditional marketing program, or are you just bolting on “Follow me on Twitter/Facebook” to your ads and fooling yourself?The Integration QuestionIf you’re running a truly integrated program, congrats. You’re among the elite. Like the Marines, you’re part of the few, the proud, the enlightened. But for …
Hiding Some Sort of ‘Proprietary’ Trade Secret? You’re a Fool Do you have a proprietary approach to strategic planning, media planning, brand development or anything else at your agency? Or maybe you have a trademarked, super top-secret-can-only-show-you-during-our-new-business-pitch-meeting process that is proven to make bland brands grow? If you do, you’re not alone. I too remember …
I’m sensing a seismic shift in our business. No longer will marketing strictly be about finding target audiences and telling clients how to speak to those audiences using traditional primary and secondary research. Instead, our job will be to act as curators of communities of like-minded people. They will become like our friends or like …
Over the last few years I’ve become increasingly less interested in the core concepts of advertising. While so many in our business want to talk about concepts, I fancy ideas. When they speak of campaigns, I push for conversations. And when they boast of impressions, I can’t help but think about impacts. At first I …
What if by allowing you to experience something you “thought” you knew about, even virtually, I could change your mind about your perception of that thing/event/brand? Would that be a powerful marketing tool? Would you invest money, time and effort behind that sort of thing? I’m thinking most would but first, you’d need the case …
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 …
Today I’m off to Curitiba, Brazil, a city I’d never heard of prior to being invited to come there and speak about using social media to alter brand perception for destinations and festivals. But what makes this even more interesting is what you find when you virtually visit Curitiba as I did with my kids …
Have you ever worked on the blogger outreach component of a social media plan? If so, what’s the first question you get asked? For me it is usually, where do we find the Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). Brands that want to engage bloggers in social media platforms to help carry the message always want the …
This weekend I was reading the Wall Street Journal and came across this Florida Tourism ad. No doubt, it’s part of the effort that all Gulf Coast states are undertaking right now to fend off summer vacation cancellations due to the oil spill. On one hand I applaud the simplicity. There is no concept here…it’s …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …