Archive for November, 2006
Bitpiped
Yesterday I got an e-mail from Bitpipe that looked like such a nice piece of micro-marketing, I almost got goosebumps. It alerted me to an article on a somewhat obscure topic that is of EXTREME INTEREST to one of my clients. Excitedly, I clicked right through, filled in forms for not one but two online pubs that [...]
Zune Hits the Market
Yesterday Microsoft launched their Zune… digital media player? Personal music player? It’s a measure of how thoroughly Apple has captured this market that I want to find myself wanting call the Zune “Microsoft’s iPod.”
The player itself appears to be a solid offering, no iPod-killer but a good competitive entry into the market that should probably be seen as a prototype for [...]
Be Right Back
I was at a client’s office yesterday, and we broke around 1 p.m. to head downstairs to grab lunch at the pre-fab sandwich and salad cafe, only to be met by a sign that read “Back in 5 Minutes.”
Just what kind of customer communication is this, anyway? None of us had seen the cashier leave, [...]
Ads, Ad, Everywhere
Fellow marketers, please try to remember: consumer really aren’t excited by the chance to see ads everywhere they turn. They view them as interruptions. They resent them.
Shel Holtz just wrote about an unwanted ad experience in his Road Weary blog (a blog which is always great reading for those of us who have taken too many business trips).
After checking into [...]
Moving Targets
The other day, my mobile phone beeped to tell me I had a text message. This usually means someone I know is trying to reach me, so I grabbed it and looked to find… a message from Cingular (my provider) telling me about international calling rates.
Typical irritation marketing, with an extra annoyance factor: I’ve [...]
In Praise of PDFs
Years ago, I returned from vacation hoping to see a brochure that I’d slaved over back from the printer. I was running marketing for a small software company and we were spending big time (by our standards) for this piece. We’d hired a designer, we had a great concept and copy (mine), and I was [...]
Pricing Games
It’s that time of year when the my mailbox is filled with catalogs. Which makes me quite happy; I need to buy Christmas gifts for a number of people, and I’m not going to a mall to do it. (I don’t even like to go to shopping malls the rest of the year; one of [...]
Don’t Confuse Tactics with Strategy
There’s an an interesting post at Vario Creative Blog in which Anthony Vario describes an excellent software port project:
In order to get the product right, she started by talking with customers. They were literally pulled into the development process. A monthly newsletter was instituted to make the development process as transparent as possible. Each and every [...]
Woe to the Vacationer
Norwegian Cruise Line has an ad in this week’s New Yorker which touts its “no set dining times” policy. The header for the ad is interesting:
Woe to the Vacationer who is forced to dine at 7 p.m. at table 8 with the Wurtzels from Albany.
Woe. Wow. Whoa.
First off, if I were from Albany, I might [...]
Cool Tool
This is interesting: a little tool called Page2RSS that creates an RSS feed for you to monitor updates of sites that don’t publish their own feeds.
I’m not sure how well it works, but I’ve set a couple of feeds up, and so I’ll find out.
Found it via Micro Persuasion.
