Archive for March, 2008
Rediscovering Telespam
I recently got a new home phone number. I moved all of my services (phone, internet, TV) over to the cable company for a package deal at a good price. I don’t really use the land line much but I’m not willing to cut the cord; it allows my alarm system to call for help [...]
Pragmatic Marketing’s Process for Effective Product Marketing
Next Monday, I’ll begin a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules. To place those posts in context, I wanted to spend a bit of time looking at their process for building a successful go-to-market-strategy for technology products. As they lay it out, the process elements (in flow order) are:
Gather
Focus
Assess
Build
Execute
Measure & Improve
GATHER
Market-driven [...]
Briefly Noted: the Demise of Firebrand
When Firebrand launched last year to provide an all-advertising network, I asked, will anybody watch this?
Well, we’ve got an answer. Good commentary from Minter Dial at that link.
Comcast’s Direct Mail Protection Racket
Targeting direct mail is important, because you don’t want to spend money sending direct mail to people who aren’t going to read it or respond. Cable/telecom giant Comcast apparently hasn’t gotten that message; apparently they are so intent on sending direct marketing mail to all their customers that they’re charging people $2 to stop receiving [...]
Nice Touch from Jet Blue
God knows, Jet Blue has gotten some pretty bad publicity in the last year - mainly stemming from their mega-delays last February, delays that required a major mea culpa on their part.
So I thought I’d give them a small kudos - a kudo? a kudeen? a kudette? - for their recent follow-up to me and [...]
Advertising That Speaks to Advertisers
One of the great pitfalls of advertising is creating ads that speak to the organization doing the advertising rather than the audience that they’re trying to reach. I’ve seen it at tech companies: the ads that everybody internally thought were cool and neat, talking about the features that we loves but the customer didn’t necessarily [...]
Social Media Posts
Over on my social media specific blog I’ve posted a few things in the last few days:
Mapping the Social Media Applications Space: how do all the puzzle pieces of social media applications fit together?
The Social Media Operating System: what makes all of these applications and services fit together, and who will be the players in [...]
Be still my Jarvik heart
Last week, Pfizer decided to pull the Lipitor ads that feature Dr. Robert Jarvik.
I, for one, will not be sorry to see them go, mostly because I find Dr. Jarvik kind of creepy. Maybe it’s the hair, but he looks like someone who’d be wearing a black cape, playing a subterranean organ, and cackling about [...]
Google’s Clicks and the Economics of Advertising
Last week the New York Times reported on signs of weakness in Google’s pay per click advertising business:
The [stock price] slide continued Tuesday when Google shares dropped 4.6 percent to close at $464.19, as investors were spooked by a report by the research firm comScore that said clicks on Google ads the United States were [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #20
This is the “final episode” in a series of posts on the Practical Product Management rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #20: The market-driven product manager should be the final authority on what goes into the product.
While at first blush, this should be the most obvious of rules - someone, after all, has to be [...]
