Marketer's Lab

Is Your AdReady?

Vendor Speed date - AdReady - Looking for an easy way to create an online campaign?  AdReady provides an application that makes it easy to create a complete online campaign.  They provide tools to do everything from developing creative all the way through to performance measurement.  Here's how it works:

Create banners - pulling from a library of over 600 banner design templates, users can customize banners to integrate your message and call to action.  Banners are made available in a host of sizes.

Create a campaign - AdReady has predefined target segments including B2B, Consumer, Education and Government categories and number of subsegments within those.  They also provide the ability to target geographically down to the state level.  Similar to PPC campaigns, users define a daily budget for each program.

Pick your publisher - Campaigns can run over Google, Yahoo, Right Media or United Media networks.  Google is selected as the default. 

Reporting - Once all the above steps are completed and the campaign is submitted, AdReady provides a suite of reports to track program performance. 

Certainly not for everyone, but for organizations looking for a quick, easy tool for creating online campaigns, AdReady is an pretty interesting solution.

 

Banner Blindness or Banner Lameness?

Part of their ongoing "Chart of The Week" feature, MarketingSherpa just featured this piece on banner blindness which includes the chart below and some of their usual, helpful and pragmatic insights on what this means for marketers.  What the piece briefly touches on that I think gets overlooked is the power of creative in this equation.  The death of the banner ad has been popular fodder for marketing media types for a long time and yet banners continue to be an integral part of the marketing equation.  I wonder how the eyetracking study would be affected if the banners had been more engaging through the use of rich media of some type or even just bolder messaging?  I do agree that banner blindness is an issue, but its important to keep in mind that it can be mitigated with the smart use of creative.

Click the chart below for larger image

Marketing and the $24 Wal-mart Bicycle

A friend of mine just bought a bicycle for $24, seriously $24!  No, not on eBay, Craigslist or some other outlet for used bicycles.  This was a brand new mountain bike, certainly not a titanium/carbon-fiber speed machine like you might find in a real bike shop, but a 20+ speed bike straight off the aisle at mega-retailer Wal-mart.  My aim with this post isn't to tackle the "Wal-mart is the incarnation of evil" /  "Wal-mart is the foundation for the global economy" debate, plenty of people on top of that one.  For me, this $24 bicycle stirred up a handful of insights I thought were worth covering.

There's a business model for a $24 bicycle - Certainly there must be more to making a $24 bicycle a viable business than utilizing cheap off-shore labor?  The cost of materials, manufacturing, distribution and selling required to support this pricing are hard to fathom.  Why, you could even double the retail price of this bike and its still amazing to think about.  The very fact this $24 bike is possible should smack us all right between the eyes.  This kind of seismic change is at play in all industries, we ignore this at our peril.   

People will buy $24 bicycles - There are many who would scoff at these kinds of bikes, I don't imagine we'll be seeing many of these in this year's Tour de France, but there are plenty of people out there who would be thrilled to own one of these bikes, the nice red paint job certainly doesn't hurt. 

The new disposable - At $24 this won't be a bicycle my friend will see passing from child to child over the years.  "If it lasts the Summer and then explodes, it's still a great deal!"  There's a disposable mentality creeping into product categories that have historically been focused on long-lasting, durable offerings.  The messaging is implicit, but attitudes about product longevity are being dramatically altered.

Quality = Sustainability - As the quality threshold in some categories goes down, the demand for products designed for longevity is likely to build.  Many consumers want high-quality, conscientiously-made products as the antithesis to cheap, semi-disposable products of unknown manufacturing origin.  This aligns with the powerful "sustainability" movement and presents a huge opportunity for companies capable of creating quality products.    

From a marketing standpoint, the $24 bicycle has big implications for all of us and acts as a microcosm for many of the dynamics happening in the world.  I encourage you to think about what's happening in your marketplace and think about who's building the $24 bicycle in your industry.

 

iCentera 5.0 Release - Fine-Tuning Roles

I've posted on iCentera previously, they provide a great dynamic portal solution.  Today they announced the release of iCentera 5.0, which amongst a host of new features, focuses on supporting multiple roles and views.  As a quick refresher, iCentera allows users to create custom portals which can be used for internal or external audiences, can be set up for specific sales interactions or as more marketing-centric resource center type applications.  The ability to fine-tune who sees what is pretty important and this new release is clearly aimed at providing users better capabilities in that area.  You can read the full release here or if you really want a deep dive, access the release notes here.  Portals for Mortals (a great tag line BTW) continues to get better and better. 

Don't Forget about UI

The primary reason I blog about marketing technology and have a passion for this space is I see it as essential to being a great marketer.   As big a fan as I am of understanding the newest tools of the marketing trade, I'll be the first to say not all emerging marketing gadgetry is deserving of our time and attention. It's easy to get swept away with technology for technologies sake. 

This post from SEOmoz titled 8 Innovative Design & UI Elements That Make Sites Better hits on a handful of important points we as marketers seem to occasionally drift away from. The post features examples of marketers doing interesting and engaging things, which stirred these additional thoughts:

- Interface/Design trumps technology infrastructure - To head off those of you who are more tech-oriented, I'll disclaim that obviously the optimal situation is where you have effective, hand-in-glove synchronization of UI and infrastructure, but for my money if users can't figure out what to do or easily intuit how to achieve their objectives, it makes no difference how good your technology infrastructure might be.

- Making the complex simple - Many companies, especially technology companies of any kind, are notorious for complicated web sites that make it tough to understand what they do.  The Logistetica example is a great study in how to distill key messages and provide a beautiful visual experience.

- Great ideas inspire great design - Most of the examples in the post are well executed designs around strong ideas and concepts.  Whether its contests, conversion-funnel based navigation or the feature of a "multi-hero" piece, they are all propelled by cogent ideas.

Check out the SEOmoz post, soak in the nice ideas highlighted there and be sure to stay focused on UI throughout the marketing process.