Category: Portland marketing

Fly the Cluttered Skies

If you’ve been thinking that there are just too many messages coming at you from every direction… and you should just jump on a plane to get away from it all… think again.

  Assuming that your airline hasn’t just laid off the flight crew, here are a few things you can expect:

  According to the Wall Street Journal, five different airlines will be selling advertising on your boarding pass, courtesy of a marketing company called Sojern, Inc. “Sojern says the online check-in process will remain essentially the same until the boarding pass appears on a computer screen. Then the traveler will be able to click on the various ads and suggestions. When travelers print their boarding passes, the ads will automatically be printed, too. Fliers can, however, click a box to prevent the ads from being printed.”

  The New York Times tells us that US Airways “offers advertisers spots on ticket jackets, cocktail napkins and even air-sickness bags, [and] has, until recently, been one of the few airlines running tray-table ads.” More airlines are considering the tray-table ad idea. Meanwhile, the Times reports, JetBlue is selling advertising on the screens of their seat-back TV’s. (Thank you to Deborah Brody for the tip).

  USA Today reports that the baggage carousels at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport will have advertising on the conveyor belts. According to the article, “the baggage carousel provides advertisers a captive audience of travelers who ‘wait 15-plus minutes for their luggage to arrive,’ says Tracy Zwahlen of DoubleTake Marketing, which is selling and producing the ads.”

 Enjoy your trip.

 

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What’s Wrong With This Promotion?

Driving to the office today, I heard a radio ad for a local X-Rated merchandise establishment — Fantasy for Adults Only. They are having a Tent Sale. And like every good tent sale, free hot dogs will be served.

Would you eat a hot dog at an adult shop?

 

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Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.

“We Had A Really Nice Ad”

I subscribe to Roy Williams‘ view that campaigns rarely fail because they use the wrong medium; they fail because they deliver the wrong message. But it’s an uphill battle — one of the most common objections an advertising salesperson hears is “We tried [name of medium here] and it didn’t work.”

The other day a jewelry store owner told me he wasn’t interested in meeting with me because “we tried radio once and it didn’t work. We had a really nice ad, and it didn’t bring us any business.”

If it didn’t bring you any business, I asked, what made it a really nice ad?

“Several people called us,” he replied, “and asked where they could buy the music.”

The most depressing part of the conversation is that he delivered the line completely without irony. Someone in my profession convinced him to spend good money on a campaign whose most memorable feature was the music.

Years later, this business owner still believes that this ineffective commercial is how a jewelry store radio ad is supposed to sound. And that — Tom Shane and Woody Justice notwithstanding — radio won’t work for his store.

If he’d been willing to meet with me, I might have showed him what a really, really nice ad sounded like. An ad that sells jewelry, not music.

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Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.

Your Marketing’s Carbon Footprint: Does It Matter?

On LinkedIn’s Answers Forum, Don Carli asked this question:

Is it important for advertisers to know the carbon footprint of the advertising media they buy?

My answer, which I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about, was this:

While there may be exceptions (skywriting comes to mind), in general, carbon footprint has to rank near the bottom of the relevance scale for an advertiser. Any advertising will use some resources — in most cases it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible to accurately calculate and compare each opportunity on that basis.

Marketing dollars are precious, especially in these times. The goal of most advertising is to generate customers and business — if the campaign achieves that, I suppose you can use some of the income to plant a tree.

Mr. Carli sent me an email (which he has given me permission to quote) taking issue with my answer. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, and is chairing an upcoming conference on sustainablility in media. Carli points out that there are already some tools for measuring some media campaigns:

The carbon footprint of some advertising media options are easier to determine than others, but none are exceedingly difficult or expensive to determine or to offset. For example if you want to know what the carbon footprint of a banner ad is you can get a free estimate by using the ClearSky carbon calculator developed by imc2:

http://www.imc2.com/carbon

And, if you want to know what the carbon footprint of your website is you can use the free widget developed by CO2stats:

http://www.co2stats.com

Some advertisers are already want to know. Recently Timberland determined the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the broadcast campaign for its EarthKeepers product launch in Boston and offset them by purchasing Renewable Energy Credits in Massachussets.

So I’ve learned that although not all media is measurable, carbon-footprint-wise, some of it is. And that some major advertisers are paying attention to the subject. At the same time, I’ve had hundreds of meetings, and thousands of conversations, with my own local customers in the past year, and the subject has never once come up.

Which prompts me to put out a two-part question:

1. If you’re in the media business, has a client ever asked you for information on your media’s carbon footprint? If so, how did the conversation go? Do you offer any kind of offset program as as an option for your customers?

2. If you’re an advertiser, have you ever asked your media partners for this information? Would you ever switch media (or options within a medium) to reduce or mitigate your impact on the environment?

Please answer by leaving a comment below.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.

Effective Buzzwords for Press Releases

For those who have sent out press releases, only to be met with complete indifference:

Tara Bloom’s blog Ditch the Dusty Widget points us to a New York Times article on getting your press release noticed, and used. From the Times article:

Those who make their living composing news releases say there is an art to this easily dismissed craft. Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a “breakthrough” onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file.

The thought process behind press release writing is not too far from that used in effective advertising copy. You can find Tara’s take on the subject, along with a link to the full article, here.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.