Want to know why advertising is dead, but living on like a money-eating zombie? Watch The Pitch, a reality show where real ad agencies face off for real work from real clients.
Among many silly things said by the agency people on the pilot episode were these:
- “We pride ourselves on creativity, not playing it safe, doing things that no one has ever seen before.”
- “We ask clients to take risks, because we’ve taken risks.”
If I were the client, I’d immediately remove the agencies where people say things like that from all consideration. Because to those guys, the work is about themselves, not about accomplishing their clients’ goals. They are going to produce dumb, crappy, clever ads that don’t motivate people to buy the clients’ products.
Unfortunately, the clients can’t quite see through the fog and are willing to pay agencies to bare their empty souls to a world that doesn’t give a rip.
These whiny agency hacks think they are artists, creative free-spirits with a vision and a passion that just needs to be discovered. And they think their clients are the media for their art that should be willing to pay for the privilege.
The difference between them and real artists is this: Real artists are willing to live in poverty and obscurity while they seek their vision. Some of them actually do produce things no one has ever seen before — unlike the agency folks who think their latest wordplay or clever sex joke is some kind of avant-garde statement.
The good news is, a lot of companies are starting to figure it out. They’re not interested in paying for the fantasy life of agency people. So times are getting harder and harder for the parasites.
What does this have to do with nonprofits?
Not much. But every once in a while, one of us gets pulled into the upside-down world of the agency artistes, and they produce faddish, opaque brands that don’t move donors and stupid nonprofit ads.
Not all agencies are like that. Some do brilliant work and really focus on their clients, not their own tortured souls. But if you find yourself talking to an ad agency, make sure you don’t end up working with frustrated artists who see you as a kind of “paint” for their own artistic self-expression.
Filed under Future Fund Raising Now by on May 20th, 2012. Comment. 
At Non-Profit Humour, a strangely familiar tale of a nonprofit organization that was lulled into a state of stupidity by an ad agency: Advertising campaign reaches Mrs. Betty Turner, 93, and 17,678 people who don’t care.
In this satire — and despite the realism, it is satire — an organization runs a meaningless awareness campaign that costs a lot and has absolutely no impact:
The campaign, which lasted an entire week, was seen by an estimated 17,679 people and many hundreds of cats and dogs. Since the Foundation’s website doesn’t have web metrics Snidely says they couldn’t actually tell whether the ad campaign had any impact, but she’s optimistic that the ads made a big impression on the public.
It’s all too common. A nonprofit is persuaded that “awareness” is a powerful thing. So they develop a multimedia campaign built on abstract concepts (sometimes including opaque wordplay and/or weirdly photoshopped images). After paying the agency for developing the ads, there’s little budget left, so the impacts are spread thin.
The agency then counts “impacts” — which means how many people might have seen or heard the campaign: If the publication running an ad has a circulation of 15,000, that’s 15,000 impacts. Never mind that the huge majority didn’t see the ad at all, they merely had access to it. And if that ad is abstract and lacks a clear challenge or call to action, even most who see it will be unaffected by it; it’s just more noise in their noisy days.
Counting impacts yields pretty big numbers, so they report the large number as if it has any kind of meaning, creating visions of 15,000 people who are now fanatical supporters, when in reality, there are zero new supporters, and awareness was raised in about three people — like the woman in the story who was hit by a falling billboard.
If you’re serious about recruiting people to join you in your cause, you will not waste time or money on vague awareness campaigns. You’ll do measurable, donor-oriented marketing that actually brings supporters in the door.
Filed under Future Fund Raising Now by on Apr 23rd, 2012. Comment.
Regardless of whether you pick to do your marketing and advertising a item with any technique as creating a review of it like Street Smart Profits review on the internet or offline, one thing does not change. This is the notion that no single marketing and advertising method will be as successful as a mixture of two or much more marketing and advertising techniques. This does not mean it is necessary for you to implement every single known marketing and advertising method to advertise your company but instead it implies that it is worthwhile to market from a handful of various perspectives to aid you accomplish your company associated targets. This write-up will examine the significance of combining email marketing and advertising with other sorts of marketing and advertising to create a effective multi tiered marketing and advertising method and will also supply some advice on managing much more than one marketing and advertising method at when.
As the outdated saying goes, “Two heads are much better than one,” and this is certainly true when it comes to marketing and advertising. You may possibly take pleasure in a wonderful deal of good results with email marketing and advertising but this does not mean you should not consider other sorts of on the internet marketing and advertising such as site creation, participation in industry associated message boards, placing banner advertisements, orchestrating an affiliate marketing and advertising campaign and producing inbound backlinks to your site. Although it is feasible that not all of these techniques will be successful for your company, you are probably to uncover at least one other selection which complements your email marketing and advertising and helps you to accomplish your company associated targets.
Alternately you may possibly even want to mix your email marketing and advertising campaign with much more classic marketing and advertising techniques such as radio advertisements, television advertisements and the print media. Just simply because these sorts of advertising do not take place on the internet, does not mean they will not be in a position to aid you create much more company. In simple fact advertising both on the internet and offline can enable you to attain a greater target audience. This is simply because you will probably attain Net customers around the globe but can also attain potential customers who do not use the Net for getting or researching goods or companies related to the ones you supply.
Popular marketing and advertising techniques to mix with email marketing and advertising incorporate banner advertisements and message board participation. These are all on the internet activities and each and every one individually is pretty basic. However, in mixture these basic activities can create a strong statement. You may possibly send out emails offering useful info about your goods or companies, buy banner ad room on web sites which may possibly be of interest to your potential customers and participate in industry associated message boards wherever you can earn the respect and pique the interest of potential customers. Even if your potential customers are not at present in require of the goods and companies you supply, seeing your company title so usually can have a branding impact. Branding is essentially a approach in which customers see a business title so usually that they are much more probably to select a item from this business when they are in require of an item the business provides.
If you are organizing to mix several types of advertising, you should be aware that this can make it tough for you to evaluate the effectiveness of each and every marketing and advertising method. This is specially true of the marketing and advertising techniques are implemented concurrently. When you are only making use of one sort of marketing and advertising method, you can normally attribute increases in product sales or site visitors to modifications in the marketing and advertising method. However, when much more than one sort of marketing and advertising method is in impact, identifying which method is generating the desired impact can be quite tough. This circumstance can be handled by not generating modifications to much more than one marketing and advertising method at a time. This will aid to pinpoint which modifications create an enhance in product sales or site visitors. It can also aid you to decide when modifications to your marketing and advertising method have a detrimental impact on your product sales and site visitors. However, if you are having difficulty identifying which marketing and advertising method is most successful you can contemplate asking customers to answer survey concerns and give info such as how they learned about the goods or companies your company provides.
Filed under Chris Stoddard by on Apr 7th, 2012. Comment.
Getting discovered among a lot of websites and getting your content articles read by people yet again thousands can be incredibly tough to understand. That’s why you need to ensure that your content articles have the greatest optimization as well as content. But one does not simply improve and popularize their content articles in a snap. There are numerous actions and tips that you can adhere to to get you recognized by the internet. Here’s how:
Established websites and internet-based newsletters need a certain degree of professionalism in the content articles they publish, just as print publications do. The way to attract and keep viewers is to continuously provide readers with well- composed content articles which are correct, well-timed, and provide useful tips or methods to real life complications associated with the subject matter. So ensure that all of your articles are relevant to the preferred subject.
Also, mixed in with the off- topic that articles are multitude of submissions which are actually white papers or inadequately hidden promotions composed primarily to promote buying a certain product or service from the publisher of the article. Ensure that articles are of genuine and original content. Not just filled with articles that are overloaded with pointless marketing campaigns.
Ensure that the articles are particularly designed to target a certain audience. This is why you need to do careful Niche research. It is very unnecessary to promote a product that you don’t know will effectively sell off to the general public. It is better to know it up front than wondering what they desire. Ask around, perform surveys or explore online boards to see what appears to be trending amongst people today.Social networking websites like Facebook or Twitter are excellent places to look.
Begin thinking about keywords and key phrases to boost your content articles. Much like in niche research, this can be achieved by doing proper keyword research and same thing with
Keyword analysis. Uncover what words and phrases people today use to find what they need over the internet and incorporate them into your articles. After that, you can now start building your website, publish it and sign up with search engines and directories.
Last but not the least; use social networking to promote your articles and websites. Think about such as a link for your social networking accounts or other networking website into your author box. You are able to thrust out articles to audience who have chosen to adhere to you which will give you you an easy jump in getting new people to view your articles. – nicheresearchSel4YDD4tk
Filed under Chris Stoddard by on Mar 13th, 2012. Comment.
Online classified advertising has grown with time with the advent of sites like Craigslist and GumTree. Today people are more open to advertising online through classified sites. The reason why it’s working much better now is because the number of regular Internet users has practically shot up in the past few years. An increasing number of people are coming to understand the value of advertising on classified sites due to the level of exposure they can gain from these websites. We will look at three tips that will help improve the effectiveness of your classified advertising in this article.
One factor that many advertisers don’t give a try is testing the price. Sometimes testing out different prices can make a huge difference to the response of your ad. Often, people search classified ad sites to seek out the best value deal they can find. Your response rates will increase if your price offers the best possible value for the product offered. By using digital signage you can get your message out to a large audience.
But you need to test some different prices first in your ads to uncover that right pricing point. Since the look of your ad is critical to its success, you need to ensure that you format it properly. You have to stick to the site’s guidelines as well as making sure that your formatting is done properly. The first factor that will influence your prospective clients is the presentation of your ad, whether or not it looks professional, despite the fact that there are many other issues that will play a role in the type of response you get. You will find that your rate of conversion will go up. By using digital signage solutions you can get your message out to a large number of consumers.
You need to focus on your highest performing ads and you can only find out which ones they are if you track and test them. When we say testing we mean that you take individual components of your ad, like the headline, content and presentation and you test various options to find the best one. Testing ads is vital to succeeding because if you don’t test various ads you will never be able to find the best one. Finding out how an ad performs is what tracking refers to. Tracking will provide vital information such as how many times your ad has been seen and how many people have clicked through. If you don’t test and track you won’t be able to maximize the results of your ads and they definitely go hand in hand. This is what sets apart good advertisers from mediocre ones. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to succeed with classified advertising, which you can see from this article. How you create your ad and put together your offer are the two areas that require most of your attention. There are lots of internet marketers who have been incredibly successful with classified advertising and you can also do it. All you have to do is keep this advice in mind and focus on making your campaigns better and better.
Filed under Chris Stoddard by on Dec 26th, 2011. Comment.