MarketingSherpa Blog

Wow – I don’t think we’ve ever published anything that got such
fervent, lengthy, opinioned responses as this week’s article,
‘80% of Consumers Hate Flash Intros’ (link below.)

Some people thought the survey that generated the data was
slanted or improperly created. Some felt that Flash is the
greatest thing since sliced bread. And, many expressed joy that
the Flash intro bubble was “popped.”

While I don’t think the survey was absolutely perfect, I also
don’t think its imperfections skewed results so profoundly that a
different version would have had opposite results. (You can
judge for yourself, we included a link to the original survey in
the article below.)

I was also very surprised at the number of Flash intro
supporters who wrote in. The fact that most Web users
dislike intros is hardly new, or even big, news.

So, I contacted Macromedia – the makers of Flash – to see if they
had any formal best practices or advice on Flash intros. Suzy
Ramirez in the PR department sent me a link to a white paper
called, “Flash: a New Hope for Web Applications” (link below.)

Despite the promo-sounding name, it’s actually a fabulous paper
with lots of useful screenshots and examples of how you can use
Flash to make people love your site and your brand. I heartily
recommend you download it.

But, it didn’t have a specific rule about intros – so I called up
the co-author of the paper, Jared Spool of User Interface
Engineering, to ask, “Flash intros – good or bad?”

Jared said, “When we have clients who are thinking about Flash
splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and
bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the
supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little
show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket
and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on
sale today.

“Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how
many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how
many people punch the mime out.

“That should give you a good idea as to how well their splash
page will be received. That’s the crux of it.”

However, Jared did add, if 100% of your site visitors are coming
to learn one thing and one thing only from you, then a splash
page might work. His example, “Michael Jackson’s home page today
could say ‘I’m innocent of all charges,’ and that would be it.”

So, you heard it from a usuability expert that Macromedia
themselves recommend. Flash intros are not wonderful.

Useful links related to this Blog:

The “80% of Customers hate Flash Intros” article that prompted
this Blog (includes link to original survey):
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2524
(Open access until 11/27)

The White Paper Macromedia (and I) recommend you check out on
Flash design inspiration
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/blueprint/articles/flashbp.html

Jared Spool’s UIE site
http://www.uie.com

Weird – yet good – show.

“This is the eleventh AD:TECH,” said show Chair Susan Bratton just
before Tuesday morning’s keynote.

You’d think that any industry after 11 conferences would have
stabilized. That there would be at least a handful of massive
booths (aka “pavilions”) on the show floor from the biggest vendors.
That the majority of attendees would be experienced in the field.

Instead it was the opposite.

Yes, everyone was celebrating the fact that the industry has
stabilized in terms of forward growth and respect. One speaker
said, “Last year we were all just glad to be here; this year
Internet’s back big-time. We’re walking with a collective swagger.”

However, the industry has yet to truly coalesce.

– There were absolutely no big booths. Even big-name companies had
booths that in any other industry’s tradeshow would be for small-fry
only.

– I hadn’t even heard of roughly 25% of the folks exhibiting. They
were either new, or newly renamed, or flying real low under the
radar before this. Established industries don’t have so many
unknown players.

– Aside from the huge number of vendor sales reps, the almost 4,000
attendees couldn’t be grouped into any one heading. I’ve never seen
such an odd mixture of utter newbies, old-timers, low-level people
and C-level people at any comparable show in another industry.

– The topics everyone was talking about in the hallways were
contextual advertising (ie Google Adsense and its competitors),
search marketing, and rich media. Hardly anyone talked about email
(aside from fear, fear, fear) when a year or two ago, it’s all
anyone talked about. Topical whiplash.

So, yes the show was big, attendees were in an upbeat mood, and
there were some pretty good speeches (links below), but my
overwhelming feeling was … as an industry we have a long way to go.

And I’m looking forward to AD:TECH 2013. It’s gonna be really
different.

Useful links:

AD:TECH’s Official Show Blog with loads of commentary and notes from
attendees:
http://www.adtechblog.com/

Fast Company’s Blog with some word-for-word transcripts of actual
speeches (scroll down and look at entries for Nov 3-5):
http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2003/11/index.html

MarketingSherpa’s Library, including interviews and Case Studies
with more than two-dozen AD:TECH speakers:
http://library.marketingsherpa.com/search.cfm

Weird – yet good – show.

“This is the eleventh AD:TECH,” said show Chair Susan Bratton just before Tuesday morning’s keynote.

You’d think that any industry after 11 conferences would have stabilized. That there would be at least a handful of massive booths (aka “pavilions”) on the show floor from the biggest vendors. That the majority of attendees would be experienced in the field.

Instead it was the opposite.

Yes, everyone was celebrating the fact that the industry has stabilized in terms of forward growth and respect. One speaker said, “Last year we were all just glad to be here; this year Internet’s back big-time. We’re walking with a collective swagger.”

However, the industry has yet to truly coalesce.

– There were absolutely no big booths. Even big-name companies had booths that in any other industry’s tradeshow would be for small-fry only.

– I hadn’t even heard of roughly 25% of the folks exhibiting. They were either new, or newly renamed, or flying real low under the radar before this. Established industries don’t have so many unknown players.

– Aside from the huge number of vendor sales reps, the almost 4,000 attendees couldn’t be grouped into any one heading. I’ve never seen such an odd mixture of utter newbies, old-timers, low-level people and C-level people at any comparable show in another industry.

– The topics everyone was talking about in the hallways were contextual advertising (ie Google Adsense and its competitors), search marketing, and rich media. Hardly anyone talked about email (aside from fear, fear, fear) when a year or two ago, it’s all anyone talked about. Topical whiplash.

So, yes the show was big, attendees were in an upbeat mood, and there were some pretty good speeches (links below), but my overwhelming feeling was as an industry we have a long way to go.

And I’m looking forward to AD:TECH 2013. It’s gonna be really different.

Useful links:

AD:TECH’s Official Show Blog with loads of commentary and notes from attendees:
http://www.adtechblog.com/

Fast Company’s Blog with some word-for-word transcripts of actual speeches (scroll down and look at entries for Nov 3-5):
http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2003/11/index.html

MarketingSherpa’s Library, including interviews and Case Studies with more than two-dozen AD:TECH speakers:
http://library.marketingsherpa.com/search.cfm

John Kerry is the first presidential campaigner to place ads on blogs. BlogAds Henry Copeland says, “You can see them running soon on Atrios, Politicalwire, Blogshares and Talkingpointsmemo.” Henry also notes that “Ads on Talkingpointsmemo have been averaging clickthrus near 2%.” To which I reply, “well honey, ultra-niche media buys always work best, but media buyers hate them because they can’t expand the campaign if it works.”

Apparently Kerry’s campaign is also sponsoring TheOnion, but not Slate or Salon. Can you say quirky?

OJR Article (longish) on how UK newspaper sites are charging for content – including PDA news updates. Nothing earthshattering but still fun.

And it’s a twofer – another new OJR article on paid content “CanWest Takes Tiered Approach to Pay Content at Canada.com” – it’s about what they’re planning not what they’ve done and learned from.

The short answer is: yes, even if you are a permission mailer.

If you are working on your budget for 2004 right now, make sure you include a significant investment in your customer and prospect database systems. New and pending US and Canadian laws on email, telemarketing, faxing, and now even direct postal mail, all point in one direction.

You have to ask for permission. And then you have to be able to quickly and efficiently prove on demand that you have it.

It’s the latter part of this that worries me for many marketers’ sakes. If your various databases are silo-ed, if you can’t tell precisely where and when each name joined your house file, if you can’t prove you are innocent, your carefully collected list becomes worthless — even a liability.

Marketers in other countries have been dealing with this longer than we have – take Germany for example where data and privacy regs are very strict. I’ll make sure we get some tips from them to run in future issues.

Just as marketers were climbing out of the recessionary doldrums we had to get hit with this. Well, it’s for our best in the long run. Gotta eat your spinach. Invest in your database.

According to Doubleclick’s latest annual survey of consumer attitudes about email, 65% of men are likely to think a company they’ve done business with is sending them unsolicited junk mail if the mail arrives “too frequently.”

This compares to 55% of women.

If the company got permission first, but still mails too frequently, then 61% of men and 56% of women still think you’re a junk mailer.

These results jibe with the data from Quris’ similar study conducted this August. Consumers don’t care about what you are legally entitled to send them or what permission box they ticked off a while back (and probably forgot 15 seconds later.)

They just care that there’s stuff in their emailbox they don’t want. And they are going to blame you for it. Men especially.

In effect, each name on your list is an unexploded bomb, ready to go off if you mail them too much, or the wrong sort of content. So, even if the law, advertising associations and vendor white papers tell you it’s ok to mail something it may not be.

Email is rewarding, exciting, and yes, increasingly dangerous. And nobody can keep you safe but yourself.

Calling Slate and MSNBC “one-offs”, Maggie Wilderotter, SVP Biz Strategy proclaims “Microsoft is not in the content business,” in this Online Journalism Review interview. She notes that MSN plans to continue as a content aggregator, relying on a mixture of ads and consumer subscriptions for revenue. “When we look at subscriptions, it will be from a personalization perspective. When we look at aggregation of free data, we look at it from more of a mass market.”

She also notes Microsoft has not ceased its commitment to ebooks, and is investing in R&D to add ebook-viewing capabilities to every platform rather than forcing folks to buy a stand-alone reader. Well, ok. Somebody tell Barnes & Noble. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/kramer/1065653930.php

This Monday morning I was enraged by a note from a marketing consultant on one of the email discussion groups I belong to. She wrote, “I tell my clients to test sending opt-out email because, it might work for them, and why not test it?”

Normally I don’t enrage easily – and certainly not over other people’s business decisions that are none of my affair.

Plus, I’ve always believed that picking what level of permission to use is not a moral (or emotional) issue, but rather should be a cold-blooded business decision. Best practice is to research and weigh the risks thoroughly, make the best decision for your particular brand, and then track results carefully.

But, I forgot about email blacklists.

If they blacklist a mailer (which they do both more frequently and more inaccurately than most marketers realize), they generally don’t blacklist by mailer name. They blacklist by IP address — the server that sent the email.

Plus, if the offense appears egregious enough, they blacklist by IP “range” too — not just one server but many of them.

So, if you send mail through an email service that other mailers use, everyone else’s mail will be blacklisted and filtered too.

That’s right — some other mailer’s send can cause your mail to be blocked too. I know because it’s happened to us, not once but three times.

I’ve lost thousands of dollars due to blacklisting because someone else thought, “what the heck, let’s just test” something that was considered junk by at least one recipient.

So, when you test something risky, such as opt-out, all the mailers who share your email service are forced, unknowingly, to take an equal risk right along with you.

Please, only take risks if you don’t use a shared service. Otherwise you’re peeing in the pool other kids have to swim in.

Salon’s CEO Michael O’Donnell is leaving after 7 years. Editor-in-chief David Talbot now steps up to the plate to lead the company he founded. 72,000 paid subs and counting…