MarketingSherpa Blog

If your publication reports on technology in a niche or upcoming marketplace where you may not have too many competitors (yet
anyway), consider having your head of editorial start a private email discussion group with the tech vendors in the industry to
discuss stuff together. It’s a great way to help editorial become true insiders and partners with the people and trends they cover, and inadvertantly build relationships that may turn into ad dollars later.

However, you have to be very careful not to allow your ad sales reps into the discussion or use this as an overtly commercial thing that serves you only, because everyone will desert in droves. You also have to promise that stuff revealed in discussions will remain absolutely private (not for publication) unless your reporter specifically gets permission to quote.

Today Euromap newsletter announced their editor is starting one for language technology suppliers.

“This community venture will be devoted to exploring new ways of raising awareness about market-ready speech and language
technology in Europe rough events, collective marketing actions, partnering, etc.” Group moderator: Andrew Joscelyne (EUROMAP). If
you are interested, please send a request to
ajoscelyne@bootstrap.fr.

According to a story in the NY Times today, Amazon has ceased its $50 million per year TV and general print advertising campaigns and moved the ad staff of five into other jobs. Instead the company plans to concentrate on word-of-mouth, affiliate, Web and Sunday paper insert campaigns to get more customers into the site, and then to spend $100 million on free shipping offers to convert more of them into buyers.

Andy Jedynak GM Weatherbug just emailed in that Weatherbug does serve pop-unders to installed users which appear when you close the Weatherbug window. However, they limit this in three ways to keep users’ trust:

1. “Severely” limit pop-unders to 1-2 per day per user, no matter how often that user opens their Bug.

2. Never ever serve contextual ads based on clicks or other surfing activity data the user displays. The only data they base ad serving on is the data the user voluntarily provides them in the registration form and other user surveys where it’s clear answering questions will affect your Bug. No surfing privacy is invaded.

3. Ads stop the minute a user decides to uninstall the Bug.

Jedynak added, “As for what IT guys told you, I think they pronounced us guilty by association. Since we’re a downloadable application, occasionally people will assume we do the same questionable things that other downloadable apps do, then rumors fly. It’s unfortunate…”

The iCopyright “service” has been sold by its parent company Data Depth Corp to Reprint Services, who will continue to operate it under the new name RsiCopyright.com. This change should not affect publishers using the service too much, for now at least.
The companies were already partners with Reprint Services doing all the hard copy printing iCopyright clients requested. It will be interesting to see how this plays out because Reprint Services is a traditionally telephone sales rep-built company. iCopyright was an online self-serve reprints purchasing operation.