MarketingSherpa Blog

Tomorrow morning online publishing company TechTarget will announce it’s had 54% increase in revenues in the past year, during which time period its print competition have seen 44.9% reduced revenues (and a lot have gone out of business). Are tech ad dollars moving online? Heck yeah!

Tech dollars have traditionally been the first big thing the Net saw. First in which organizations invested in Web sites, then what types of books Amazon sold the most, and now what ad dollars have moved most dramatically from offline to on. In the former two cases, the road then lead merrily to everyone else adopting the Web too and at apace they would have never predicted. Does TechTarget’s success (and CMPTechWeb’s and Knowledgestorm’s, etc.) mean that other sectors’ ad dollars will move online someday sooner and more dramatically than anyone expected? I’m tired of the old 6% online ad growth this year prediction.

Just got an emailed ad sales promo from Forbes featuring Flash, big colorful pictures and data charts. It’s like a mini-media kit. I’m assuming they developed it in-house because having an agency do this would not be cost-effective. Sample here:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/forbes/1.html

Why is there so much color in your electronic docs?

This is a problem we run into almost invariably with publishers and authors who want us to sell their PDFs or other-electronic-format reports in our Store. They stick all sorts of stuff in color. The cover page, their logo, critical points in the text, lines on charts, etc. The problem is that if your document is longer than a very few pages most people will print it out to read. And most people either (a) use black and white printers only or (b) don’t want to use up the far-more-expensive color ink in their cartridges on your logo.

If color is critical to making your point, then create a version that prints ok in black and white and then give links to a protected Web site for color views.

“Bartles & Jaymes” is a critical code-phrase around here. Whenever anyone has a big new idea (something red-hot we should launch or do right away to make more money) somebody says, “Bartles & Jaymes” and the balloon is punctured from crazy to sensible.

It’s from a story in one of my favorite books ever, ‘Ernest & Julio: Our Story,’ about how in 1982 a tiny start-up called California Wine Cooler (who invented the cooler) came out of nowhere, and by 1983 became the 10th largest wine company in California selling almost 2 million cases. The Gallo brothers’ execs urged them to launch a wine cooler too, do a land-grab on the new marketplace and stomp the upstart. They held back, and back and back. Until 1985.

Not because they are a slow moving-organization, they were family-owned and fairly nimble. But because they wanted to make sure (a) the opportunity was real before diverting resources that could go into previously proven things and (b) they wanted to do the absolute best job they could of launching. They wanted the best product, best distribution and best advertising. It’s not worth launching if you do a half-assed job in your rush.

It’s the absolute opposite of the “land-grab” mentality of the dot-com boom. Frustratingly, it’s also the opposite of my own nature (life is no fun unless I do things in a slapdash manner at the very last minute).

Results: Within one year of launch B&J was in the #2 spot in the marketplace behind California Cooler, the following year B&J slipped ahead to become #1 and still dominated the approx 34-million case marketplace in 1993 when the book was written.

My goal is to run a publishing company emulating these principles, even if it kills me :-).

Yesterday you were supposed to get an email from me asking you to
take our big annual reader survey.

Just 30-seconds before it was due to go out, I checked the hotlink
one last time to make sure it worked. It didn’t. The survey site
was down.

Arrgh! If you rely on ASPs such as online survey tools, broadcast
email services, campaign metrics tools, ad serving tech, etc., you
are utterly at the mercy of Somebody Else’s Server.

I asked our Tech Editor Alexis, “What questions about reliability
should a marketer ask an ASP before picking them?” She told me,
“What is your uptime guarantee to me as a customer? What are the
penalties if you don’t meet it?”

“If you get a 99% uptime promise then your ASP can be down more
than 7 hours per month. If you get 99.9% it’s 43 minutes per
month. 99.99% is less than five minutes per month – which is what
everybody thinks they are getting but most ASPs couldn’t afford to
pay for the redundancies that would require.”

I have terrible link kharma, so even at just 43 minutes per month,
they will always be the Worst Possible 43 Minutes.

Yesterday you were supposed to get an email from me asking you to
take our big annual reader survey.

Just 30-seconds before it was due to go out, I checked the hotlink
one last time to make sure it worked. It didn’t. The survey site
was down.

Arrgh! If you rely on ASPs such as online survey tools, broadcast
email services, campaign metrics tools, ad serving tech, etc. you
are utterly at the mercy of Somebody Else’s Server.

I asked our Tech Editor Alexis, “What questions about reliability
should a marketer ask an ASP before picking them?” She told me,
“What is your uptime guarantee to me as a customer? What are the
penalties if you don’t meet it?”

“If you get a 99% uptime promise then your ASP can be down more
than 7 hours per month. If you get 99.9% it’s 43 minutes per
month. 99.99% is less than five minutes per month – which is what
everybody thinks they are getting but most ASPs couldn’t afford to
pay for the redundancies that would require.”

I have terrible link kharma, so even at just 43 minutes per month,
they will always be the Worst Possible 43 Minutes.

According to a news brief in Media Life Magazine today MSN has admitted “only” about 9 million people have subscribed to MSN8 ISP service versus AOL’s 35 million, despite spending about $300 million on advertising. The problem seems to be due to heavy churn from campaigns of years past, old MSN access users are dropping off the system as their heavily discounted multi-year accounts run out. MSN is planning to offer a new selection of services that don’t include ISP access, you buy whatever ISP access you want and then upgrade to MSN for extra services such as IM and “enhanced email” for a orice that’s under $10 a month.

What this means to broadcast emailers and list owners: Watch your @msn.com names carefully because you may see your own heavy churn matching MSNs as people drop off and start new accounts with other ISPs. It’s definitely worth tracking this URL as a separate part of your list if you’ve got a big one.