MarketingSherpa Blog

MediaBuy$.us a new ad buying and selling marketplace online is set to launch Oct 1st. The site was founded by Chick Inc an LA-based agency who do a lot of media buying for the entertainment industry, especially B2B (or I guess you could call it B2E). Hollywood Reporter is definitely on board.

Although it’s an online marketplace, they are mostly focusing on selling print ad pages in trade magazines. They have an ambitious
plan to expand rapidly beyond entertainment to a 84 different industries from agricultural to real estate. So I guess they’d be a bit like B2BWorks network only for offline instead of online. Which is neat, print media sales being changed by online sales tactics.

We’ve all seen too many B2B e-marketplaces crash and burn after announcing grandiose plans over the past few years to have high
expectations for a new one. It’s worth looking into if you are a trade publisher. Listings are f*ree.

http://www.mediabuys.us/

Oh my god! How fun is this? It’s past midnight here and I just got an email from an exec in Australia who likes our TortureaSpammer game. I click on the link in her signature to learn more about her company (I do this with all personal email I get. It is a great way to meet future sources for stories) and it leads me to this Flash-driven site for The One Centre. I think they are an interactive ad agency, was too overwhelmed by their presentation to really make note of it.

Why so overwhelmed when I’ve seen (and reviled) zillions of agency Flash sites in the past? It’s the way they use it. The site opens up and instead of canned music playing while big words and logos dance about on the screen, it shows the picture of a woman’s face. Then she starts talking, “Allow me to give you a tour of the site – if you’re interested in X, go here, if you’re looking for Y go here, etc.” As she speaks different bits of the nav bar light up indicating what she’s talking about.

It was a bit jerky, her lips and words are not in synch. For me it was thrilling. I hadn’t seen that before for a B2B site. It kinda blew my head open and made me think about the future of Web design. It’s been a very long time since anything really did that.

Last week we went from single to double opt-in for one of our publications, MarketingSherpa, because of the torture game. I figure we ought to put Best Practices in action (practice what I preach) especially because the viral game may be played by all sorts of civilians who normally wouldn’t know to visit our site
and sign up for subscriptions. The hurdle that normally pre-qualifies them for a subscription is not there.

Results? 82% confirmation rate so far, which means 82% are replying to the confirmation email in the affirmative. I try to think of the remaining 18% not as “lost” circulation, but as culled out “bad” circulation. People who didn’t really want our newsletter, and who might have viewed it as a pest in their inbox over time.

Tonight I got an interesting offer from my domain registrar, GoDaddy.com. They’re offering “unlisted” registration of domains. On the surface, this might not look like an email technology issue, but isn’t is obvious that spammers would take advantage of this service? For $6 (on top of your regular registration fees) per domain, you can register your domain to Domains by Proxy. This will make finding spammers that much more difficult.

Sure, I would like to stop getting email (as I just did today) for a domain that I registered in 1999, but have since let lapse, offering me great business leads. However, I’m not sure I want would-be spammers to have this kind of anonymity available to them. I hope Domains by Proxy has a good legal department, because I imagine they’re going to be getting a lot of subpoenas.

I wonder if one of the domains registered to Domains by Proxy were to spam, and were to be blacklisted. Would the blacklist be likely to add the rest of the domains registered by Domains by Proxy? Talk about moving into a seedy neighborhood! Let us know and we’ll post the answer here.

Has the ‘Net spawned a new type of advertising offline? Inspired, at least partially, by take-over-a-site campaigns that consumer marketers such as Ford, LEGO, even the little purple pill, have been testing for about a year now, HP is launching the print version. According to the spokesperson who just called me up, next week’s issues of People, the New Yorker, Sports’ llustrated and Newsweek will be completely taken over by HP ads. Back cover, inside front, and everything in the middle.

It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in a recession. But it’s kind of cool.

I always thought of sponsorships (as in the classic sense of the word such as sponsored sporting events) as being one of those niches in marketing that it would be neat to know more about, but hey who has time for everything and it’s only a niche right?

I take it back. $27.4 billion is *not* a niche. $27.4 billion spent globally in 2001 is a heck of a lot of money. Plus, it’s about the fastest growing form of advertising out there. Last year it grew by about 5%. During an average year in the past decade it grew by 10%. To put this in perspective, during the 1991 recession, regular advertising grew by -2.9%.

If you’re interested in the sponsorship scene, check out SponsorClick which tracks it in the US, Canada and Europe. Your choice of free newsletter in French or English.

In the 12 hours since we launched our new online game, TortureaSpammer, loads of people have written in notes saying they like it. (Including one guy from a spam-stopping software firm who said, “You’ve immobilized the entire office, every desktop is playing it.” Hey, as long as it’s lunch-hour. Right? 🙂 ) Here are some fun further links from readers and friends:

1. Tim Gibbon of ElementalPR in the UK sent over his list of favorite viral marketing-related sites to inspire us to further glories:

Ha! Just got another email from our tireless ad trafficking guy Dan Zebroski: (typos mine)

“Another case of those dumb s*pam firewalls. A client provided text for their ad, it was loaded with our favorites, such as f*ree and c*lick to d*ownload. When I replied to their email, I said please change your ad because a number of the companies are turning away emails with those words in the text.

I sent the reply to them, not changing any of their text that was in an attachment, well about 30 to 45 seconds later, I received the following message:

Your message did not reach the intended recipient, it was rejected by email security for containing either; S*PAM, graphic
material or unsafe attachments. If you feel that this is an error please email the postmaster at.

Needless to say once we sent the original message and the error message to her home account. I didn’t have very much trouble
convincing them that they needed a change on their creative.”

Copywriting tip for the day. Are you really, honestly using the exact same language your prospect uses?

The results from this online quiz Pop vs Soda really made me think about copywriting. If I were a copywriter creating an ad for a carbonated beverage, I’d probably use the word “soda” without thinking twice about it. However, turns out that more than 50% of Americans and Canadians habitually use the word “Pop” instead. Luckily the differences are regional so you can actually create two different ads and have your media buyer split the buy to make the campaign more effective.

Of all copywriters out there, the worst at thinking about the way prospects use words are technology marketers. Either they’ll use made-up terms they invented to describe their stuff so they can safely say they are #1 in their category, or they use highly technical terms the techies assured the copywriter the marketplace uses (never listen to techies’ wording suggestions), or they use broad terms such as “CRM solution” because the marketer isn’t actually quite sure what the tech specifically does, or they use big words that seemed to impress the VCs when they got that last round of funding. OK enough. Tech copywriting is such an easy target that it’s almost not fair to rag on about it.

Here’s a challenge, email me samples of tech marketing copywriting where the marketer used words that prospects actually do use to describe their need or product. I’d be delighted to give kudos. AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

P.S. Thanks to for the Pop versus Soda link.

Most realtors these days in the US will offer to sign prospects and clients up for a daily email from the MLSMessenger service, so every morning you get a listing of the latest houses listed in the town(s) you’re looking in. The email appears to be coming directly from your broker for that nice personal touch.

Being a relentless test-it marketer, I got on several brokers’ lists for this, and recently one in particular, Edward Moy of RE/MAX of Newport, has impressed me because he’s using the system to go the extra step toward really connecting with prospects and clients in a personal way. Moy has started supplementing the daily HTML email with extra little notes sent separately now and then.

The timing is irregular. It’s about once a week but you can’t count on a particular time or day, which helps this campaign feel much more personal. After all my friends don’t send me an email every Thursday at 2 P.M. They dash off a note whenever they have something specific to tell me. The fact that Moy’s extra notes are always in text-only also makes them feel “real.”

Plus he writes them in a personal-sounding manner. One starts, “Hello Anne, On occasion I see a house that I think is worth quick investigation. 24 South Drive is one of those. I admit, I live on the same street, perhaps that is why I like this house, etc.” Another note talked briefly about a neat Web site he’d discovered that revealed the latest valuations for houses in his county. It sounded useful, I clicked right through.

None of the notes are very long, not longer than a paragraph. None include a hard sales pitch to use his service. He’s just keeping in touch. You know, sometimes I think we all get so excited about the power of email newsletters that we forget a little “personal” note now and then can also work wonders through email.