The The Next Big Thing After the Current Big Thing

This is a duplicate post from David Allison’s blog on BC Business – One Brand Clapping

David Allison predicts that the next new scary channel will be mobile marketing. Brrr you just received a new text message…

I don’t want to pretend to be some kind of marketing Nostradamus, but I’m going to make a prediction. Once social media becomes mainstream and everyone stops prattling on endlessly about it, the next scary new channel for all of us to wrap our head around will be mobile marketing. Mobile marketing is nothing more than messages that show up on your mobile phone.  For those of you who don’t have this on your radar yet, you need to pay attention to this blog post. You’d best be prepared.

There were 4.1 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world at the end of 2008. That’s subscriptions – people actually using their phones – so it doesn’t include the ones in my desk drawer that will never see the light of day again. And unlike computers, most people have a phone with them at all times. Moreover, people tend to read text messages immediately, unlike emails or voice mails, which increasingly we save for later.

Now imagine if your company could send updates, links, videos, and sales information to customers and fans as text messages. If you could motivate a sales force with minute-by-minute updates on account wins. If you could motivate a database with special offers, 60 seconds from right now. It’s already happening, to the tune of $391 million in spending on this medium in the USA in (2009). And that number is predicted to grow by 35% over the next 5 years. The privacy act dictates that you can only send messages to those who request it, so don’t be worried that you are going to be swamped with unsolicited text spam, but you will be engaged with mobile marketing as a consumer, if not already, then very soon.

“Mobile is like direct mail on steroids. It’s personal, immediate, and fantastically intrusive,” says Amielle Lake, co-founder and CEO of Tagga Media Inc., a Vancouver-based company that sells advertising agencies a platform to launch these campaigns on behalf of clients (full disclosure: my company, Braun/Allison Inc. has purchased this system, and it rocks). “It’s still an emerging medium, but once marketers see what it can do, they are hooked.”

The Fortune 500 are all experimenting with this. Thousands of geeks in thousands of basements are developing applications for your mobile phone. Major consumer brands are investing significant resources to try and be at the front of the wave. At Braun/Allison we’ve used it on real estate project hoarding and in print ads as a way for pedestrians and drivers to register for more information or prizes (try it: text the word CENTURY to 82442)*. We’ve used it to promote restaurant chains, and push out special offers (Want a free entree? Text GLOWBAL to 82442)*. We’ve even used it in a very rudimentary way to promote One Brand Clapping, the very blog that you are reading right now (text ONEBRAND to 82442)*.

* Message and data rates may apply

As far as I’m concerned, it should be a response mechanism on every print ad, direct mail piece, billboard, and bus side that we produce for every one of our clients. It makes all mediums interactive. Every one of your customers has a mobile phone, they all know how to use text messages, and they read text messages right away. This will become a part of your marketing program…maybe not today, but someday sooner than you think. Are you ready?

Read more: http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/onebrand#ixzz0NzyU0LTc

Print Advertising Still Works

This is a duplicate post from David Allison’s blog on BC Business – One Brand Clapping

Even in today’s market, some well-placed column-inches can still work wonders

There’s no question that print advertising has been taking a bit of a beating of late. And for our clients, they aren’t the cornerstone of a marketing campaign like they used to be. But print ads still have an important role to play, albeit a different one than the role they played in pre-recessionary times. Here’s what you can expect from them, and how to make sure you have a good one.

What to expect from new-school print ads

For many old-school marketers this is the hard bit. We circle around these clients in our board room and chant the following line in soft dulcet tones, hoping it will seep into their consciousness in a pleasant way:
“A print ad is not a salesperson. Do not expect a print ad to sell anything.”

In fact, print ads have never been good at selling things – and this has always been a place where many companies fall down. In the new economy, it’s just more true than before, because people don’t want to be sold anything. They want information. So if you have a really good print ad, it might be successful at getting people to remember something about your brand. An exceptional print ad might get prospects to go to your website for more information. But that’s about all you can expect.

If you think an aggressive print campaign is going to get your product to fly of the shelves, I’m afraid you need to give your head a shake. Consumers today want more of a relationship than a print ad alone can give.

Viewed through another filter, however, what print ads can do is fantastic. Think about it for a moment: you can buy a piece of a page in a targeted publication, and if your print ad is working right you can get people to seek more information. What marketer wouldn’t want that?

With that in mind, here are six rules to keep in mind to make sure your print ad is working as hard as it can for you:

1. The law of singular focus says a print ad can talk about one thing well. Just one. Pick a very competitive benefit that distinguishes you from your competitors and focus on that. Forget all the other stuff.
2. Don’t try to be clever. You can be creative, and you should be, but kooky headlines and nutty visuals will just obfuscate the message.
3. Don’t sell, just educate.
4. Have a clear and concise call to action. What do you want people to do?
5. If you can leave something out without damaging the message, leave it out. Less is more. Ditch the map, the hours of operation, the photos of your sales team, the history of your company and the fourteen awards you won last year. You can put all that on your website.
6. Make it easy for people to follow up. Your website address and other contact information should be easy to find and easy to read.

For any experienced marketers out there, these six rules will seem very elementary. But if you look at 99 per cent of the print ads in any publication, you’ll see that most advertisements break at least half of these rules. If advertisers can at least start following these simple rules, they may re-discover the value of print advertising – and have an old but new tool at their disposal as they work to meet their sales objectives.

Read more: HERE

One Brand Clapping: David Allison’s New Blog at BC Business

David has been in branding and advertising for a long time. So long, in fact, that he’s given to expounding a lot about the subtle art of communication, and the best ways forward for businesses in the new economy.

He really needs a way to vent all this stuff. I mean, it’s really lucid and insightful and everything, but we get kind of a lot of it around here.

So we were really happy when we heard that David was beginning a blog on the BC Business website. It’s called One Brand Clapping, which should give you some idea of mandate and tone of the thing: It waxes philosophical about all the seismic shifts taking place in the world of business, and invites clear new thinking about how we can meet the many challenges that face companies now.

So far, it’s been pretty fascinating. And we’re all happy that we get to read it on our own time, instead of being cornered at the office. Well done, David.