Cheapertising

Thomas Nelson is one of the biggest book publishers around, and a major player in the Christian book industry. CEO Michael Hyatt posted on his blog, From Where I Sit, about their recent decision to drop out of two major industry trade shows and what they’re doing instead for existing customers. His post also includes links to other media coverage about this brave new marketing decision.

Heard during an e-metrics webinar by longtime web marketer Jim Sterne: HIPPO – Highest Paid Opinion. HIPPOs can overwhelm any sensible advertising or marketing effort, online or off. Always be on the lookout for signs of them and take appropriate action.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of Turing’d, tune in to this post on Kevin Kelly’s provocative blog The Technium. Much of what he says applies to marketing and advertising, particualrly in research and media. But creativity is not immune. As evidence, I offer this website: theadgenerator.org. It’s rudimentary, I admit, but there’s something unnerving for a creative type like me when you see a program that can generate concepts every 3-5 seconds. I have no doubt that refinements are in the works.

“Data Trumps Intuition” – Ronny Kohavi, general manager for the experimentation platform at Microsoft. He was previously the director of data mining and personalization at Amazon.com.

For ad and marketing types looking to understand how to survive the digital changes taking place, Irishman Gerry McGovern is not a bad place to start. He writes and lectures about the need to understand customers and the words they care to hear in the Internet age. Check out his latest column: Finding is the new advertising One of my favorite quotes: “Bringing TV ads to the Internet is like the Pony Express trying to breed faster horses in order to compete with the telegraph.”

In another sign the good old days are now just plain old, one of the pillars of advertising is going with the flow. Check this out from Mitch Joel’s blog Six Pixels of Separation: When GM Shifts 1.5 Billion From Traditional Advertising To Digital Marketing… As Joel asks near the end of his post, “Is this the Perfect Digital Marketing Storm?”

From comScore via TechCrunch, some of the latest web trends in chart form. Examine at your own risk: The Web in Charts—Google vs. Microsoft-Yahoo vs. China 

If you, like me, ponder the future of advertising, I’d like you to reconsider one of the industry’s high-water marks. It routinely ranks in the highest echelon of TV spots – Apple Computer’s “1984,” which heralded the coming of the Macintosh. Looking at it almost 25 years later, the Mac now appears to have not only liberated users from the drudgery of a PC-topia, but also (along with the Internet) has freed consumers from having to sit back and take whatever advertisers and their agencies want them to watch. Maybe we should have seen it as the beginning of the end….

As life shifts to the Internet, venerable institutions start losing their balance. Now, it’s the U.S. Postal Service. This Washington Post article highlights some of the trends taking place that could have a bigger impact on your mailbox than rain or snow or fear of anthrax. Web usage is helping citizens take control of their communication channels. Will “do not mail” become as popular as “do not call?”

Arlo and Janis courtesy of my local newspaper: