Hanging out with the cool crowd

To improve the quantity and quality of people in their online community, The Patrón Spirits Company is building a two-way cross promotional system with more popular sites.

Mediapost Marketing Daily: Patrón Club Leveraging Content Partnerships, 2009-Jul-24, by Karlene Lukovitz

In essence, the brand is taking online media buys to a different level by aggregating and integrating the exclusive content and event opportunities. Eleven site partners are currently providing exclusive content, refreshed monthly, for an area within the club site dubbed "The Agenda." [Hip content sites include Going.com, Urban Daddy, Thrillist, Pandora, etc.] Partners are responsible for generating articles relevant to the Patrón brand's core target audience and driving new, qualified members to the club site via whatever brand-appropriate tactics they believe will be effective.

Reintegrating the brand after many campaign jumps

Burger King, like many major brands, has jumped from one advertising campaign to another, maximizing confusion. Now they recognize that their customers want to them to be something more integrated. It's like looking in a fractured mirror, of course.

Wall Street Journal Digits Blog: Subservient Chicken, Whopper Freakout Come to BK.com, 2009-Jul-20, by Andrew LaVallee

Burger King has redesigned its primary U.S. site, BK.com, to feature well-known but long-gone ads such as “Subservient Chicken” and “Whopper Freakout.” The site, which emerges from beta today, will still provide corporate information that it’s hosted in the past, such as nutritional information, menus and restaurant locators, but it adds the ability to dial that back and increase the video content, or vice versa.

Cinnabon uses direct mail to work the neighborhood

Online marketers often get inquiries from geographies they cannot serve. On the other hand, direct mail marketers can buy every address in their own zip code!

1to1 Media: Cinnabon Uses Direct Mail to Tempt Potential Customers, 2009-Jul-20

Hill and his team designed a program to send direct mail pieces to small businesses within a two-mile radius of certain Cinnabon mall locations. ..."We mailed out 60,000 posters that companies could hang in their break rooms, each containing 20 perforated coupons."  ... Money Mailers' numbers show that the campaign produced a 54 percent return on investment.

Cell phone users take ads they can control

Advertising on mobile phones will take off when users believe they can control them.

Mobile Marketer: Traditional advertisers ramping up their mobile strategies: Study, 2009-Jul-17, with Giselle Tsirulnik interviewing Mack McKelvey of Millennial Media:

“Entertainment advertisers ... know the power of the mobile ad network model and they strategically leverage it to target and engage their consumers with unique interactions at various points in their campaigns.”

Still checkin' the old mail box

While all the other marketers are busy trying to figure out Facebook and Twitter, your customers are still checkin' the old mail box.

The Media Audit, FYI Newsletter, Direct Mail Use Increasing despite Competition, 2009-July:

A new study conducted by The Media Audit reveals that the percent of adults who are considered heavy direct mail users has been slowly growing over the past three years .... Among all U.S. adults, only 27.3% do not read any direct mail received in a typical week. ... Also, heavy direct mail users are more likely than the average adult to be spending money on home remodeling, consumer electronics, and new furniture.

Managing not achieved by measuring

While everyone is busy demanding a 'return' or profit on every marketing tactic they use, not everyone realizes what they are measuring.

Dim Bulb (blog): Marketing In The Matrix. 2009-Jul-9, by Jonathan Salem Baskin:

In business, a case history is only as good as its identified variables, which means most of them aren't terribly good at all.

We measure hoping to capture cause and effect, but in the real world, causes are often beyond our control, often beyond our imagination. The best we can do is develop a 'marketing theory' for our enterprise, and improve it over time using every scrap of evidence we can find.

Marketing (UK magazine): Reinventing Marketing, 2009-Jul-7, by Alan Mitchell

... beneath the same surface appearance, there may be multiple causes and effects; each one its own mini-mystery.... Learn more from Alan Mitchell