ShiftedPixels

Great viral video - Make a joke of yourself and improve your product sales

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Saturday, December 15, 2007

Thanks Servant Of Chaos

This piece of research (that beautifully rolls up into a great viral piece) by the makers of Drambuie, is a great introduction on how paying yourself out and using negative customer feedback can improve your sales.

I think Guy Kawasaki's advice on the value of polarising your customer base comes true in this piece.

Ive never tried Drambuie, but given this bunch of yokels hate it, it makes me want to go and try it :)

Labels: advertising, conversations, demographics, Marketing, Sydney Internet Marketing, Sydney Video Production, sydney viral marketing, viral

Posted by Nick HaC @ 9:33 PM

The cost of advertising in NYC (Video)

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Saturday, November 3, 2007

Its increadible to imagine to total sum of all street advertising for any given month in NYC...

I loved this video

Labels: advertising

Posted by Nick HaC @ 8:17 PM

When online editorial meets banner advertising

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Sunday, October 21, 2007

Check out this unfortunate clash on SMH.com.au.

This kind of Editorial/Advertising clash would be difficult to find in traditional media, however with computer assisted banner ad placements we might see more and more of this online.

On one hand it may make sense for telstra to advertise here, maybe to try and overcome negative sentiment from the editorial. On the other hand telstra might be upset by this computer generated irony, and may request their adverting dollars back from SMH.

Labels: advertising, communities, Online PR, reputation management, reputation monitoring

Posted by Nick HaC @ 5:31 PM

Sprinting, Statups, Ideas and Professionalism

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Thursday, October 4, 2007

Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. Its that way in most new business too.

The earliest phase is usually the most productive.

The striking thing about this phase is that its often completely different from what people think "business" looks like. When you think business you think suits, offices, boardrooms, reports. However most successful businesses are the opposite of this, and whats more they are probably the most productive part of the whole economy.

Why the disconnect? I think there's a principle at work here: the less energy people spend on performance, the more they spend on appearance to compensate.

Whats worse is that the energy people spend on seeming impressive, actually makes their performance worse!

Suits, for example, don't help people think better. I bet most executives at big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and are making coffee in a bathrobe (or in the shower or reading a bedtime story to their kids). That's when you have really big ideas! Just imagine what a company would be like if people could think that well at work all the time.

I don't have a proposal for how to achieve this in the real world, but it did seem interesting to pry this topic open.

Sometimes i think professionalism is a dieing fad from the 1970's. Today we want authentic, genuine products, partners, clients, suppliers and friends. Real people who do real work. No longer does the bland, fake "take a number and get in line" sterility of professionalism cut it for the informed, seasoned, advertising-hardened consumer.

What do you think, leave a comment on the blog...

Disclaimer: Thanks to Jessica Livingstone and Paul Graham for Inspiration

Labels: advertising, behaviour, communities, consumer, internet, Marketing

Posted by Nick HaC @ 3:35 AM

Brand Strategy - If your product isnt the best, its better for the bottom line to be honest

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Great Article in AdAge, Below...

Don't Convince Us Your Brand's Better that it is If It Isn't

Be True: So Your Product Isn't Inherently the Winning Choice? Thats ok, Just Tell an Honest , genuine Story.

Balanced diet
If you practice what I call a brand-balanced diet, the following criteria will sound familiar:

Your brand story is consistent and can be measured against consumer-resonant benefits.
Your brand teaches rather than preaches.
You enable your consumers to have choices and are sympathetic to "studied cheating."
You invite your consumers to be part of your brand through ongoing dialog.

http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article.php?article_id=120028

Labels: advertising, behaviour, branding, consumer, Marketing

Posted by Nick HaC @ 9:52 PM

Social Media Optimisation - SMO

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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

There has been much talk about the power of new media and social media, but what does this all mean? What is Social Media Optimisation and How does it effect your business?

Labels: advertising, communities, consumer, social networking, sydney viral marketing, video, web 2.0

Posted by Matt Vaughan @ 5:36 PM

Mick Stanic on understanding Podcasting, New Media and Consumer convesations

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Tuesday, August 7, 2007

We just bumped into a podcast from mid 2006 from PodWorkx that we thought was was quite interesting to see some early perspectives on podcasting and the role of consumer consumer generated media coming into play.

Click to Download - PodWorkx.com - An interview with Mick Stanic.mp3 (27.86 MB)

Today we had the pleasure of interviewing Mick Stanic. Co-Founder of ThePodcastNetwork and founding GM/EP at Singleton OgilvyInteractive. We talk about the state of the podcasting industry aswell as how Advertising and Media companys can relate to Podcasting as a technology and as a marketing channel. Thanks Mick!

Labels: advertising, communities, internet, Marketing, online, podcasting, Startups

Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:35 AM

I'd rather be a filthy hardcore spammer than be in direct marketing

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Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Seriously, why is spam illegal and so bad that you can go to jail for it?

Direct Mail is the real crime!

We checked out mail today and it would have had a kilo of junk mail in there.

Here's why DM sucks soo badly

1. Direct mail wastes precious natural resources (paper, manufacturing, energy), on the otherhand, Spam is just a bunch of zeros and ones in a server somewhere.

2. Junk mail creates soooo much paper/trash waste for councils/landfill/garbagetrucks, spam makes none of this.

3. Collecting mail can now be very frustrating and we have to sort it out which takes time and thought. You can also miss REAL legitimate mail, or dont get a letter in time cause it is burried in junk. Just like spam, but without the spamfilters! (Lightbulb... new business idea.)

We're not hippies or anti marketing or anything, just damn frustrated and even angry at the crap these brands expect us to put up with.

I wouldn't tolerate direct email if it was email spam, would you?

Labels: advertising, branding, consumer, Email, Ideas, reputation

Posted by Nick HaC @ 7:10 AM

8 Seconds to capture attention

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Monday, July 9, 2007

It's estimated that up to 50 percent of visitors to landing pages will bail in the first eight seconds.And while that amount of time can feel like an eternity to a bull rider in the rodeo, it's a mere blink of an eye to an email marketer hoping for strong conversions and a positive return-on-investment.

Online marketers spend countless hours and untold millions trying to make recipients click on a link leading to a landing page. But delivering only clicks is short-changing the company. Marketers need to convert prospects to customers; clicks need to result in purchases. with online marketing, the bridge between the click and the credit card is generally a landing page.

As online competition intensifies, greater efforts are being placed on maximizing revenues from each and every opportunity. And few opportunities are as rich with possibilities as when an email recipient clicks a link within a message and comes knocking at your online door.

A MarketingSherpa reader survey found that average landing page conversion rates for email campaigns ranged from 5.67 percent to 11 .31 percent for free offers, and from 5.67 percent to 7.63 percent for e-commerce campaigns.If your conversion rates are running near the bottom or below those ranges, consider making changes to your landing page program. A new evaluation by Silverpop of landing pages from 50 companies finds that placing a little more effort on nurturing recipients once they hit those landing pages would be time and money well spent. This report, evaluating landing pages from companies throughout North America and the United Kingdom, can serve as a valuable guide.

Key Findings

Landing pages that pass the eight-second test successfully feature a number of important attributes. Unfortunately, many of those reviewed in this study failed to grab the attention of customers and prospects, leading them down a clear path to conversion. Silverpop found that:

Successful landing pages grab attention quickly by matching the promotional copy in the email's call-to-action that yielded the click. Yet 45 percent of the landing pages evaluated failed to repeat the email's promotional copy in the headline.
Catapulting a clicker to a Web site's home page generally fails to deliver on the promise inherent in the email's call-to-action. Yet 7 percent of email campaigns dumped recipients there.
Recipients can be taken aback when they click on a link and end up on a landing page without the same look and feel as the email that captured their attention. But three out of 0 marketers risked confusing customers and prospects by sending them to landing pages not matching the email.
Asking too many questions can lead prospective customers to become wary and frustrated enough that they abandon the process. Nevertheless, 45 percent of landing pages that included forms required more than 0 fields to be completed.
While the presence of a navigation bar on a landing page can be a distraction that pulls visitors away from the primary conversion goal, nearly seven out of 0 landing pages included them.
Professional writers know it's a lot harder to write short copy than long. Apparently some marketers are taking the easy way out, since 25 percent of the landing pages reviewed by Silverpop required scrolling through more than two screens of text.

Download the full PDF Report

Labels: advertising, behaviour, Email, Marketing, online, websites

Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:13 PM

No matter what industry you're in, you're in the fashion industry

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We have seen an explosion of consumer choice, a new level of scarcity of consumer attention, the growth of abundance of options and masses and masses of online consumer review and comparison sites.

Under 30's have grown up with advertising, and are fully aware of the processes that corporate marketers use to sell them products.

Are there are more products than consumers need? Just go to the supermarket, you have 20 types of peanut butter, 200 types of cheese and 80 types of toothbrushes.

Want to but a tshirt online? Which one of the 10 million sites do you choose?

We could speculate that consumers and businesses make more choices based on social recommendation than advertisements.

We could also speculate that are seeing the end of the media-industrial era, and the rebirth of the pre-industrial era consumer run Market Place (this time with global, realtime efficiencies).

This new era is the market place of the people for the people. Of course there will still be a strong need for insustrial processes, but these will become commoditised as platforms, just like electricity and the railroads have become.

If you are selling a product, a service or an idea... spreading your brand will soon strongly rely on person to person social reccomendation.

But with so many products and features on offer, how do you get noticed? Instead of selling based on pure functionality, as a coat functionally keeps you warm, the new market is about style! So what defines style or fashion, social influence and reccomendation?

The drivers of social reccomendation are the early adopters, the merchants of cool. Those who take early risks and by breaking the norm send waves through the social landscape. Sometimes they succeed, and sometime they miss the mark. Aside from the risks of this space, this is the source of new social influence and trends. And this space must be recognised.

Dont think this only applies to consumer goods, business to business services and products follow the same rules. Business communities and social networks are potentially even closer, tighter and more intimate than those of the consumer social community. Is it possible that the tightness of the business community creates an even stronger desire to use the hip process or service or business practice?

The rules of consumer influenced have changed. Has your businsess shifted?

Labels: advertising, behaviour, branding, communities, consumer, design, internet, Marketing, online, pr, reputation, social networking, technology, viral, web 2.0

Posted by Nick HaC @ 5:46 AM

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

This is Broken

Seth Godin talks at Gel 2006, a very funny look at how stuff is broken.

Labels: advertising, behaviour, consumer, design, Fun, Ideas, Marketing

Posted by Nick HaC @ 10:32 PM

How not to produce a viral campaign

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Check out this new "Viral" video from a US Crysler Dealership

1. The Video is blatently "selling" the user, using traditional techniques. Same old TV advertising crap. The reason this video sucks is the same reason Tivo rocks.

2. Treading viewers like idiots doesnt work anymore. The best virals have a uniquely human voice, they sound human. This video sounds like ad talk.

3. There is nothing "Viral" about it. What information would viewers want to spread here?

4. There is no stimulation of viewer emotions. Why do i care?

5. No point of view. The most effective virals have a strong (even offensive) point of view. Its really the only way to get noticed in the new "Attention Economy"

6. No one got kicked in the nuts, and no boobs were shown (Lets face it, why do people typically watch YouTube)

Shifted Pixels is working with traditional businesses helping them prepare their existing media content for the new-media environment. Call us for a quick chat if you need more info...

Labels: advertising, Marketing, social networking, video, viral

Posted by Nick HaC @ 12:24 AM