Archive for October, 2007

I had a very interesting conversation with Charles Prescott, the VP of Global Education for the Direct Marketing Association. Charles comes from a direct mail background, whereas I am a child of the internet. We like to joke with each other about which is the better medium, but ultimately we know that there is a lot that we can learn from each other. Direct Marketing Success One of the things that he told me was that the most critical part of a direct mail/marketing campaign was the selection and refinement of a list. While most research is anecdotal, most accounts put the importance of list selection up to 70% of…

In the Most Obvious Headline of the Year, eMarketer tells us that “Poor Content Makes Viral Marketing Fizzle.” Really. Jupiter Research reports that only 15% of viral campaigns get passed along. The reason viral marketing rates are so low? Poor Content. (What a surprise) Jennifer Laycock and I do many viral planning campaigns throughout the year, and we’ve heard more than our share of lame pitches. We have companies tell us that they want to do a viral campaign, but have no idea how or why it should happen. The worst thing, according to Jennifer, is when companies tell us, “”I have this (fill in the blank) I just built…

There are a some people that I highly respect in this industry, so when a few of them got together and started a company – it got my attention. When they said that they were starting a training company, I got very interested. The combination of John Marshall, Michael Stebbins (both formally of ClickTracks) and Avinash Kaushik (author of Web Analytics an Hour a Day) joined forces because of their passion to teach. Thus, MarketMotive was officially introduced. In August, I had dinner with John and Michael to discuss their new venture. I was fascinated by the business model and the passion that they had to train businesses to “do…