I love the idea of advertising, because at its best, it combines free thinking and creative problem solving with meeting your company's needs and building relationships with your customers.
How can you catch someone's attention and make it worth their time? More than that, how can you make them appreciate and enjoy the fact that you just advertised to them? Ideally, advertising should be like trading: both parties should end up in a better situation after the transaction than they were before it. On the business side, this means an increased attachment to their brand by the customer and therefore an increase in sales and profits; or, for a non-profit organization, a more effective way of communicating about their mission and raising awareness of the problems they're trying to solve. On the consumer's side, it means a smile for their day that they wouldn't have had otherwise, or an increased awareness of an issue that has been brought startlingly close to home, or something else that has affected them for the better and caused them to think.
How would you advertise a pasta place, knives, Wite-Out, or job hunting? It can be done surprisingly, and surprisingly well.
How can you use a space that's unexpected and make it a memorable way of sharing about your product?
How do you advertise a niche service to the people that would actually want it, such as crime scene clean-up?
Now, I know what you might say. "So," you might say, "that's all fantastic stuff for 'real life' advertising, but what about the Internet where people spend most of their free times these days? How so you deal with that?" Well, that's a very good question, and it's one I don't think we've quite figured out the answer to. Actually, I think it's a question that can't have The Answer. As Joe Pulizzi has pointed out on his blog, Junta42, the Internet has completely reset the way we do marketing. His three concepts help to provide a great foundation for what effective marketing often needs to look like in the age of super-specialized, super-vocal, and super-opinionated viewer attention. (And, of course, I would encourage you to read the Seth Godin post he links to as well.) There's an excellent eBook that Joe offers up which serves as a useful and quick introduction to the emergence and importance of social media.
So how can you take advantage of the Internet to connect to your market in a meaningful and creative way?
- You can develop an incredibly strange Alternate Reality Game website to generate buzz (heh heh) for your video game.
- You can make an excellent and personal game journalism blog as a way to create interest for your novel.
- You can create an arcade game and hire a celebrity to promote your charity competition, all of which has the delightful side-effect of securing a soft spot in the hearts of a finicky demographic.
The possibilities are endless, so long as you deliver content that your audience cares about, you don't waste their time, and you don't abuse their trust.
How can you catch someone's attention and make it worth their time? More than that, how can you make them appreciate and enjoy the fact that you just advertised to them? Ideally, advertising should be like trading: both parties should end up in a better situation after the transaction than they were before it. On the business side, this means an increased attachment to their brand by the customer and therefore an increase in sales and profits; or, for a non-profit organization, a more effective way of communicating about their mission and raising awareness of the problems they're trying to solve. On the consumer's side, it means a smile for their day that they wouldn't have had otherwise, or an increased awareness of an issue that has been brought startlingly close to home, or something else that has affected them for the better and caused them to think.
How would you advertise a pasta place, knives, Wite-Out, or job hunting? It can be done surprisingly, and surprisingly well.
How can you use a space that's unexpected and make it a memorable way of sharing about your product?
How do you advertise a niche service to the people that would actually want it, such as crime scene clean-up?
Now, I know what you might say. "So," you might say, "that's all fantastic stuff for 'real life' advertising, but what about the Internet where people spend most of their free times these days? How so you deal with that?" Well, that's a very good question, and it's one I don't think we've quite figured out the answer to. Actually, I think it's a question that can't have The Answer. As Joe Pulizzi has pointed out on his blog, Junta42, the Internet has completely reset the way we do marketing. His three concepts help to provide a great foundation for what effective marketing often needs to look like in the age of super-specialized, super-vocal, and super-opinionated viewer attention. (And, of course, I would encourage you to read the Seth Godin post he links to as well.) There's an excellent eBook that Joe offers up which serves as a useful and quick introduction to the emergence and importance of social media.
So how can you take advantage of the Internet to connect to your market in a meaningful and creative way?
- You can develop an incredibly strange Alternate Reality Game website to generate buzz (heh heh) for your video game.
- You can make an excellent and personal game journalism blog as a way to create interest for your novel.
- You can create an arcade game and hire a celebrity to promote your charity competition, all of which has the delightful side-effect of securing a soft spot in the hearts of a finicky demographic.
The possibilities are endless, so long as you deliver content that your audience cares about, you don't waste their time, and you don't abuse their trust.
Thanks Mark...love your takeaways. Becoming a true solutions provider is the best way to drive your business. Be a needed resource, and when they are ready to buy, they'll start with you.
Good luck with the blog!
Posted by: Toy Fighter | 08/25/2009 at 03:48 PM