Marketing Automation, Lead Management, and Training to Achieve Data Driven Revenue™
Today The Marketing Consigliere is flattered to be a guest blogger on Geoff Livingston’s The Buzz Bin. They have briefly discussed the collective rise in power of bloggers, another manifestation of the “wisdom of crowds” concept. Bloggers are achieving credibility – all in just a few years.
The Marketing Consigliere encourages you to read Geoff’s blogs and if you ever get a chance, hear his impassioned speaking about business blogging and social media.
With Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and a headsets or microphone, users will be able to place free calls to U.S. and Canadian phone numbers over their computers – the catch?- Pudding Media‘s voice recognition powered ad serving system will deliver ads during the conversation on their computer screen.
Similar analytics are already in use with textual data; Google’s Gmail delivers advertisements upon analyzing text in the Gmail user’s correspondence. While the voice recognition is not perfect, there will probably be improvements with time from the contextual perspective.
Currently, Pudding Media does not record conversations nor make a central list of the keywords extracted, but advertisers will probably be wanting a collected log of words used and analysis of the context in which they are spoken. Given the desire of advertisers for ROI on their investment and their power over content providers, this seems inevitable and privacy advocates probably will not be able to fight such a volunteer system.
Sensor technology is paving the way for innovative advertising. Travelers passing through Houston, Orlando and Miami’ s main airports will now be able to activate ads simply by walking near a wall. On these walls are oversized ads that will roll, courtesy of JCDeacaux North America, the agency, Orbitz, the advertiser, and Monster Media, the technology provider of the “MonsterVision” advertising system. MonsterVision was unleashed earlier this year in Las Vegas McCarran International Airport. (The Marketing Consigliere was in Vegas in June but unfortunately didn’t see it – He hopes that’s not a bad omen!)
In high-traffic areas such as airports, malls, sports arenas, campuses, subway stations, and hospitals, a networked version of this system with touch screens could start yielding a king’s ransom of information for Marketers.
It will be interesting to see if the airport ads will eventually be more B2B oriented or B2C oriented. Given the novelty and entertainment value of the ads, there will probably be better creativity in them than in television commercials. One thing to remember is that, some travelers (maybe most) will naturally be in a hectic rush and won’t want to be slowed down, but those with time to kill before a flight might be the perfect captive audience.
Elly Trickett, the Editor-in-Chief of DM News, writes in her article “There’s Life (And Opportunity) Behind Data” about the difficulty of keeping track of consumers as they make life changes and inherently contact information changes. With a new residence but only a cell phone, her usual direct mail fails to reach her but certain vendors plugged into the moving / postal world know how to reach her quickly with messages of services and products relevant to new home owners. Good for the B2C world. [Read more...]
Omniture and salesforce.com announced the launching of Omniture Closed-Loop Marketing on salesforce.com’s AppExchange.
This is a great example of aligning sales and marketing – working with sales, marketers will be able to follow simultaneous marketing campaigns and to ascribe credit to the specific campaigns resulting in a sale, transaction or a conversion.
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Marketers should be all over this and sales should be demanding more campaigns. Even without the robust salesforce.com element, Marketers should be ecstatic about Omniture’s acquisition of Offermatica last week – that is also sure to be a great marriage of web analytics and multivariate testing. Companies that don’t have these types of tools will be surprised when they find out they are being outmaneuvered by competitors that do. This marriage of capabilities allows SMBs a better C4ISR Marketing capability and should get Marketers a little more respect from Sales.
A couple weeks back, the Web Analytics Association hosted a webinar entitled “Web Analytics is Easy!” along with Eric Peterson’s Web Analytics Demystified. The title was ironic on purpose. Web analytics is complicated and just beginning to evolve. One of the most interesting slides called “Web Site Optimization Ecosystem Technology” prompted The Marketing Consigliere to do a little quick and dirty research. [Read more...]
