Saturday, October 20, 2007

This is a rock band

Sunday, October 14, 2007

The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life - New York Times

The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life - New York Times

Here's an article in the NY Times about a shift away from traditional media by marketers. What I think is interesting is that the mainstream press isn't saying, "Everything's going digital". They are looking at from a broader perspective and recognizing how advertisers are merely shifting their support from content to tools.

Advertisers are moving away from making content "free" and towards making "tools" free. Those tools can be a running club or a matching making service. It can be digital or live in the real world.

This doesn't mean ad supported content is dead, it means the bar is raised. It doesn't mean "tools" will achieve an advertisers goals. Its means awesome tools will meet advertisers goals.

In the end, it will be marketers looking at their customers, (and to steal a line from this week's Private Practice) figure out what they want, and then give it to them.

BusinessWeek Debate Room E-mail Faces Deletion

BusinessWeek Debate Room E-mail Faces Deletion

As a professional digital marketing guy I always feel I am not reading enough, sharing enough, blogging enough. (as can be seen by this pathetic stretch between posts). But I do think the reason is that I am crushed by emails. Merely deleting them and filing them takes hours a day.

Can there be tools better than email to conduct business? Most definitely. Scoble is on to something here.

I manage a group of three people (hardly a daunting number) and they copy me on tons of emails to make sure I am "in the loop", can cover them if they decide to get sick or go vacation, and can advise if I see a major issue. Its very important I can do all those things. I don't need to engage with these emails on a daily basis but they clutter my inbox and take up valuable time. I can't imagine how the person that manages 30 people gets by.

There must be a better way. I don't know, as Scoble suggests, the answer is twitter and facebook though.