Another Head Slammer…

Zzzz is for...

Following on from my learned friends post regarding the stunning quality of insight achieved by the latest Marketing Sherpa email research, here’s another one for you…

A business called Zeta Interactive have done their detailed analysis of the web using a special tool that is probably really expensive and very, very, difficult to understand without a PHD and have proved that in the States, the number one concern during financial crisis is mortgage payments – read more here.

Outstanding. The most expensive outgoing is the primary concern of households during tough financial times… watch this space for other exclusive insights into the web-world.

However, this great bit of publicity got onto ‘AOL Money’, great to see that AOL have cut back on Human Editorial Controls in this age of financial duress…

Now That’s Advertising

Over on BeerViking I read about how a Carlsberg-owned brewery in Bulgaria, Shumensko, created free-giveaway bags that look like the carrier is holding a case of beer on this side.

How great is that!

Finding the Right Kind of Hood

The Local Onliner, Peter Krasilovsky, writes about a service launched in the US by Homethinking that allows you to find similar neighbourhoods from city to city.

Example below is from Boston to Seatlle.

Last year, saw this AdViking spending way too much time on Real Estate sites in the UK (mostly:  Rightmove and Globrix) and a service like this was exactly what I needed.  I ended up building my own hack using Acorn data available from Upmystreet.

Now what would be really handy is something similiar but Globally, say from London to Seattle.

Lies, damned lies and the bloody obvious

Statistics. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t choose between coffee and tea without ‘em.

Marketers and politicians live or die by what stats we can dig up to prove our most spurious points. We’ve even developed a sense of humour, occasionally, about them, like in the old Guinness ads that proclaimed that 86% of statistics are made up on the spot.

But I couldn’t help but scoff at the statement-of-the-bleedin’-obvious that just hit my inbox from MarketingSherpa.

They’ve done a survey!

And guess what: it turns out that “online marketers who think e-mail effectiveness is increasing have a much different approach to budgeting than those who tink the tactic is becoming less worthwhile.”

Well thank heavens we know this now.

Aaargh, Chris Brogan’s Call to Arms

Probably a mini-post that should be on Twitter but I loved Chris Brogan’s post about The Beauty of Pirate Ships I had to write something here as well.

Basiclly, it’s saying take your lead from the pirates and don’t care about the details but about the booty…focus in on the big things (the treasure) and stay focused on that.  That is who cares what the boat looks like, if you’ve got a boat that can sail and take pirates and guns then go for it.

AdViking thinks of this three ways:

Individually – Now’s not a time to back down, it’s a time to get focused, agressive and remember our viking (early pirates) roots

Start-ups – Find your niche, don’t boil the ocean and if you can stay the course, you should be in a good postiion

Big co’s – Don’t under-invest in your digital strategy.  Invest more but in the right areas.  Google only really has Search advertising.  Cut them off at the knees and find a new approach to Search.  Move your Display business away from DoubleClick now.  Get going with your Mobile and Social Media strategies…

Or to put it another way, as David Ogilvy said:

The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.

Does Your Browser Know Where You Are?

Building on the excitement created by the location services available through the iPhone.  Mozilla Labs announced release of the Geode plugin for Firefox.  It’s an extension that will be fully baked in 3.1 and talks to the same Skyhook service that iPhone and iTouch uses to help locate you and communicate to other services about your location.

This is interesting as generally to date the conversation about LBS has been around mobile but this is a natural extension into the browser and starts to overcome the difficulty with targeting location on IP.

Here’s what Mozilla Labs says about the importance of this:

The potential here is for more than just resturant lookups. For example, imagine an RSS reader that knows the difference between home and work and automatically changes it’s behavior appropriately. Or a news site whose local section is, in fact, actually local. Or Web site authentication that only allows you to login from certain physical locations, like your house.

AdViking says this is all fine and dandy and may provide an incremental data stream to enhance ad targeting but thinks the real value is only going to be mined and opened up by services that communicate openly with their users.