FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

As I enthusiastically pitched the latest, coolest, online marketing product, my client cut me short: "I sell a dull product. Nobody will click on a banner to read more about it. People buy it because they need it, and when they don’t need it they don’t want to know anything more about it."

The core benefit on online media is engagement. But what happens when your client is selling a dull product and true engagement is unlikely?

For many, there is another category of dull products getting a lot of attention these days—presidential candidates. With many contests extremely close, it is often not the engaged, well informed voter who decides elections but rather the undecided, unengaged swing voter who might see More...

Denise Shiffman’s new book "Age of Engage" is insightful, illuminating and potentially terrifying for media sales people. Shiffman lays bare what the marketers we sell our ads to will be expecting in the next 10 years and sees a future requiring different skill sets and media products. In this world media consumers demand total engagement and control over the content we now dispense at our discretion.

Although she offers little specific advice on transforming our current products into Web 2.0 versions she clearly describes what expectations of all Web products and services must be. Here is a handy chart from the book describing expectations of the old vs. new Web:

More...

No matter what sector or industry you are in, this is a great study to sell the value of print advertising. The study—"What Doctors Think"—documents how physicians prefer to receive their professional information, and magazines top of their list. The study has implications beyond just medical magazines because of the importance and prestige doctors have. The study, with 231 physicians responding, also covered a variety of other perceptions doctors have on the media that serve them.

Use it on a call.

Talk about the importance physicians play in our society. Talk about how, unlike almost any other profession, the information they re More...

You might not like this.

A recent poll of Cafepharma visitors, a Web site for salespeople in the pharmaceutical industry, asked how a salesperson's physical attractiveness affects their selling. The survey was posted with a big helping of skeptical humor, with only three possible answers to "Which type of rep gets the best results?":

1. An average looking rep that knows their products and can sell.

2. Doesn't matter. Too many other factors come into play regarding sales.

3. A super attractive rep that is an idiot and can't sell.

A bit over More...

One way to sell more print ad space is to encourage your advertisers to add a campaign and magazine specific URL to their next print ad. It is one extra step. But here is what happens; a readers sees the ad and is motivated to search the Internet for more information. By using a campaign and magazine-specific URL, the advertiser can track which campaign and which magazine drove the reader to their Web site.

A post on Clickz by James Hering offered tips on how to use campaign specific URLs. Hering references research that indicates many do not like to enter long URLs with a lot of extra slash marks. As result, some marketers now favor campaign-specific URLs, often based on More...

It is happening right now in many many industries and sectors. Web-only competitors, "pure play" online publishers, are sneaking in and winning ad sales away from the online products of print publishers. How can they do this? Don’t we have an insurmountable advantage by having a print product continually advancing our brand in the physical world? How do the pure play Internet companies even stand a chance?

"Pure plays" routinely beat the products of print based publishers because they design a new newsletter, webinar, web section, or website, by starting with a clean sheet of paper. Since they have no print vehicle to get them started the "pure plays" design a media product desperate for attention. Ever More...

RFPs are a game. As a best practice for buyers, RFPs simplify the buying process and weed out media that is off the mark, allowing more time with more approprate media. But with buyers under pressure to make decisions more quickly, RFPs get misused. When they become the primary tool of evaluation, insightful media buying sufferers.

James Hering—writing for the ClickZ Network back in 2003—posed this summation showing both sides of the sales desk.

From the seller side, we hear:

• "So I'm supposed to tell you why my site is better than the 180 other sites that received an RFP?" More...

According to a study by MediaVest, magazines are more trusted than online for content in the three areas of entertainment, food/cooking, and fashion/beauty. But online is more trusted for health/wellness information.

Here are the five key findings of the study:

1. Print is more trusted than online in every category but Health/Wellness. Readers find print more trustworthy than online by a margin of 24 percentage points for Fashion/Beauty, 7 points for Food/Cooking, and 5 points for Entertainment.

2. Readers find online more Health/Wellness more trust More...

Yet another study supports the strength of magazines as an online traffic driver. BIGresearch's August 07 released "Simultaneous Media Survey" of 15,439 consumers shows magazines as the top offline media driving Web traffic. Here is the chart that tells the tale:

Top 10 Media that Trigger an Online Search (Adults 18+)
-------------------------------------------------------
51.6% Magazine
47.7% Read an Article
44.2% TV / Broadcast
41.3% Newspaper
35.6% Cable TV
35.3% Face-to-Face Communication
33.8% Coupons
30.3% Email Advertising
29.3% Direct Mail
28.2% Radio

Use it on a call:

This study does NOT say that magazines generate more W More...

Remember your magazine's first Web site?

For most publications it was a simple copy and paste job. We copied content from the magazine and pasted it right onto the the new Web site. The big question of the day was, "Should we hold off posting the Web content, as it might hurt readership of the identical print content?" Then something unexpected happened that changed everything:

Nothing.

That's right, nothing happened. Because we discovered that no new Web content meant no new Web visitors, and as result, no new ad dollars. The dialog abruptly shifted to how we could develop fresh content for the magazine's Web sit More...

In earlier posts I have cautioned against adding online products to your magazine's brand portfolio because other publications seem to succeed at using them. There are strategic reasons for all online products but they may not fit your requirements. For example, blogs are fantastic web site traffic builders that can lift site traffic and thus rates. But trying to monetize blogs directly by selling sponsorships on them is typically much harder.

This week's Economist turns that same analysis to social networking and comes up with a similar cautionary tale:

"The big internet and media companies have bid up More...

Many credit Hillary Clinton's presidential primary wins in Ohio and Texas to her controversial "Red Phone" ad designed to raise doubts about Barack Obama's experience on national security.

Despicable sleaze? Clever politics? Love the ad or or hate it, what I saw was a common sales tactic that every media sales rep uses at some time in their career.

When you sell a product where the outcome cannot be predicted, like a presidential candidate or a media buy, raising doubts about your competition, a.k.a "playing the fe More...