• ONLINE SPIN
    Ignorant Customers Happier With Their Choices
    The less your customers know about what they bought, the happier they'll be.That's according to researchers at the University of Iowa, who recently announced new research suggesting that people who have only a little information about a product are happier with that product than people who have more information. They dubbed this counterintuitive notion the Blissful Ignorance Effect.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Piloting Media
    I spent a good chunk of yesterday in Cambridge, Mass. at the Harvard Business School's "2008 Entertainment and Media Conference." I was on an ad panel -- "Advertising: Is (R)evolution at Hand for the Industry?" However, we weren't the most interesting session. Not by far. Jeff Zucker, CEO and President of NBC Universal, opened up the conference with a keynote and, after some amusing Harvardesque anecdotes, he spent the rest of his time answering a number of very substantive and pointed questions from the students about the future of the entertainment industry generally and NBCU specifically. Surprisingly, he ducked nothing …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Making Sense Of Social Media
    Social media can be a bit daunting if you don't take a moment to make sense of it all. To understand the landscape you need to break social media down into its elemental pieces. As I can see it, social media as a blanket term is the one category that overlaps the most with other categories in emerging media, further making it difficult to sort through. That being said, I think you can break social media down into four primary categories....
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Video Advertising And Monetizing Online
    It's early in 2008, and yet it's clear that video adverting and monetization will be the problem that either one of the big four (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL), or one of the media powerhouses (NBC, Viacom, CBS, Disney, News Corp.) or some upstart (too many to list) will crack. They have to this year, right? There was even a strike here in Hollywood over how the revenue is going to be split up. There has been a steady increase in media consumed online. Some of the brightest minds in the industry are fully invested in solving this problem. Except 2008 …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    The Brand That Ties Us
    f you've followed me for any length of time you've probably found that I'm often dubbed a branding gal. It's one of my biggest passions. Whether I'm pitching new business, servicing existing clients, at a speaking gig or teaching college students, I always ask the question, "Name some top brands." As nebulous as the question sounds, I almost immediately get answers. Think about it for a moment. How would you answer?
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Today's News
    Editor's Note: Dave Morgan's Spin column was meant to blast on Thursday, but because of email snafus, did not. We're still sticking with the headline "Today's News." Today has been a big day for news. Not only did the U.S. Navy ship Lake Erie shoot down a dying spy satellite that was falling from orbit, but Microsoft announced that it is going to "open up" its software platforms, Google announced the launch of a CPM-based Web video network, AdSense for Video, and Reed Elsevier announced several major transactions to reduce its exposure to "cyclical" advertising markets by selling magazines like …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    There's Nothing Wrong With Being A Prospect(ive Customer)
    Seth Godin recently expressed on his blog dissatisfaction with marketing-centric terms, where a person is defined by the marketer, not the other way around. This includes the words "prospect" and "target". He then asks: "Isn't it interesting that there isn't even a name for someone who doesn't yet have a relationship with the marketer?" So Godin settles on "citizen." I agree with Godin in spirit, and especially with his dislike of the word "target" (which, similar to the common marketing term "penetrate," sounds phallic and motivated by testosterone). But throw out prospect and replace it with citizen? Godin is a …
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Social Media Campaigns Have No Flight Dates
    Your social media campaign is always on -- like it or not. The only question is whether you are paying attention or not. Marketing Daily's Sarah Mahoney does a great job of highlighting the key findings of a study by OneUpWeb in her piece "Social Media Marketing's Disease: No Follow-Through." The finding that social media efforts positively influenced sales, while vastly underappreciated, is not the study's most interesting finding. I would instead direct marketers' attention to the rapid loss of return on social media efforts as those efforts lose support.
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Advertising Terminology 2.0
    Late last year I wrote about the terminology and the lexicon of the advertising industry, and how many of the terms we use on a daily basis are relatively foreign to anyone not directly involved in online advertising. Of course due to the creativity of our industry and the people involved in it, some of the terms in use are actually completely made-up on a case-by-case basis, so it's no surprise that no one else knows what we're talking about! Wouldn't it be great if there was a site where you could go to find terms related to our industry?
  • ONLINE SPIN
    Hulu Baloo?
    Heard of Hulu? If you haven't by now, you should have. That is if you call yourself a digital maven, pundit or masochist. Kidding aside, it's rare that I come across a company when I think, "Wow, this is gonna be big."
« Previous Entries