The BIG Kahuna

Lots of talk about permission marketing these days. What is it? How does one do it? Are there gray areas?

Let?s look at it from both sides.?

Spamming:?

Do you send unsolicited emails? I know you?re not one of the Viagra type spammers but you may send unsolicited emails to your target market. Under the Spam act you?re breaking the rules. But are you really? If you send a targeted message to an audience that may need your service is that so bad?

Say you sell tires. Are you horrible if you send emails to auto shops? According to the word of mouth marketing guys you are.??

Seth Godin says:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.?

Geez, that?s pretty harsh. I would argue that consumers appreciate targeted messages. They despise getting stuff that doesn?t apply to them but receiving information from RELEVANT suppliers may be a good thing.?

Some of my best and biggest customers have taken our brand strength test. In doing so they provide their demographics to us. One could argue that they would expect to receive information going forward or they wouldn?t give us their information. If we then email to them later we would be breaking the permission marketing guidelines.

Does that make sense? If we were to survey these people would they tell us they are offended or put off by receiving pertinent information that applies to their business? I don?t know that answer. And I don?t know if permission marketing pays off either. Where?s the proof?

Does permission marketing lead to word of mouth which then leads to sales? I know in the past we?ve emailed our newsletter to people that have taken our brand strength test and the results are staggering for new business obtained. That would have never happened if we applied permission marketing.

The real question is out of all those people how many of them say ?I would never do business with them? because they received the newsletter?

Ponder that, and give me your opinion. ?Apparently there are no gray areas if you follow Seth Godin?s thoughts.

I would like to thank Joe Zuccaro for this guest blog. Check Joe?s blog out here The Marketing Consigliere Blog

Super Bowl XLII was definitely a nail-biter for both New York Giants and New England Patriots fans.? For the net-centric marketing and advertising crowd, IMHO it was bit of a disappointment compared to past Super Bowls; branding enthusiasts had a little better time though.

Most of the ads viewed can be seen on the NFL site. ?Unfortunately, each ad here has the same pre-roll from Planters, the game sponsor. ??They make you watch an ad to see and ad!?? R-R-R-R-R-R!

Many famous brands were long on creative but short on call-to-action.? At the end of some of the ads, the URLs were quite different from the intuitive name of the product.? For instance, the Taco Bell commercial flashed ?www.thinkoutsidethebun.com? so quickly I barely caught it ? and I was focusing on the ads for this blog.? AT&T Wireless wanted the viewer to get one of their red phones because of the proximity of St. Valentine?s Day ? that?s it ? appeal to my irrational affiliation of the color red and romance but don?t offer me a real value proposition.

On the other hand, Nationwide offered a toll-free number for a car insurance quote ? good call to action, but how about a web based approach?? Are you telling me that one of the largest insurance companies in the country still relies purely on a call center for sales when the most wired generation of viewers are watching?

GoDaddy.com had a call-to-action that was literally immediate ? go see the commercial that ?Fox rejected.?? OK, family values aside, that was brilliant.? Presidential candidate Barack Obama, the only politician with the obvious deep pockets and cojones to run a Super Bowl ad, asked the view to text message.? GoodDaddy.com, GoBarak.com?..

Doritos, which last year broke ground by leveraging user-generated content, repeated this good recipe by allowing its audience to vote on a music video which appeared as a commercial.?

Of the one hundred plus commercials, over ten percent of them were ?house? ads run by Fox for various shows, including the Nascar ?Sprint Cup? Daytona 500.? Talk about brand overload?.

The Super Bowl itself offered ample sponsoring opportunity, allowing brands solid visibility, obviously with Planters being the overall sponsor; however, their ?beauty? ad was in poor taste and may have tainted the brand. ?Other branding examples that seem to work well included Budweiser ?Aerial Coverage? and the Cadillac MVP Moments.?

B2B brands were conspicuously missing this year.? A Constellation Energy branding commercial may have been part of the local network commercials; I don?t know for sure.

What brand managers missed was an opportunity for more interactive engagement.? Considering BIGResearch?s Simultaneous Media Survey of this past year, 28.1% of respondents go online when watching TV.? True, the Super Bowl may be a ?group watch,? that commands more attention, there were probably a significant number of people with wifi enabled laptops and smartphones multi-tasking.? The chance to capture more data from the audience resulting from good ad or branding campaigns with compelling call-to-actions was squandered by most of the brands.

?I hope that the ability to immediately capture, analyze, and act upon data will be an objective that is part of next year?s Super Bowl ad strategy for more advertisers and brand managers.