Written by Mihai Dragan on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 ( One response )
Tags: advertising, direct mailing, ogilvy, targeting
In his legendary “Ogilvy on Advertising”, David Ogilvy had a very interesting opening sentence in his direct mail chapter:
“One day a man walked into a London agency and asked to see the boss. He had bought a country house and was about to open a hotel. Could the agency help him to get customers? He had $500 to spend. Not surprisingly, the head of the agency turned him over to the office boy, who append to be the author of this book. I invested money in penny postcards and mailed them to well-heeled people living in the neighborhood. Six weeks later the hotel opened to a full house. I had tasted blood.”
Ogilvy fell inlove with direct mailing and he later mentions the wonders he has witnessed over the years: computers. He shows enthusiasm in how can they be used to select names by demographic classification, by frequency or amount of purchase. The man is thrilled at the idea he can merge and purge lists, send personal mails and many others we now take for granted as the internet evolved. Have I mentioned we are talking about 1983?
He is also known for his clear and to the point copywriting, for inserting coupons encouraging readers to “buy now” or send feedback to companies.
With his focus on targeting, filtering, measuring and interacting with consumers Ogilvy built one of the biggest agencies in the world and probably the most popular.
But that was then …
[to be continued]
Written by Mihai Dragan on Monday, October 20th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: advertising, lbs, location based, targeting
The future of interactive advertising depends on context. Location can be important creating the context.
With AdSense it was text. With location based services is … of course … location. What are the benefits? Targeting, better understanding of the user and a better marketing message.
With advertising turning more and more to information rather than intrusive messaging location can be great delivering better info.
However, some issues must be solved in order to actually use this technology en masse.
First – there is the privacy.
Users have to be able to set which application can access their location, how far these application can go and how do they use this data. Easily.
Steps have been made in this direction by Yahoo, which launched Fire Eagle in august (interesting naming – I wonder how did they come up with it 
). Fire Eagle is a platform which helps its users manage their location across the web.
Some of the webapps already using it are Brightkite, Dash, Dipity and Pownce.
Second – there is the information we serve
Ok, we have this LBS thing, now what? Well for starters we have a bunch of Google Mashups we can use in one way or another.
Advertisers could also benefit from this. Why bother someone who is 100 miles away when you can just contact someone in front of one of your shops. Mix that with some bluetooth advertising and we can already start dreaming.
Third – too many platforms
The bad thing with the market economy is differentiation. Everybody wants to be the leader. Just joking. The competition is good for just about anything but it does bring some issues. Higher development costs for example. One has to develop for the Symbian, the iPhone OS, the Android, Windows Mobile. So many.
Wouldn’t it be great to have something that can help you develop for once and deliver to multiple platforms? That way you can engage many more users with lower costs. Oh, wait – there is Google Gears. Not only does this help solve the problem but it also connects web apps with mobile and others.
So the big question in the next few years of Interactive (both advertising and development) is “Where art thou?”.
