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Back when I first started working at Hacker Group, I learned about what we call “the safe assumption.”

The safe assumption is that the people who are viewing your marketing message don’t know you and don’t care about your product. The safe assumption is that they only care about what’s in it for them.

If you ignore the safe assumption, you can do some...

ROI is not a trendy business buzzword. It’s fundamental to marketing success. And who knows return on investment better than direct and digital marketers?

We keep hearing about big data. Marketers are (finally) delving into their customer files to learn what really works. They are using direct marketing unique predictive abilities and running the numbers on their programs before they...

Digital and direct marketers talk about measurement. We like to brag about measuring everything we do at every step along the way. We’re hearing more about “big data” every day. The implication being that we have more information than we know what to do with.

Some marketers forget that we can do so much more with the data when we have a good idea what it means. We need a...

I have a teeny-tiny rant. More of a crank, really. It's this: Many media and marketing articles online have a quirk I find annoying. It's the pop culture headline reference. You've seen it.

What I Learned from <Inception, Sun Tzu, my dog, Indiana Jones, Bridget Jones, Alice in Wonderland> about Social Media Marketing

7 Things <Captain Kangaroo, Game of Thrones,...

Just read an article in Target Marketing about an MIT research paper called Modeling Customer Lifetimes with Multiple Causes of Churn. (I haven’t...

A July survey of brand marketing executives showed that mobile marketing still doesn’t get much in the way of respect. Yes, marketers have been spending more on mobile in the past couple of years – with...

One thing direct marketers learned a long time ago is that our target audience is always limited. Many people are just not direct-marketing responsive.

This was true for direct mail – so we would always look for mailing lists of people who had responded to direct mail in the past. When Hacker Group moved into digital marketing (back in the 20th century), we had no expectation that online...

A couple of recent articles have reinforced my closely held beliefs about marketing. And isn’t that one of the biggest reasons why we read articles?  I love having my biases fed as much as the next guy.

One of those articles was about how “ugly” often works in marketing. Robert...

Just read a post called “Do you want real-time or timely data?” (BTW, I’d have commented on the post, but I don’t remember how to sign in. When are “they” going to fix that particular annoyance?)

The author argues that only “very rarely”...

How long have we been beating the drum that demographics are a poor indicator of purchase behavior?

Finally. FINALLY, a TV media researcher has come out with a similar finding. Ad Age reports that the Chief Research Officer at CBS Corp. says that using demographics to target is “essentially...

The website you’re looking at was just launched this month. We’re awfully excited about it.

But enough about us . . . what do you think about us? (I love that line. It’s one of the only redeemable moments from the movie Beaches.)

One of our big goals was to make sure to give our audience the experience they’re looking for. If you’re...

Human beings love categorizing. It must be our survival instinct. You see something and you need to know: Friend or foe? Predator or prey? (My dogs get confused on these issues quite a bit. Thank goodness they don’t live in the wild.)

Human beings hate being categorized. When you put people in a box based on age, gender or skin color you’re going to annoy them –...

If someone in this blog says “measurement isn’t everything,” you may be expecting the next phrase to be “it’s the only thing.” Or maybe that’s just me. I grew up in Wisconsin, where Vince Lombardi’s famous quotes were tattooed inside our eyelids.

I mean it. Measuring...

.this semi-rant in Ad AgeWe’re just finishing up a HUGE round of year-end/first-quarter agency RFP requests and apparently we’re not alone, according to

As the person in our company who drafts the initial round for RFI information...

Here’s a great way to NOT prove the effectiveness of advertising: Ask people if they think it works on them.

An Adweek Media/Harris poll discovered that very few people admit that advertising sways them.

You could have knocked me down with a feather.  (That...

” that gave me pause.  Business Implications of Facebook LiteI stumbled across an article called “

I’ve...

Nobody likes to be labeled, but everyone loves putting labels on other people. Baby boomers, Gen X, Millenials. You can’t avoid the label. You can only say, "Wait a minute. I’m not like that."

Here’s a commentary on MediaPost that tells us about the motivations and feelings...

That’s my favorite line from the movie Beaches. I honestly don’t remember much else about it.

This line encapsulates why good marketing is so hard to create. We know so much about the product. And the process we use to make the product. And the brand personality we want the product to embody. And on and on and on.

It all goes in the creative brief – along with...

Read a helpful Marketing Sherpa article on mobile marketing that interviews Jeff Hasen, CMO of HipCricket.

My favorite bit is this:

Strategy...

Just read another article about the poor, beleaguered banner ad in Mediaweek.

The Online Publisher’s Association and comScore want us to know that banners are about more than clicks. This follows efforts by the IAB and Microsoft to do the same thing.

True,...

Isn’t it odd that, whenever you have firsthand knowledge about something you read in a newspaper, you realize the article is full of inaccuracies? I say this as someone whose college major was Journalism (about 500 years ago) – so I sympathize with news writers. It’s never easy to pull together every stakeholder’s perspective and have a...

If you’re getting started in new and emerging media, I’m going to recommend checking out Brian Gilbert’s new audio conference on April 22, sponsored by The Competitive Advantage.

Brian is our VP of Integrated Marketing, as well as a contributing writer for The Competitive...

It’s easy to use this forum to poke at what others do. Making fun is fun -- and I indulge that guilty pleasure here often enough.

So, please note: I just read a recent interview that made me want to stand up and cheer. And I am telling you about it here, hoping this kinder, gentler post will provide contrast to those meaner, snarkier ones I usually write.

Beverly Thorne, SVP...

Few things (marketing-related) raise my blood pressure like the waste of money and energy involved in getting a third party involved in taking a so-called survey on behalf of your pet cause that purports to prove . . . something.

Disraeli said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

I think of that quote every time I look at a PR puff piece that tells...

Targeting, segmenting, media planning . . . all those things are tailor-made for spreadsheet junkies, right?

We’re so darned rational in the marketing world. At least when we’re explaining what we do to clients. We do all this research, you see. Qualitative, quantitative, all of it. We mine your customer database and overlay somebody else’s database and see what shakes...

Yet another survey of marketers has shown that they are unable or unwilling to measure marketing return on investment. This time the information comes from The Conference Board in a report called Managing and Measuring Return on Marketing Investment.

I don’t doubt...

We’re all being a lot more careful with our budgets in 2009 -- consumers and businesses alike.

"Do more with less" is back in style with CFOs everywhere. Argh.

I have a proposal for you: Use some of your marketing budget for split testing -- even if that budget is smaller this year. In fact, do it especially if your budget has shrunk.

Multivariate testing...

I started talking about the Good and Green Conference in yesterday’s post. You might wonder why I went.

Hacker Group launched an internal green initiative a year and a half ago and we started the Green Marketing Coalition this past spring. The Coalition looks at marketing...

I attended the Good and Green Conference last week. I’d love to sum up what I got out of it . . . but I haven’t quite reached a pithy conclusion yet.

One thing was confirmed to me about marketers that I hesitate to discuss in this post -- because it’s negative and I met such lovely people in Chicago. But I’ve made this knock...

Ow! Got a little burned by the acid in the CMO comments in an Ad Age article today.

Agencies are getting "in the way" of advertisers, rather than smoothing the path with online media companies. Advertisers have to do their own strategic briefings with the online ad networks. Advertisers are laying down the law and calling...

Lots of behavioral targeting start-ups are going away or slowing down, according to Online Media Daily until "Congress sorts through the rulings."

Part of the problem is fear -- privacy issues haven’t been completely addressed -- and part is that BT hasn’t proven its worth to...

At a certain point, people stop believing your messages. For banks, that day has arrived. For political candidates . . . well, I have to think their time for "setting the record straight" may have come and gone. The hysteria has reached a fever pitch and cynicism is everywhere. No one believes anything that doesn’t match their pre-conceived ideas about the candidates.

If you’re...

Nothing seems to have been posted here in a while.  I can testify that it’s because our agency is in the middle of one of those high-pressure crunch periods.  We seem to have several campaigns that need to drop by October 1 to impact fourth quarter numbers.  Yoiks!

So I feel particularly out of touch when skimming through Ad Age and seeing "

The continuing off-target discussion about behavioral targeting is a real frustration to me. 

In MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider, there’s an interview with comScore’s vice president of product management, Steve Dennen.  He’s touting a new product that purports to help advertisers better...

I have hope that one day general advertisers and direct marketers will speak the same language.  That day is not yet here—but we're getting closer.  In a July 7 article in Ad Age about the changing consumer market, Peter Francese said:

In the...

 ...Often creative directors and designers are invited to join the fun.  Copywriters and art directors get together and brainstorm.  Generating ideas on the creative side of an agency is almost always a team sport.

I hope your Memorial Day celebration was full of fun and kicked off summer with just the right amount of verve.

I read in last week's New York Times that tourism marketers are nervous about getting your travel dollars and are changing tactics to...

If a commercial gives you goosebumps, are you more likely to buy the product?  If your palms sweat, does it mean you're going to reach for your wallet?

Disney thinks so -- and I'll bet they're right, if they're talking about entertainment advertising.  Nothing is worse than going to a movie that doesn't arouse your emotions.  Most of us figure that if the trailer doesn't do...

A nice article in Strategy + Business, a Booz Allen Hamilton publication, lays out the recent history of marketing measurement in a straightforward, unbiased way.  I admit to being very biased toward metrics that are about outcomes rather than inputs.

Christopher Vollmer,...

Just read an interesting Ad Age CMO Strategy piece on "Why Consumers May Never Be the Same" after the recession.

The author, Eric Spahr, talks about how to figure out consumers. And he suggests observation, rather than focus groups. Here's what he said:

Consumers...

Smart people tend to depend on their smartness and don't necessarily think about luck. Since none of us is perfectly smart all the time, a little good luck is a wonderful thing. Being smart can't always help you with things like timing.

No one is lucky all the time either. In that case, having brains can pull you out of some scary-bad situations.

And intuition is something else...

I do a lot of traveling and I've finally come to terms with haggling with street vendors. I used to just say "Okay!" (universal language) when I heard the price of something I wanted. I'd hand over the lira or pesos or whatever and be done with it. My husband took the opposite approach. He'd start out offering half the asked-for price. It was muy dificil for me to keep a poker...

We probably don't need a survey to tell us that. After all, except for financial planning services and long-term care insurance, little in this life seems specifically aimed at people over 55. (I exaggerate. But only a little.)

What...

We started working on it last year. We've come up with several ways to reduce our clients' impact on the environment without a huge hit to their budgets. We call it our green best practices.

Our goal is to compensate for our own office's carbon footprint through all...

...The results found that marketers overgeneralize, misrepresent and sometimes ignore the generation, lumping them together and, in the process, alienating them.

Apparently those wacky Boomers don't like the generalizations made about them any more than Gen Xers or Millennials do. Nobody knew...

People found it offensive. I have to admit, it struck me as going a little too far when I saw it during the game.

The guy who wrote the commercial, Vinod Gupta, owns the company. He's a direct marketer...

We were having an internal creative review meeting where the full team looks over everything the creative team put together — before it gets presented to the client. The Account Manager had to be out of town that day, so she phoned in.

We were all...

Just like the first week of classes, I've discovered I'm already behind -- and it's only January 9. I have reading to catch up on, assignments coming...

Does that surprise you as much as it does me? I don't think I'm career-obsessed and I know I'm no workaholic,...

Many, many years ago, I worked for a software company as a marketing copywriter. The vast majority of people there were software engineers. The business owner was, too. She's a brilliant woman and I learned a...

They say their "premise is that 85 percent of brand purchases are made by women." And yet the agency's founders claim women are "often not influenced...

Hacker is not a common name....