Targeted Advertising
Don Marti has written another blog post about targeted advertising [1]. His main point is that when a company uses the most targeted adverts (such as Google advertising) everyone knows that they are paying a small number of cents per click and nothing for the people who don’t click. This compares to TV adverts which cost a lot of money and for which most viewers either leave the room or use fast-forward. Therefore using Google adverts doesn’t send a signal about the amount of money invested in the products. Don also cited an example of a company sponsoring an OK Go film clip, that was a great idea, it shows that the company can do expensive things which are also a bit creative and fans will thank them (watch all the OK Go videos on Youtube, they are great).
The next question is how else companies can advertise? One thing I’d really like to see is sponsorship of authors. Pick an author and pay them a salary with paid editorial services for releasing a book a year for free in HTML and ebook formats. Having a fixed salary is a significant benefit when it comes time to apply for a mortgage or plan a holiday and being able to freely distribute books would be a significant benefit for an author who hasn’t got a large fan base.
In the computer industry it seems that there’s a lot of potential for sponsoring people who produce free things. That ranges from free software and designs for free hardware to blog posts and documentation. Five years ago Sun had a blogging contest and my friend Dave Hall won a server that was worth $21K [2]. It would be nice if some other companies started doing similar things and if Sun did a repeat so some other people I like could get some free kit.
- [1] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/business/small-business-targeting/
- [2] http://davehall.com.au/blog/dave/2007/06/25/warm-glow-sun
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Syndicated 2012-06-24 14:50:36 from etbe - Russell Cokeretbe - Russell Coker