Posts under ‘Advertising & Media’

Ever since the inception of social media, marketers have pondered how to put it to work for their brands. Viral marketing, contests, even traditional ads have been placed on the table as appropriate tactics for the job. Yet, as many skeptics have decried, do any of these things really work?

A recent article in Ad-Age speculates on a looming battle for advertising revenues between Google and Facebook – and places all bets on Facebook emerging from this battle in pretty good shape.

How often do you see your clients face-to-face? Do you have a good sense of their location and geography in relation to their supply chain, to you or to your competitors? Could there be other potential opportunities to grow your business near by?

Got a Facebook page? Now, starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you can also get your own Facebook username. It’s first-come, first-serve, so get on Facebook in the early Saturday hours and choose your username… before someone else does.
So why should you care?
Sure, it might be cool to register your personal Facebook page as […]

Some words used in marketing assume significance far beyond their original meaning. For example, in the ag-input world, the words “yield” and “performance” have assumed a similar level of ubiquity. Yield has been an important word in advertising to farmers since the dawn of advertising, but we have certainly seen a marked increase in its use.
In […]

If your mother was like mine, she probably rewarded you for good, consistent behavior.
And she might have had fits when you behaved like Jekyll and Hyde. So here’s a lesson in congruency for online marketers that most mothers would approve of. You’ve probably seen ad campaigns that direct you to a web site or landing […]

You’d never deliberately set out to develop communications tactics that work in your competitor’s favor, right? But, strangely, we see it happen all the time.
We recently tested two direct mail pieces that looked remarkably alike — one by a major seed company, the other by a smaller competitor. We sent copies of both pieces to our […]

Agrimarketers might be badly misreading farmers when they judge the effectiveness of direct marketing. Increasingly, clients and other agrimarketers are saying:

“Farmers are inundated with junk mail. We need to find a better way to communicate with them.”

But is their belief accurate? Many public and proprietary research findings – including quantitative and qualitative research – tell us that, to most farmers, direct mail is a valued source of information on products and services.

Let’s look at the issue more closely. Certainly all consumers, including farmers, are at the receiving end of a constant stream of communications. But what constitutes “junk” as opposed to useful information?

In the face of present economic uncertainty, we can predict that some media plans will be slashed to cut cost, some will be scaled up to grab share of voice, and some will be refurbished to cut waste and improve efficiency. Each may be the right choice in your business, but readers most interested in […]

With the economic downturn, 60% of large companies and 29% of medium-sized companies have made cuts or are thinking of making cuts to their marketing budgets.1 How are marketers shifting their spending to respond to this challenge?

More investment is being made into online advertising compared to traditional methods – a 38% increase in online marketing investment […]