Posted by: Elie Ashery
on Oct 22, 2007
By day three of the conference I pretty much had my fill of database analytics, email marketing and that god awful, overused cliché "Web 2.0". But as my luck would have had it, I had the opportunity to dine with Jeanniey Mullen, Executive Director, Worldwide Email Marketing for Ogilvy One and Scott Delea, President of Adverb Media. Some how during the course of our meal I got talked into attending a Thought Leadership series hosted by the two and Ian Baer of iCrossing at 4:15 PM. Keep in mind at 4:15 PM on day three the only thing I knew I would care about is getting the hell out of Chicago. But in the spirit of keeping my professional posture I gladly accepted the invitation.
In truth, I'm glad I attended the series. All participants gave really good insight into the evolution of direct marketing on the web and how there will eventually be a "convergence" of message mediums. When I prompted Scott Delea to give a good example of a successful RSS strategy he was able to shed some light on the fact that RSS is rapidly being transformed into widgets and that simple text RSS was the beginning of the widget phenomenon. An interesting perspective that I didn't previously consider. Jeanniey extended our debate from the previous night as to whether social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook will become the new inbox providers since global email is used to prompt the user to the changes made to their own or their friend's accounts. This is something I definitely agree with and will probably blog about it at a later date.
Kudos to all. It was a good series.
Posted by: Elie Ashery
on Oct 18, 2007
Day 2 in Chicago kicked off with a key note speech from Kenneth Cole. From basic research I can determine that Kenneth Cole is his real name unlike his counterparts Ralph and Calvin. The speech was semi off the cuff with lots of reference to corporate responsibility (a theme that resonates from Kenneth Cole Productions' advertisements) and business anecdotes about how he launched his company. I'll skip over the corporate responsibility b.s. because no one appreciates having rich privileged liberals lecture them about the right thing to do, even rich privileged liberals.
What did attracted me to Mr. Cole's speech was his description of his tenacity in executing creative marketing tactics such as how he got permission to park a big rig trailer on 5th Ave. across from a trade show. According to Cole, The City of New York only grants long term parking permission like this to utility companies or film production companies, hence the name Kenneth Cole Productions. Or how the Company focuses on urban trend setters to keep their lines exclusive and prices high.
Overall the speech was entertaining and informative and I admire Kenneth Cole's business intuition. I realize that the premise of his marketing is to shock and make you think however I personally kind of find it annoying. But then again, I know I don't fit into his "cool", hip single male urban trend setting market.
What does this have to do with email marketing? Whatever you want it to be.
Posted by: Elie Ashery
on Oct 14, 2007
Chicago is a great city! This nook facing Lake Michigan has great food, warm hospitality and good people. I didn't attend any of the DMA's pre-conference tracks so I'll just talk about all the food I've been eating and scotch I've been drinking.
Posted by: Elie Ashery
on Oct 11, 2007
A recent
informal poll released from Dot Email stated that 38.4% of respondents feel that AOL was the worst culprit when it comes to deliverability with MSN/Hotmail coming in second place at 21.4%. Even though I'm the editor of Dot Email, based on my experience I don't agree with the poll. Because of MSN/Hotmail's notorious "black hole" phenomenon I would personally crown them the winner. The bottom line is that the top two winners heavily rely on their spam reporting mechanisms so if enough of your recipients think your message is spam, regardless if they opted-in, you're a spammer.
Posted by: Yotam Derfler
on Oct 9, 2007
For all the marketing rules you follow, breaking a few can wreak havoc on the results of your campaign. Review these pitfalls you can't afford to make (or repeat).
