Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Medicins Sans Frontieres

I’ve been thinking about this video ad from Medicins Sans Frontieres, which has stirred up quite a bit of controversy on the Chronicle’s Give & Take blog and elsewhere. Here are my observations. First, a piece of advertising needs to be assessed against its objectives. If the objective here was branding, I’d rate the ad […]

Learn More September 4, 2009

Direct Mail Just Keeps Truckin!

Here are the stats on direct mail volumes from the latest USPS Household Diary Study (2008). As reported by the Center for Media Research, key factoids include: U.S. Households received 148.6 billion mail pieces in 2008, of which 63% was advertising. Income, education and age of head of household are the major drivers of mail […]

Learn More September 3, 2009

Magic Beans

I don’t know what set him off, but marketing maven Seth Godin recently posted an article titled Magic beans, TV and the web. Here’s the kernel: "On the web, there are countless marketers just standing around waiting for someone to hand them the magic beans. And that’s the problem. Marketing online takes too much measurement, […]

Learn More September 2, 2009

Marketing To The Silent Generation

Back in July, Mark Dolliver wrote this terrifically insightful article in Adweek regarding marketing to today’s age 65+ consumer. [Sorry, I’m just catching up to this, thanks to a mention by the Boomer Project.] Dolliver refers to this group as the Silent Generation (born 1925-42), sandwiched between a group whose life-shaping — and well-told story […]

Learn More September 1, 2009

The Medium Isn’t The Message

Sometimes the best advice is pretty darn simple. That’s the case with this piece in ClickZ by Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow. He’s an expert on optimizing online conversions, but he’s making a larger point with this advice: "Don’t get caught up in the flash of Web 2.0 technologies; work to understand how each works so […]

Learn More August 31, 2009

Social Media Penetration Grows

As reported here by MediaPost, Forrester Research, a leading marketing and media research outfit, has released an extensive study on U.S. usage of social media. At this point, four out of five U.S. online adults report using social media at least once per month. Half participate in sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Forrester classifies users […]

Learn More August 28, 2009