ADUTAINMENT: Advertising as Entertainment
JellyBasket.com - JELLY by the CASE or as a GIFT BASKET.

Internet Advertising: Viral Ads
Viral ads are called so because they are sent through emails, from account to account, spreading like viruses. The negative connotation of the name is merely due to its dispensational nature and not necessarily to any potential ill-effect brought on by its presence or any possible disruptive intent of the Viral Ad?s designer.

Viral Video Evolved - Startup LonelyBloggers.com Launches With Viral Marketing Case Study
LonelyBloggers.com is proud to announce a 7 episode, 40 minute viral video series called LBTV that can be watched in it's entirety on YouTube right now. Despite recent reports that a viral video now cost up to $250,000 to produce, LonelyBloggers was able to produce our viral video series with only a $5000 budget. Internet marketers need to understand the growing importance of adding video to your marketing mix as people flock to video sharing sites like YouTube. This means potentially free website traffic as a result, all the time presenting your brand in an exciting manner. Viral Marketing has to be considered as a key part of your future marketi...

Internet Marketing And Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is a unique tool designed to create so much buzz about the article itself that even the largest sites will want to publish it.

Using Viral Advergames For Worldwide Advertising and Marketing
Branded online games are being used more and more as an advertising medium by everyone from small businesses to big worldwide brands, but can branded games really help as part of your marketing efforts Branded online games (or Advergames as they are commonly known) can be one of the most effective viral marketing agents, if used correctly

Viral Marketing: Internet Marketing Strategies
First of all, I realize that anything with "viral" in the name doesn't conjure up images of something you want close by, but there is a new type of Internet marketing known as "viral marketing" is worth investigating. Despite its unflattering appellation, it is an effective Internet collaboration marketing tool, and one that is important to understand if you want to expand your business.

Social Advertising Changing Internet Marketing: Moving From Forced Advertising To Opt-In Ads
SplashCast CEO Helps Define The Emerging New Marketing Field At L.I.S.A Conference - First Forum Dedicated To Social Advertising

Best Email Advertising of 2008 to Be Named by Web Marketing Association
The Best email advertising in 86 industries will be judged as part of the 2008 Internet Advertising Competition awards. Companies or agencies wishing to nominate their work for consideration may do so at IACAward.org (http://www.iacaward.org?gad=CNvQkJkDEgjMICey2iA0NRi6nML_AyCb88Qv) before the deadline of January 31, 2008.

How to Incorporate Viral Marketing Techniques to Your Internet Marketing Arsenal
Viral marketing is not the last disease found, nor a virus to your desktop

MJM Internet Adds Internet Video Production to Enhance Dealership Websites With Tactical, Online Video Marketing
Automobile dealership website production firm, MJM Internet, has added Internet video products to enhance their clients' online marketing. Produced quickly, and at low cost MJMI internet video's feature online actors, and dealership personnel. They help bring car dealerships' online marketing to life using the site, sound and motion of video seemlessly added to their websites. Flexible and effective, integrated video should prove to give dealerships a competative advantage.

Video Email And Its Impact On Internet Marketing
Email is a revolutionary means of communication facilitated by the advances in information technology. With the acceleration of e-commerce as a consequence of these same technological innovations, email is now a significant means of marketing products and services through the internet. Through email, myriad companies and businesses have a convenient means of reaching potential consumers. Through email, marketing copies get delivered directly to a person?s inbox; companies no longer had to wait for consumers to come across their ads in the internet.

Viral Videos: Lethally Effective Advertising Carriers
Are you one of those millions out there hooked on the viral video craze? This article describes the opportunities that viral videos offer to internet marketers.

SIPA's 32nd Annual Conference Showcases Latest Internet Advertising Trends And Email Marketing Through Client Newsletters
The Specialized Information Publishers Association Will Feature Leadership Keynote Speakers (http://www.newsletters.org/Events/Annual/2008/index.htm), Jay Berkowitz, Josh Macht, Bob Bly, Chris Schroeder And Fredrick Marckini On June 1, 2008 In Washington, DC

Viral Marketing:10 High-Impact, Viral Marketing Strategies,To Explode Your Sales
Hello, do you have any website that is not bringing in a lot of sales?Would you like to know a few smart and sharp viral marketing secrets to turn it around and explode your sales?If yes, may I offer you 10 high impact viral marketing strategies to increase your sales!Viral Marketing is allowing people to giveaway and use your free product or service in order to multiply your marketing quickly over the internet. The idea behind viral marketing is that you include your ad with the freebie people giveaway or use.

Viral Marketing - The Future Of Advertising?
To understand viral marketing you need to be familiar with social memetics ? the idea of viral marketing is to create a product or advert that encourages the end user and potential customer to also become your promoter.

Mortgage Marketing - Viral-Email, Referral Marketing Strategy
This is a devastatingly powerful way to extend your marketing reach. For this to work right you need a website that promotes your business.

Marketing in Troubled Times

If you think the economic chaos currently at play on the world financial markets has run its course, may I suggest a rapid trip to the nearest Starbucks for a cappuccino IV.

Because one has to wonder why it is that agencies and advertisers alike continue their marketing march to Hell.

It was Rance Crain, Advertising Ageýs editor-in-chief, who remarked in a past issue, ýBut whatýs really broken in todayýs system is the amount of very bad advertising that gets approved by top management. Are CEOs so absorbed by trying to make their next deal that they tolerate the inept and stupid ads guaranteed to alienate their best customers?ý

These sentiments were echoed in the same issue by none other than the Godfather of Positioning, Al Ries, whose article on branding is brilliant in its simplicity.

ýMost advertising is mush, especially TV advertising. Thirty expensive seconds wasted trying to proposition the viewer without providing enough of the brandýs credentials for the consumer to take the offer seriously.ý

I ponder this nightly while perusing the ads in the Wall Street Journal over dinner like a parent searching in vain for a lost child.

How can advertisers spend a quarter of a trillion dollars a year (thatýs trillion with a ýTý) with the ostensible purpose of selling their products and services using ads that do anything but?

Yes, the agencies create the ads, but presumably the CEO or someone in the clientýs senior management signed-off on them. I realize I speak heresy of the most inexcusable kind but hereýs a news flash ý ads are suppose to sell something.

Branding, the mantra of the last decade or so is fine, so long as it is not done to the exclusion of getting your message across and motivating the prospect to go to your store, pick up a phone, or click a mouse.

A review of ads running in national magazines and print media these days calls to mind the powerful scene portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the great Stanley Kramer film, Judgment at Nuremberg.

Lancaster, playing one of several judges who sat on the bench during the Third Reich, on trial for crimes against humanity, sits in stoic silence throughout the trail as Maxamillian Schell, whose academy award winning performance as the groupýs defense counsel, tries to convince the Tribunal (chaired by Spenser Tracy) that the judges were not aware of what the Naziýs were really doing.

During a highly inflammatory cross-examination of Judy Garlandýs character (who had fraternized with an old Jewish man) by Schell, Lancaster has finally had enough and stands, his face a visage of fury.

In what may be his most prized performance outside of Elmer Gantry, Lancaster, his voice rising with intensity and volume with each word, tells Schell and the rest of the court that he and the others were aware, and asks in rhetorical outrage:

ýWere we DEAF, DUMB, BLIND?ý

It is a moving performance.

Lancaster I am not, but the question applies, are they DEAF, DUMB, BLIND?

I am thumbing through Forbes scanning the ads in search of one that attracts interest instantly. There is a picture of a red brick wall that takes up most of the full page, four color ad. Itýs a home builder or construction company, I think. But this is a wild guess.

I look more closely because I am writing this article. At the top of the wall is the word Elevate. Perhaps itýs some kind of self improvement program.

I look at the copy that would best be read with the Hubble telescope. But I read it (which I would never have done under ordinary circumstances). Itýs an ad for Conoco Philips, the oil giant, explaining ýwhere others see an obstacle, we see a chance to elevate.ý

Huh?

Did they have some recent failures, I wonder, and now feel compelled to tell people that they can overcome them?

In short, what in the name of John David Rockefeller has this got to do with selling oil and gas?

I have subsequently seen this ad in other business publications. It is someoneýs bright idea for an advertising campaign.

Unbelievable.

Who signed off on thisýthisýmetaphorical brick wall, this Tony Robbinsesque PR ad?

Iým sorry, but what a waste.

I donýt care how sexy the girl, how elegant the design, how sophisticated the message, if it doesnýt generate a desire for the product that leads to increased sales and income; it hasnýt done its job.

I close with what is a self-serving note that nevertheless happens to be true. Your ads should forward a message and a position that have come from the mind of your public ý not the boardroom.

That way they resonate and generate sales and income.

This is the kid of research we have been conducting for nearly a quarter of a century. If you want your ads to communicate and generate response, call us.

Michael Richard Burke is the CEO of On Target Research (www.ontargetresearch.com) and is the author of Response, the marketing newsletter hailed as ýbrilliantý by Al Ries. He is also an internationally recognized speaker on the subject of market research and surveys and their use in marketing, positioning and branding.