Thursday 30 August 2012

Why does personal service have to be limited to the offline world?

Why does personal service have to be limited to the offline world?

Well, leading Interactive marketing expert, Paul Ashby (Shoppers' Voice)

can show you that it doesn't. Shoppers' Voice has been

designed to help digital and marketing professionals increase the effectiveness

of all their marketing channels through more relevant interactions with individuals.

Paul Ashby can show you the main principles and benefits of personalisation, show

examples from leading companies using it successfully and give practical advice

on how companies can develop their own personalisation strategies.

If you're looking to improve customer engagement, repeat purchase behaviour

and encourage deeper interaction across all your marketing, then you

should talk to Paul Ashby (01934 620047) or paulashby40@yahoo.com

Monday 27 August 2012

Return on investment

"Return on investment—ROI—is the

hottest buzz word in advertising and

media; it has been for at least two

years and will continue to be for

another decade."

And only Interactive Communication gives you complete ROI!

Sunday 26 August 2012

Marketing Accountability


"Marketing accountability is the foundation for improving marketing,

building business performance, enhancing productivity and

streamlining critical processes. That is why the drive to embed

accountability as a core marketing discipline will only increase.

With it will come enhanced marketing ROI."



And Interactive Communication, properly executed, is the only way to  pureRO

."


.





 
 

Wednesday 22 August 2012

Insanity In Advertising...

Insanity in Advertising!

Is doing the same
thing over and over again
and expecting different results!
While all the time they should be using Interactive Communication and bettering themselves!

Few Companies Have a Larger or More Loyal Audience than....

 ...Facebook, with more than 900 million users and reams of
the personal information that marketers covet. Many analysts expect that
Facebook will continue to find ways to make money from that vast global reach;
it already brings in $3.7 billion a year.
Yet Wall Street's evident frustration with the stock price reflects growing
concerns about the long-term prospects for companies that are popular but do not
charge users for services.
Solve the problem? Yes we can but first of all make all marketing and Advertising people understand the true meaning of Communication!

Monday 20 August 2012

Chaotic,Evasive,Bungling - That's Marketing and Advertising for You!


Torrents of criticism for Marketing Leaders exist.
Most Advertising Agency leaders are unforthcoming and highly selective in their accountability.
Their accountability falls well short of the standards expected by Clients. Marketing and Advertising providers aren't necessarily the slick, smooth operators they can seem when they bid for work. What we also have discovered by now is having shareholders, a whizzy logo and a global footprint is no guarantee of competence. Add to that the fact that Public Trust of Advertising and Marketing is at an all time low. Urgent improvements, both the the way advertising agencies are run and the way they are accountable is needed if public and market confidence is restored.
The fraud on the internet will add to the distrust!
Advertising Agencies have treated consumers as a Ponzi scheme. Success in marketing and advertising has been bought by promises with costs far in excess of reality. We have hoped for a tomorrow in which record sales growth will yield record levels of marketing expenditures to cover the promises when they come due . The problem?....tomorrow never comes!!
Our legacy to our successors should not be temporary austerity but a permant, massive reform of Marketing and Advertising. We have to be unflinching and utterly practical in recognising the scale of the challange.
All this would mean an attitude in both Marketing and Advertising strongly focused on performance and accountability.
We are all but guaranteed overspending and slow growth if we cannot hold both both Marketing and Advertising to account. Our economic crisis is not the moment to delay reform but to accelerate it by questioning the received wisdom in every aspect of our economy, especially Marketing and Advertising.
Our Financial, political,business and media elites are under attack as never before.After a perfect storm of venality, we are experiencing a great reckoning. Morality, personal integrity, which used to seem antique or quaint values, are back on the agenda.
After it emerged that big banks were selling dodgy derivatives and lying about their balance sheets in 2008, trust in all institutions, not just financial houses, began to unravel. If bankers, the people we trust with our money, could lie, steal and cheat, and expect to get away with it because their institutions were too big to fail, what was going on in the other citadels of power?
We must hasten to properly develop interactive opportunities already proven.

Wednesday 15 August 2012

The marketing industry is currently whistling...

 ...past the graveyard and largely ignoring signs of massive, fundamental changes in how the business of mass marketing will be conducted in the near future. The broadcast TV model is working less well each year and will eventually cave in on itself as it reaches ever-fewer viewers with a fare of low-quality programming and mind-numbing clutter. Marketers will increasingly abandon it, and, instead, rediscover the huge benefits of using interactive communication .

Tuesday 14 August 2012

Yet Another Company Claims Facebook Ad Clicks Are Mostly From Bot

Yet Another Company Claims Facebook Ad Clicks Are Mostly From Bot

A recent post on its company page, Limited Run, a New York company that offers website solutions to artists and musicians claimed, 80% of the clicks from its ads were from bots.
Limited Run said it could only verify 15-20% of the clicks on its site through a host of standard analytic solutions, which led to it building its own custom software for tracking.
The company explains: Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do.
We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.
Limited Run claims they contacted Facebook, who "wouldn't reply."Facebook declined to respond immediately on this issue when reached by Tom Mango, co-founder of Limited Run, explained further: Technically speaking, we used about 6 different analytics services as well as built our own analytics system to try and confirm the ad click throughs from Facebook. The way client side analytics works is that it will try and load some JavaScript on the page and, if that doesn't work, it just loads a single image. On about 80% of the incoming page requests from our ad campaigns, neither the JavaScript or the images were being loaded. Normal web browsers, used by normal people, will load both JavaScript and images. However, bots, such as ones that crawl the web or bots that attempt to hack into websites to leave spam comments on blogs, don't usually load those
extra things like JavaScript and images. This is how we came to the conclusion that the majority of the click throughs we were getting were from bots. We have no idea who the bots are run by and don't think Facebook has anything to do with them.
As it turns out, this issue while not everyday news, is not new for Facebook. In June of 2009, complaints arose regarding discrepancy in ad clicks versus what clients could verify. Facebook verified a discrepancy and claimed to be implementing appropriate changes. A month later, In April of this past year, the two companies along with others were denied certification for a class action in a District Court in California.
The final straw for Limited Run came unrelated to the click issue, it was regarding changing the name on its company page: While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we're not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage In regards to that specific issue, Facebook gave us the following statement:
We're currently investigating Limited Run's claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.Unlike others, Limited Run isn't accusing Facebook of fraud. The company startup-claims-80-of-its-facebook-ad-clicks-are-coming-from-bots it could have been a competitor attempting to sabotage the firm through increased ad costs. Nonetheless, Facebook admits it might haveas many as 50 million fake users Mango reiterated that it wasn't the clicks that led Limited Run to leave Facebook, it was the customer service. While he acknowledges Limited Run is smaller than a lot of Facebook's clients, it raises questions over how widespread the problem might be, even if it's not widely reported. At a time when effectiveness of the social network's ads are constant debated this surely doesn't help.

A recent post on its company page, Limited Run, a New York company that offers website solutions to artists and musicians claimed, 80% of the clicks from its ads were from bots.
Limited Run said it could only verify 15-20% of the clicks on its site through a host of standard analytic solutions, which led to it building its own custom software for tracking.
The company explains: Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do.
We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.
Limited Run claims they contacted Facebook, who "wouldn't reply."Facebook declined to respond immediately on this issue when reached by Tom Mango, co-founder of Limited Run, explained further: Technically speaking, we used about 6 different analytics services as well as built our own analytics system to try and confirm the ad click throughs from Facebook. The way client side analytics works is that it will try and load some JavaScript on the page and, if that doesn't work, it just loads a single image. On about 80% of the incoming page requests from our ad campaigns, neither the JavaScript or the images were being loaded. Normal web browsers, used by normal people, will load both JavaScript and images. However, bots, such as ones that crawl the web or bots that attempt to hack into websites to leave spam comments on blogs, don't usually load those
extra things like JavaScript and images. This is how we came to the conclusion that the majority of the click throughs we were getting were from bots. We have no idea who the bots are run by and don't think Facebook has anything to do with them.
As it turns out, this issue while not everyday news, is not new for Facebook. In June of 2009, complaints arose regarding discrepancy in ad clicks versus what clients could verify. Facebook verified a discrepancy and claimed to be implementing appropriate changes. A month later, In April of this past year, the two companies along with others were denied certification for a class action in a District Court in California.
The final straw for Limited Run came unrelated to the click issue, it was regarding changing the name on its company page: While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we're not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage In regards to that specific issue, Facebook gave us the following statement:
We're currently investigating Limited Run's claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.Unlike others, Limited Run isn't accusing Facebook of fraud. The company startup-claims-80-of-its-facebook-ad-clicks-are-coming-from-bots it could have been a competitor attempting to sabotage the firm through increased ad costs. Nonetheless, Facebook admits it might haveas many as 50 million fake users Mango reiterated that it wasn't the clicks that led Limited Run to leave Facebook, it was the customer service. While he acknowledges Limited Run is smaller than a lot of Facebook's clients, it raises questions over how widespread the problem might be, even if it's not widely reported. At a time when effectiveness of the social network's ads are constant debated this surely doesn't help.