I will be commenting on news of the day, cultural curiosities, and the wonders of media. Your input is welcome. Finally, please remember the immortal words of Saint John Coltrane “many are called, but few are chosen,” thank you for choosing to spend time reading, watching, and listening.
A great strategic thinker, talented designer, and artist, Paula Bee, commented, “what are the criteria for success” for those seeking to market their product/service to my wants and needs? The criteria for successfully marketing one’s product/service to Mark Heyert are: 1) Completion of a transaction, 2) two or more mentions of the product/service to friends and/or family. Stay tuned as the winners and losers will be announced shortly.
Should I be surprised that most companies take their customers for granted? Yes, because today’s customers are more knowledgeable, better informed, and deeply self-aware than any other time in the modern era; leading to a hunger for authenticity in the products and services they consume. I make it easy for marketers to find me by spreading the appropriate keywords on my Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace profiles. I leave all sorts of clues for the behavior targeting bloodhounds; they have been following my scent across the web and still they can’t figure out how to showcase the authenticity of their product to me. The more I hope for my wants and needs to be satisfied magically by technology empowered marketers, the more disappointment encroaches on my wonderful world. I am the same consumer I was twenty years ago: curious, knowledgeable, and anxious to be sold on the merits, or sexiness, of a product or service. Stay tuned over the next few weeks as I share the winners and losers in the market to Mark challenge, hey hair removal products, you listening?
I’m perplexed by Microsoft’s apparent desire to sell Avenue A /Razorfish. Avenue A/Razorfish is one of the world’s premier digital advertising agencies that should be able to help MSFT grow in a very attractive (revenue generating) space. There’s talk that the WPP group is interested and that there may be an asset swap, WPP owns the 24/7Open AdStream ad serving tool. Grabbing another ad server will not help MSFT in their battle with Google. Not only does Google own the Double Click platform, but they have recently launched Google Ad Manager and Google Ad Planner that are going to grab a lot of market share. Wake up Redmond, Avenue A/Razorfish is a peach and should be grown.
I take my music seriously; I take my music with cream and sugar and the fact is I’ll take my music any way I can get it! iTunes helps me manage the mass of music and finally the little application that could has a new friend, TuneUp has arrived and if you have a PC running iTunes this may be the best piece of software to improve your music enjoyment. Check it here and remember it is still in beta, but the TuneUp crew is working long and hard to buff this application out. Kudos!