Thursday, October 18, 2007

4:3 TVs Out; 16:9 TVs In

For anybody still planning video production in the analog TV format take note: As of October 1st, you can no longer buy an analog 4:3 format TV at Best Buy (except for existing inventory). Everything they will now be selling is the digital format only.

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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Seeing Past Your Beliefs

There’s a great, on-the-money article by Marcia Conner at Fast Company. It’s about benefits that can emerge if you are able to see past your beliefs. These beliefs include:
• Seeing past the categories you’ve created to organize your life
• Seeing past jargon that might feel unfamiliar
• Seeing past assumptions you’ve created
• Seeing past concepts that may seem isolated because you lack part of the contextual framework to understand them
• Seeing past your own point of view and comprehending how others view the situation
• Seeing past your standard defenses
• Seeing beyond your usual circle for opinions, thoughts and ideas

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Monday, October 15, 2007

A Few More Reasons to Worship Google

As an advertising and PR student at the University of Minnesota, one of my required classes is “Information for Mass Communication.” While I’ve learned a lot about the information that’s out there and where to find it, there’s one source in particular that continues to come up in lecture, whether we’re talking about tracking, searching, or… anything really.  Hint: Where does one first automatically go to find any sort of information about any possible subject?  Google, of course. 

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ANA Study: Advertisers Need Big Changes As Marketing and Technology Converge

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) released details of a comprehensive new study that points the way to rapid, significant change for many of the country’s biggest advertisers. The study, titled Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010, advises:

“As the media environment becomes increasingly complex and rooted in the digital space, the existing marketing agenda and capabilities need to be re-tooled and marketing organizations, agencies and media companies are having to change at an unprecedented pace. [M]arketers and their agencies must change as the convergence of media and technology, combined with the fragmentation and personalization of media, changes the connection between marketers and end users.”

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Friday, October 12, 2007

Customer Anthropology: Study Customers Through Their Behaviors

Quantitative or qualitative research studies that seek to shed light on what people think have been important marketing tools for ages. The problem is, and we all know this intuitively, people don’t necessarily do what they say they will do. In other words, thoughts don’t predict actual behaviors. So even if 24 percent of people in a statistically sound phone survey say they would buy your new product or service at a certain price, why did only four percent actually do so?

These kind of disconnects between thoughts and actions, can have huge implications for corporations, so anything that helps companies better predict the behavior of their customers is welcome news. David Pollard discusses a new methodology for doing just that with the intriguing name: Customer Anthropology.

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