As a brand do you want to get exposed to the largest audience or to a specific audience? Do I want to place an ad with Leno or Letterman?

Well, I think the most logical, far sighted strategy would be to match the brand with the audience. Though the quickest, easiest most sure-fire way to get your brand out to the masses is to go to where the biggest audience already exists.

Of course you can do as well or better by really digging in, rolling-up your sleeves in effort to better understand just who is your audience. You can do: segment, research, a/b test, focus groups and pour over over all kinds of analytics. That is, I think the best way. But when you are really under the gun, pressed for time and need results pronto simply going where the audience resides, is your best first step.

As the director of business development for a company that does on-line distribution I very much enjoyed seeing Keith's plug for setting aside distribution budget. And that is one of the best parts of marketing on-line; the relatively little cost. Digital agencies and CMOS can afford to experiment with third party email performance marketing. When you have the right safe guards in place, you can get mass distribution quickly and pay only for the good traffic.

The in-box audience is massive. Email is still a very viable option. It is a great way to launch or further strengthen a social media fan base. By leveraging third party contacts you are permitted instant access to millions of potential new fans and customers without the time and expense of cultivating your own giant list not to mention achieving delivery.

Nationally recognized, value brands are in a unique position to appeal to a big audience. Value brands target that largest chunk of consumers –the majority of us who want great value for the money spent. There are consumers all along the spectrum of purchase behavior, from private label penny-pinchers to luxury brand zealots but value brands do the best when placed in front of a vast audience.

What do you think? Which came first, the chicken or the egg, brand or the audience? What will marketing masters be crowning “king” next?

Here is a quote from a blog post of Paul Knegten’s (of Dapper) who cites one of his customers as saying, "I don't like how that ad has nothing to do with our brand." I think that really strikes at the heart of what is now rather confusing about direct response advertising online.

Brandojo, like Dapper, owes much of its secret sauce to leading edge technology. Explaining how tech innovation translates into new and improved ways to help you with branding and *gasp*…sales, can be challenging.

We are up against a few myths:

-Direct response has no place in branding
-Performance marketing is for re-bill scammers
-Great branding is based on big ideas and clever art direction

1. Myth: Direct response has no place in branding

The world, cultures, the environment, my hair color are in constant flux and change. Branding is too. In some instances and with some brands direct response can be appropriate. You just have to look at your brand from a broad perspective and plan accordingly. I believe that Snuggle brand fabric-softner, for instance, will be helped not harmed by a direct email campaign to potential new Snuggle brand purchasers. These days Walgreen’s has their own version of everything I need, give me a reason to bust-out 30 more cents for the teddy bear brand.

2. Myth: Performance marketing is for re-bill scammers

Up until the last year or so, I might have agreed with that statement. But times have changed as the economy is in the dumps and the merchant accounts of many of these weight-loss schemes, *free credit report makers and loan modification sharks have been suspended. There will always be a market for snake-oil but that doesn’t mean you have to be selling it to enjoy the benefits of performance marketing tactics. The predictive analytics technology now available means legit advertisers can dip into this marketplace with real products without losing their shirts.

3. Myth: Great branding is based on big ideas and clever art direction

For some brands, yes this is still true. I do not think a direct email campaign to tens of millions of people for an Aston Martin would be successful. Branding varies for every brand. For what I call “value brands” or brands that provide value for the money spent, direct marketing in the form of third-party email marketing is a great option. Your beautiful graphics and household name is many times more likely to land in and the inbox and actually be opened than, say for example, USA Number One Eagle Home Loan. At the same time, high end brands have no place in this space. However it is not meant only for the Ab Roller or the PedEgg either.

So there you have it.  Both Snuggie and SnuGGLE brands both have a place in the performance marketing space. All kinds of ads can be about your brand.

Much love to all the catty commentors in the Ad Age hooooouse, yo! I just finished snort giggling over the snippy remarks submitted at the end of a rather dry Ad Age article about measuring marketing performance.

Commentor Kevin from New York says “You guys get the "Duh" award for today.” To which another commentor, Jim Sweeney in Cleveland says “Kevin, are you referencing the magazine or the authors, or do you have multiple award categories?”

It’s hard to write about performance marketing in a way that that doesn’t make folks want to slam their heads against a wall. I know this because I spend a sizable chunk of my work day thinking about performance marketing. I feel for the “Duh Award” nominator as well as article authors Karl Gustafson and Rich Schreuer.

CMOs and digital agency people may demand, “Where’s the spice? Where’s the buttah, baby?” All this jibber-jabber about clicks, conversions, goals, targeting and senior management buy-in sounds like a hot load of audio Cream of Wheat.
 
So how do you get liberal arts majors and creative directors fired-up about analytics and APIs? Advertising professionals are an especially tough crowd. Is it because you/we got into this industry expecting to work our way up the martini-lunch ladder one clever witticism and insight at a time --not with stinking math?

I have tried producing funny newsletters and instigating engaging conversations. I have compiled snappy slide presentations, crafted lean value propositions, Twittered, Tweeted Twated and what have you. While fun, it can also be exhausting and disappointing.
 
Sometimes I just want to drop my pom-poms and skip off to the beach to forget this stuff. I mean what’s the point? Nobody seems interested until their hairs on fire. And then I realized something.
 
I mean, look at the dieting business. It’s worth billions and gazillions of dollars. But one simple sentence fragment could sum it all up and kill the whole industry –eat less, exercise more. That’s it. Put your money back in your pocket. Stop forking over cash for health products or fitness magazines. I just told you what to do. Put down the bagel and go for a walk. It’s just that easy.

So why are so many of us still over weight? We know what we should do. I mean duh, eat a salad not chili cheese fries. I mean HELLO PEOPLE, duuuuh.
 
So you see, taking the time to understand the less sexy bits of online advertising is kind of like making time for push-ups. It’s not fun but it has its rewards. You get killer guns and you know why and how your ad converts. You have to accept the process and any reinforcement you can find helps, be it an actual person or an informative article.

People who take the time to explain how to effectively evaluate marketing initiatives are like fitness trainers telling you to stop eating carbs at night. It’s annoying and just because you know you should doesn’t mean you will.

Sometimes you just want to shoot the messenger. Or at least, you want to give him a wedgie and say “duh.”

I wonder where the “Duh Awards” should be held?  The Golden Statue Auditorium in Springfield across from the TGIFriday’s just off the major interstate? I’m racking my brain trying to come up with the most obvious choice.

Recently a very bright, painter friend of mine filled me in on how Google works. She spoke as if revealing shocking news.

 "Google" she explained,  "charges companies EACH TIME you go to their site using Google, if you don't  just type the URL directly into your browser."

This did not sit well with her. Not wanting to risk causing her any bigger disturbance, I did not dig in to see if she knew that Google collects and catalogs her browsing habits and makes money off that as well.

She's no dummie. She just doesn't spend her time thinking about online advertising or keyword buying. She's an artist.I wonder how she thinks Google makes its money? Selling rainbows to unicorns?

It made me think about how last December, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Ehrmm...what?

And then I felt like the walls were closing in on me when I read recently that if the FBI gets their way, your internet service provider will be required by law, to track and record everything you look at online for two years at a time. The goal being to help law enforcement prosecute people involved in heinous criminal activity. But what about our basic right to privacy as individual citizens? How many of us even think about how much we are being monitored now?
 
To bring it on home, it occurs to me that as digital brand marketers I guarantee there are looming consequences for how we handle personal privacy. Online marketing campaigns increasingly rely on personal user information. And what is and is not private online is becoming conveniently unclear to those that stand to benefit from this confusion. So it is up to you to come up with your own set of principles to follow when doing brand promotion, otherwise you will be scrambling if customers begin to balk. Your brand loyalists may eventually wake-up to the new digital “rules.”
 
The word on TechCrunch is that Twitter is now processing 50 million Tweets a day, which comes to about 1.5 billion Tweets a month. That’s alotta twits Tweets. People sure like to share.

Have you seen www.pleaserobme.com? It is a brilliant piece of public relations. Its very existence jabs you in the ribs with personal privacy issues. It is obviously a joke. The site name is sarcastic and the cartoon burglar is not menacing looking but silly. There’s even a disclaimer at the bottom about the developers’ true intentions, which are not to help you get robbed.

Quite the opposite.

The site, created by the “concept and idea factory” Forthehack, highlights the dangers of sharing so much about yourself with the big, bad world. In this case, tweets about your location status away from home. The “pleaserobme” site aggregates all mobile status updates to one convenient web location.
 
What, in a regular Twitter stream, would seem like benign tweets suddenly turn into unfortunate call-outs from the utterly naïve and gullible. These seemingly hapless updates continue to flow in non-stop with “new opportunities.”
 
One quick glance of the site told me @emardoug just left home and will be working out with Adam at Gold’s Gym, @kenstaude left home pledging he will not spend $100 at the Target in New Berlin and @ldybugs81 loves the banana crame pie shakes @Sonic. And so it goes on and on.

Do these people realize how their updates are being used? If you saw your information plucked out of the giant Twitter sphere and highlighted like this, how would you feel?

Obviously this site touches a nerve. It has already been written about by numerous tech blogs, Yahoo and even large, mainstream news outlets like Fox and BBC News. Though, I first found out about it when a friend shared it on Facebook.

The privacy snafu that occurred with the launch of Google Buzz is reminiscent of Facebook’s Beacon catastrophe. Certainly Facebook was able to pick itself back up and grow like wild fire. Certainly Google will survive this Buzz embarrassment.  But each time something like this happens people add it to their mental dossier. While it seems people are willing to cede lots of information about themselves and their buying habits if only for convenience you still need to have some kind of strategy in place. Don’t just relax and pull an Anthem Blue Cross, hiking up insurance premiums by 39% as soon as it looks like the coast is clear with no real health reform in place. Californians and the U.S Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius want a full explanation.

Anthem Blue Cross put itself in the hot seat by not paying enough attention to the tone of the national health care debate and by not factoring in that California is about to ramp up a new governor’s race. Today California Insurance Commissioner, Steve Poizner, who is running for governor, has the health insurance provider in his cross-hairs.
 
Unlike social utilities like Facebook or Google Buzz, I do not think consumer product brands can stand this kind of outrage. Time will tell what will happen to the Toyota brand. Especially critical will be how the public preserves the handling of the Toyota recall. So far though, it does not look good.

I urge digital marketers to educate themselves about just what kind of information is being used to target people. Decide for yourself where the line is. Be constantly listening to the chatter. There appear to be big generational differences in what people will allow as well.

As online marketing progresses it remains to be seen how much public debate there will be about privacy issues. The way we serve ads and our ability to convert our efforts into sales is more and more linked to how much personal information we can gather about consumers. Make sure you know how the sausage is made before your customers do.

Bill Gates seemed almost hip in his new glasses during his TED talk about sustainable energy. The wavy haired billionaire cares about the billions of people who will suffer if we do nothing to stop global warming. It’s a kinder, gentler software lord with a dire message.

Gates made the case that we humanoids need to cut carbon emissions to zero within the next 100 years or it’s basically game-over for planet earth. In short we need an energy “miracle”.

It was in the last few minutes of his talk, as he responded to questions from a guy dressed all in black with a vague “European” accent (like some kind of stereo-typical 80’s movie bad guy), that got me thinking about something a little less weighty but still important --third-party email marketing. Since I write a lot about this topic I can basically look at a lemon and think “Ah! Now THAT reminds me of third-party email marketing. Sometimes you just have to make lemonade out of ….” Anyway.

What really got my attention was when Gates pointed out that to get everyone on board the “save our planet” train you have to think about cost. More to the point you have to appeal to our most basic desire for cost-savings. If I am a hold-out who is not buying this “liberal b.s.” about climate change I might grudgingly go along with you if I know I am going to at least save money.

Bing! (pun intended)

Third-party email marketing has the same issue. Some people or agencies are hold-outs and just really oppose the idea of trying out third-party email for brand promotion. They just do not see how it could possibly work or be effective. But when you point out the relatively small risk to potential for great gain, resistance drops dramatically. You pay nothing up front and get your message in front of people who have specifically requested to be contacted via email.

While green house emissions look to divine a catastrophic toll on the world, it is happening slowly. So, what’s the rush? Some people endured Snowmageden last week. I mean what global warming? People in D.C could cross-country ski to 7-Eleven.

While email marketing does not go anywhere near armageddon in terms of importance, it does however exact a toll. How much are you leaving on the table by not piggy-backing off the traffic of others and paying only for results? No act of God or billionaire in navy Dockers genius required to figure this one out.

You just need to test out third-party email before the sun burns out in the next few billion years or so. Let’s hope we hit zero emissions well before then.

Uh-oh somebody forgot to “hold his fire” when seated next to Kim Kardashian on a recent flight to Los Angeles. An air marshal leaked his identity to the self-styled Armenian princess and she turned around and shared this with her 3 million plus Twitter followers.
 
“RELAX,” Kardashian Tweets “I just told u guys the Air Marshall is sitting next to me, highly doubt anyone is twittering like me on this flight! Shhh."
 
That’s it.  It really seems like there is no privacy anymore.
 
Well, especially when you reveal yourself to hot babe, z-list celeb while you are on the job. Then again, said princess does not have to share this with the world. But hey! An AIR MARSHALL how cool is that??

When Eric Schmidt tells all us “filthy people” to just chill-out and deal with our lack of privacy, it has the classic air of establishment arrogance. He’s Mr. Burns saying “release the hounds.” We just have to understand that Schmidt, is in a privileged position and as the CEO of Google runs a company that depends upon spying on its users. That’s just good old fashioned hypocrisy.

But when a BFF of Paris Hilton leaks a kind of national security secret it seems both innocent and alarming. Kardashian is just helping followers keep-up with her. Her tweets are just infotainment. She should not have revealed the sky guard like that but whatevah –she’s hot and meant no harm to anyone. And keep in mind this past summer she mistook the country of Botswana as a city in South Africa. So Kardashian is more style maven than professor of geo-politics.

From what I can tell Millennials (which Kardashian is one) may take the lead on this. Born between the late 1970’s and 2000, Generation Next does not seem to get their panties in a twist if Facebook knows their birth dates, religions likes and dislikes or that Google stores at least 6 months of data about what they look at on the Internet.
 
While Brandojo, the company I work for, also relies on public information (that most people might assume is private) to cross-reference user input on sign-up forms, I still harbor a desire for a basic respect of privacy. I hope that we as a society have more of a debate about what should be public verses private. Even our health insurance claims can be denied based on what we might have thought of as private information when we went to the doctor 10 years ago.

So while Ms. Kardashian meant no harm with her air marshal tweet she did touch upon a matter that can mean life or death. Do we really want the Eric Schmidts of the world dictating to us about privacy? I mean I don’t wanna HAVE A COW over Kardashian’s smart phone faux-pas but let’s have a little more chit-chat about privacy u guys.

Life is hard. And as social media is now a part of life, it’s hard too. But this in and of itself would seem to be a hard fact to accept.  Somehow, somewhere, some people, companies and digital ad agencies decided to believe that social media is a great way to advertise.
 
 It can be but, only if you understand social media to really be just one tiny step toward an entire 360 advertising campaign strategy. One Facebook ad or Tweet does not a brand make.

 Adotas writer Gavin Dunaway touches on this in a recent posting about the future of Twitter. Will it become bogged down with endorsements and “teeth whitening” ads like MySpace, he opines? Well, yes. Eventually these generous, warm hearted, venture capitalists want to make their money back and the way you do that is you sell stuff that people want.

 If you have a plan, a goal, a vision (dare I say, a brand?) you put in the time and money producing a product people want and will pay for. Or if you just believe in building market share and that once you do so, the money will come…well then you go public and if the market crashes before you have all your ducks in a row, you sell teeth whiteners, diet pills and hair growth potions i.e snake oil. Or you can add an air of legitimacy by having Z-list celebs push burgers to their followers for $1.00 per thousand followers (CPMF?).

 MySpace died because News Corp. thought they could flip a “new media” switch and have all the tweenie-bopper money burst forth. They did not want to devote actual thought and strategy. Facebook is not much different with Zynga games and their affiliate marketing ads. Also, it would seem Obama’s main mission since election has been to get stay-at-home moms back to school!

 Sigh.

 If I were a CMO for a major brand looking to build and nurture a brand in the face of today’s media landscape I think I would really just stay focused on my root purpose. Try to keep goals as simple as possible so as not to get caught up in the hype and games. I think that is sort of what Calvin Lui CEO of Tumri is trying to say in his post but I really cannot be sure.

 We online types use loads of jargon. I think about this stuff daily and I get lost. It must be an occupational hazard. We go on and on and on “CPA, CPM, analytics v metrics, on-the-fly, real-time, engagement, dynamic this and that…” yada yada yada, ROI hokus-pokus.

 What do you offer and why should I pay good money for it? Now toss in a puppy or a bikini girl and SOLD!

 OK that might be a slight over simplification but not much.  I mean c’mon, who doesn’t want a good looking head of hair, nice teeth and a trim waist? Let’s get real and face the hard facts.

Let me just be the Dr. Phil of bloggers.  “Hey advertisers, all that Facebook traffic ur getting’ –how’s that workin’ for ya?”

This lemming is not buying the excitement over Facebook.  OK I mean Hitwise and Compete have their statistics about referring traffic but what about the results?

It’s a loaded question. My guess is, not so hot.

What’s so special about Facebook? It gives you social media wings. Apparently.

Gigaom blogger Mathew Ingram recently wrote a post about how Facebook is usurping Google as the number one source of traffic for “major news and entertainment portals”. It feels like Facebook is a new hot club in town, in which even your mom and second cousin hang-out. That MySpace place is like soooooooooo 2003 now.

So everybody’s excited. Facebook is THE launch point for fresh traffic. Never mind that Marky Mark Zuckerberg and the Funky Bunch Facebook board of directors are drooling over the data harvested from you and me. So what if they keep toying with the appearance of our “news feeds”? So what if they want to go public ASAP and are trying to force us all into odd “friendships” with friends of friends. I mean it is really interesting how many of my friends do not mind giving over their time and money to Zynga in the form of fake farming and hitmaning. NOT (hello humor of the 90’s!).

The thing is, I am sure Facebook does a great job of tossing traffic your way if you are a hot blogger or a weight-loss pill pusher. No doubt it provides loads of distraction for millions. But how good is the quality of that traffic you and I provide to advertisers and publishers? How ENGAGED are we with this avalanche of gossip, news, entertainment and rants of friends and friends’ of friends? What kind of bounce rates do sites get?

Maybe because I am over 30 (ah hem) but, I have an instinctual ad blocker that keeps me from even glancing at ads that I sense are somewhere on the edge of my Facebook page. I am also the kind of person that does not understand virtual gifts.

Don’t buy me a $1.00 picture of a beer. Even if it’s Bud Lite in a plastic tumbler buy me the real thing (OK arguments of the quality of national top selling beer brands aside). I can go to Google for free (minus my personal privacy) to see a picture of a beer.  Or you can tell me that you would like to buy me a beer. I’ll feel just as special as if you had forked over a dollar to Bill Gates&Co. for that virtual bonding experience.

So yes, Facebook will go public.  But that does not mean it will be hot for long or even do much beyond provide basic exposure. I wonder what the décor of the next club will be? Marky Z should pray that some flashy millionaire with Qualcomm money doesn’t open the next one across the street before Wall Street gives the Facebook social media traffic factory the nod.

RockYou is up a creek without an encryption paddle. Turns out they got hacked last December and compromised the information of 32 million users. One such user is not just going to grin and bear it, but has filed a class action lawsuit.

Playing peek-a-boo with user data ain’t cute. In other words, a lot is riding on your data.

I am pretty sure this is not all that uncommon. For example many affiliate ad networks are quite free with their data. Publishers tend not to want to deal with the “hassle” of dealing with encryption keys. So networks keep hundreds of email suppression lists with millions of names and email addresses in plain text available for any bad egg, with a login, to grab and spam to. So advertisers, especially brands, have got to be alert. The last thing you need on your hands is a CAN-Spam violation.

Any advertiser serious about maintaining a long term business or protecting a brand name has got to do the extra work to make sure their email lists and suppression files (the lists of people that have opted-OUT from you) are encrypted. Unless you are OK with changing your business name every time trouble arises and you keep your accounts off-shore, you are going to have to play nice.

All encryption methods work on the basic principle of dressing and undressing data without opening the curtain. Services like VanillaEnvelope provide an easy way to encrypt files. Currently the industry standard is MD5 but there are more robust ways to secure your data.

Not encrypting user data is like parking your unlocked Porsche out front with the key in it. It is just such a simple error and can be easily avoided. What might have been just two, annoying days of coding to secure user information could now jeopardize the entire company.

Domino’s Pizza is sorry. They are sorry that the crust has, for years, tasted like cardboard. And they are sorry about those employees doing disgusting things with your lunch. But Domino’s is ready to win you back. In fact they have hired a fancy, award winning ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, to woo you.

But I think Domino’s would be wise to include email into their core brand value methodology. As I mentioned before, with Toyota’s recent recall, I think going direct to consumer would be a very effective way of protecting and building the brand name. Full page newspaper ads with “I’m sorry” letters and contrite TV commercials are OK but a direct to consumer email campaign would really strike at the heart of the issue in a way not too dissimilar from the Domino’s Pizza documentary “The Pizza Turnaround” in which the chefs deliver the new, improved pizza to the harshest focus group critics.

Domino’s strategy of re-introducing their pizzas could be enhanced via third-party email. As cost-per-action email campaigns are a great, no-risk way to garner almost instant feedback while delivering a core message. Since both Toyota and Domino’s have huge nationally (actually globally) recognized names they can use a pay-for-performance model.

There are a few key reasons to use third-party email if you are a major, national brand:

1. Leverage the brand –Unlike a random credit report or insurance company major retail brands earn instant recognition. So brands have already earned the click and need only pay for a specific action to take place such as: joining the brand’s internal email list, ordering a free product sample or joining a social media fan base.

2. Re-fresh consumer base –Do not confuse third party email with email, email. Also I am not suggesting renting a list. Brands can partner with companies that specialize in and already have a massive or several massive email lists. These lists are all opt-in subscribers who are ready and willing to receive your commercial message. This not interruption marketing, it is permission marketing.  These are people that are not already on your internal email list.

3. Great ROI –Third party email on a performance metric pretty much guarantees you are getting your money’s worth. The caveat being that you need to have a strong backend security platform to make sure that that you are getting valid information.

As the media landscape shifts, merges and fragments back and forth it seems brands need to be more fluid. I think using third-party email with a great security platform has got to be one of the most effective tools available to strong national brands.