One of my favorite classes in college was Principles of Advertising. The section I found the most interesting covered subliminal advertising. It was fascinating to study how logos were embedded into images, like the Disney reference below. I think its brilliant.
My friends and I spent a lot of time looking for others; pondering whether or not one of the first bottled waters, Evian was deliberately named to backwards spell Naive. Cool, right? I think so...perhaps that's where my geekiness comes in. Hey - maybe I DO fit at Aprimo!!
I love entertaining the idea that marketing can play with our subconscious...if only we listened to that subconscious more! I can't tell you how many times I knew I needed a better way to track projects and lead development or manage marketing finances...those nagging thoughts that aren't annoying enough to be conscious, but they bug the heck out of your subconscious. I knew I needed these things to prove my ROI in marketing to my boss and others and yet, I subconsciously fought against them.
Do you do this? Should I push my graphic designer to start creating subliminal marketing collateral that speaks to your subconscious instead of the conscious self that is fighting an internal battle? One more fun subliminal post for fun....
In my past marketing life, before learning to speak "Yoda" and definitely before I could do an office scavenger hunt that I would win if "stuffed star trak characters" showed up on the list...(there are at least 10 offices I know of that I can beeline to here!) I fought uphill battles.
In that past life, I debated, practically daily, with the finance higher ups about the value of marketing. My department was responsible for lead development and lead distribution, but a lot of our success rested on the question, "Is it just the economy driving these leads?" It seemed to me that anything we did poorly, we took on chin (yes, I hear violins playing!) but that anything done well was attributed to the economy. What we needed to do was rip up the Excel speadsheets used for tracking and adopt a marketing communication software that would provide lead automation. Then, that monthly debate or button pushing would be backed up. Technology is a science...so who can argue with science? Are you fighting those same uphill battles? If so, quit tracking and start automating!
I say..."CFO Joe" bring on your questions, I've got Aprimo software on my side...and a whole host of "techie trekkies" to back me!
The concept was so simple, that it took a while for me to understand it. Now, I had worked in a relatively big company (HP through the late 90s) but hadn't been in a big marketing organization since that time. In reality, HP still operated as a series of small companies when I left them. So, the concept that a Marketing Calendar could provide an ROI in Marketing was somewhat hard to grasp initially. However, as my learning increased here and our own marketing got more sophisticated from lead development through marketing planning and I got exposure to larger marketing operations operating in this increasingly complex world of online marketing and offline marketing, it all came clear.
Marketing Operations were spending extensive person months just managing and communicating their calendar of planned activities. Literally, there are multiple companies that have individuals that spend all of their time gathering new and changed information that drive the calendar of marketing activities and formatting the information to communicate it (everything from elaborate graphics to spreadsheets) to people inside and outside the company that need to know. So, what if there was a tool within marketing automation that allows the people that are managing their marketing projects to easily update their calendar dates that could drive a series of calendars tailored to the audience and available online? A simple concept extended to scale and married with the current process of marketing project management can really work. I would love to hear from those of you that relate to this, those doing this or those that have tried and failed.
I blame my mom for my bad teeth. My dad gets blamed for my freckles and long face, but my mom definitely gets the rap for the teeth. I had a lunchtime dentist appointment yesterday - my third in about three weeks. Thanks mom! While I was brushing and flossing before the appointment, I wondered how many others take time to clean their teeth before going to the dentist. I asked Dr. Geyman and she said that I would be surprised at how many don't. Nice....
It doesn't actually surprise me because I work in marketing. Where's the correlation? It is that I see marketers and companies frequently take their products or services to market with NO campaign management or marketing planning - like going to the doctor with dirty teeth.
They know there is a need to generate lead development and response history that are tracked back to a marketing plan and yet, they fail to do the 'brushing' on the front end to make that connection. By failing to plan, marketers wind up planning to fail. By planning marketing campaigns in advance, you can avoid those cavities and pitfalls of not being able to track back to your ROI in marketing. Go to market with a clean mouth!
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