Help Wanted

February 1 2010

How do we sell ourselves (interactive shops) to potential new employees? If you’re pouring over RFP responses or shopping for a new ad agency keep in mind that these new hires will build brands, execute marketing campaigns and help drive demand for countless companies. We’ve been fortune and never really felt the need to advertise for to bring in new people. Others aren’t so lucky. Would you work here?

We have over 800 budget conscious, retail bleeding, merchandise loving, sofa sleeping, car driving, pizza eating, market activating, comp sales crazy, ROI focused team members in many offices around the country! –Zimmerman

We fuse media, creative, strategy and technology to achieve brave, accountable marketing solutions. –Moxie

Our relentless focus on client service leads to groundbreaking work and outstanding results. And fun permeates everything we do - from weekly happy hours at our in-house Beer Bar, to friendly Wii competitions in our Game Lounge and annual all-agency outings like 360i’s Amazing Race or Beach Olympics. –360i

You eat, breathe, and dream not just about design—but interactive design. You’re a bit of a technology geek, too. Good news is we’d love to talk to you. –Partner & Napier

It’s only fair that we include our simple, short blurb.

We fight boredom! –VLG

We also eat, dream, focus, drink, drive cars (not after drinking) and have fun.

Bookmark and Share

Comments

No comments yet.

Join the dialog

Good vs. Bad

January 28 2010

Over the years we know only a handful of things to be true 99% of the time. One is that the more people empowered to make suggestions that “have” to be included in a website the worse that website becomes.

A good analogy and example of bad is your t.v. remote control. Just because it has room for 100 buttons doesn’t mean it has to have 100 buttons. Keep the message simple. Keep the site clean and navigable.

Think about a remote with 10 buttons. What would you keep and what would you throw away?

blog_g_v_b1

Bookmark and Share

Comments

No comments yet.

Join the dialog

7.5 Hours Per Day

January 27 2010

That’s how much time today’s 8- to 18-year old spends in front of a t.v., computer, mobile phone, and/or iPod each day. Thirty years ago that same demographic spent 1.5 hours in front of digital media each day, but that’s probably just because we didn’t have very much digital media. Bad or good this is a trend unlikely to reverse itself.

How will this change how you target these up-and-comers? Almost 8 hours of digital leaves very little room for print media, so that’s out. Tech savvy children won’t know what it’s like to sit through t.v. commercials. Heck, what’s a t.v.? Facebook ads, PPC, iPhone app banners, and other ad delivery vehicles will likely lose influence and go the way of the classified ad in the Sunday paper.

Peer pressure. That little thing we all want to resist will be the new way to advertise. Social influence is huge and will only get bigger, especially in this young demographic. Peer pressure is not a new thing, but the availability of new social media tools is amping up the influence both in volume and distance. Think that all night Halo 3 marathon in four states and two countries holds any sway over kids today.

It becomes very easy to see why the advertising landscape evolves so rapidly. It’s too hard to see how the landscape will change, so the best option is to be the one driving change. They’re the only advertisers that will know where they’re going.

Bookmark and Share

Comments

No comments yet.

Join the dialog

Clever Bags and Buses

January 25 2010

This will help kick start your brain on a Monday morning.

Bookmark and Share

Comments

No comments yet.

Join the dialog

The rubber meets the road…

January 21 2010

These days everyone has a formula for marketing success and no two are exactly alike. We either adapt our clients to our direct marketing approach, or adapt strategy to the goals set forth by the client. Giving clients solid advice along backed by previous campaign metrics creates an healthy partnership and solid dialog marketing campaigns. It takes a delicate touch to offer advice without talking down to clients. Many agencies fail here. You should hear our clients relay stories of agency egos the size of conference rooms.

Revenue generation is a team sport. Marketing starts with solid prospect or customer lists.* High mail-to-web rates drive these same prospects and customers into the marketing funnel.** Sticky microsites educate these folks and prime them for discussions with sales. Sales cycles grow shorter as sales gets into deeper and deeper conversations. Decision makers and those that influence the purchase get involved. Revenue is won. It all started with established campaign expectations and a solid customer-vendor relationship.

Not all clients buy into our approach 100%, but together we find ways to leverage our creative work to meet organizational milestones and goals. At the end of the day it’s about communicating expectations, setting goals before the first brainstorming session, and executing against those goals. That’s where the rubber meets the road.

veyron06_09

*Marketers spend far too little time cleaning lists. Traditional direct mail took a shotgun approach. You could afford bogus data, because the per unit costs were somehow justified. Not so with dimensional mail. Higher-end mail pieces help keep lists smaller with better, targeted contacts.

**Once you have a solid list it’s up to us (VLG or whatever agency you use) to deliver a value proposition to those future/current customers. Look for mail-to-web (or visit rates) over 20%. Our Dialog Marketing gives you a leg up with real-time behavior tracking online and notifications via email, SMS, or RSS feed.

Bookmark and Share

Comments

No comments yet.

Join the dialog

Herding Cats, Part 2

January 20 2010

We promised feedback after week of trying out three similar mtg/event scheduling tools. To recap, we are playing around with Presdo, Tungle and TimeBridge. For our purposes TimeBridge came out on top. I encourage you to run out and try each of these apps and feel free to come back here with comments.

TimeBridge

Pro: Scheduling meetings with several busy people without haggling is our biggest pain point. Problem solved. The user interface was straight forward. Trial account left open the possibility of a cross sell to other features. (We are entrepreneurs, too. Nice to see good pricing strategy.)

Con: Sharing calendars left users confused. Most found it difficult to find the colleagues shared calendar. In the end, that’s not very useful as it makes better sense to send an invite out that fills holes in your own calendar.

Presdo

Pro: Easy to use. Super easy. That bulldog that rides a skateboard could use it. Sign up is easy, so it took no time at all to get going.

Con: Not sure how this trumps iCal or Outlook when scheduling events for your calendar. It seems like an extra step, though I understand the argument for Presdo meeting reminders in advance, which is better than most calendar apps. No collaborative scheduling. Outbound only scheduling, which make it more like a nice scheduling to-do list.

Tungle

Pro: Handles collaborative scheduling with ease. Remember, that’s our biggest pain point. UI is intuitive once you get past the early handholding. Seems this app was intended for perhaps a less web-savvy users–Wall Street v. One Dell Way. Short URL can be copy and pasted into your own email client quickly and easily. That’s an interesting feature for contacts not interested in third-party mail, or leerily of it.

Con: Some of the sharing UI is tough to navigate. It’s just me, but loads of white and purple on the page make navigation visually distracting.

Conclusion

It’s a tie (for now). We’ll continue to run Tungle against TimeBridge and vice versa until we settle on an app. Time to kick the tires when it matters–with clients. Sorry, Presdo. Nifty little app, but didn’t have enough muscle as a business tool.

Tungle
Tagline: Scheduling made easy

TimeBridge
Tagline: Run great meetings

Presdo
Tagline: Make time to “___”.

Bookmark and Share

Comments

One Response to “Herding Cats, Part 2”

  1. John Stormer — January 20, 2010 3:05 pm #

    Thanks for the kind remarks. Even better that we get your “cons”. That’s how we get better. We just completed some usability testing on this features. Significant improvements are on the way. Stay tuned.

    Reply

Join the dialog

14 blogs for 2 weeks

January 19 2010

VLG is signing up for the Social Media Challenge. We encourage you to do the same. Check out Colin Alsheimer’s blog post for the rules. We’ve gathered a list of blogs from the folks here at VLG. Below are the 14 blogs we’ll track and promote over the next couple of weeks. With any luck we’ll learn something original. Don’t forget to bookmark and read our humble opus, too.

1. Customer Experience Crossroads
Our favorite Canadian that has on several occasions bought our loyalty with profound words about our own Dialog Marketing. Susan Abbott makes it onto the VLG top 14.

2. Servant of Chaos
Gavin Heard represents marketers from down under in a sometimes disturbing, yet informative way. Don’t let the crazy eyes headshot on his blog fool you. Australians, as you know, are good people.

3. Church of the Customer
I’ve never seen Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba speak in public. I’ve never read one of their books, but they crank out a good blog post every now and again. (Any blog that posts a PSA staring the late governor of Texas, Ann Richards, deserves a nod.

4. The Big Fat Marketing Blog
Get in the heads marketers kind of like you as they post prose about our favorite topic, big fat marketing.

5. Gaspedal “The Blog”
Brought to you by the people that gave us tidy white papers, books and conference panels and speeches littered with word of mouth and social media that matters. This is a good blog for people that communicate.

6. Unleashed on Marketing
Gary Bembridge has two passions in life. Want to guess one of them? This Londoner mixes it up with commentary and links to EMEA marketing goodies.

7. Good Is
Collaboration is very Good. Go hear for an “Ah-ha!” moment everyday.

8. ILT
John really, really loves typography. It’s blog posts by a British expat in Japan, so it has to be interesting.

9. Just Stuff I Find
We all could start a blog like this, but we don’t. This blog will find stuff for you.

10. Kottke
Jason was named after Alexander the Great and has big shoes to fill, he says. Can’t believe he didn’t see the Empire Strikes Back on the big screen. Nice little posts on his blog.

11. 37signals Blog
This blog might not fit within the SMS Challenge rule book, but it’s pretty darn good at making you think strategically.

12. Design Mind
Three times a year you can get this content in print form. Frog design takes this blog stuff pretty seriously. Always harder to make anything look easy, simple and clean.

13. Dustin Curtis is a superhero.
Dustin takes it to another level. Hard to explain. You have to check it out on your own, because I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Tell him hi for us.

14. the tortoise initiative
This six person team pulls together interesting work, design, quotes, etc in one easy to read package, very simple package. Blogger template, “sacrilege!” they say. We say bully for you.

Bookmark and Share

Comments

2 Responses to “14 blogs for 2 weeks”

  1. John Stormer — January 20, 2010 3:05 pm #

    Thanks for the kind remarks. Even better that we get your “cons”. That’s how we get better. We just completed some usability testing on this features. Significant improvements are on the way. Stay tuned.

    Reply

Join the dialog

Attn. Highrise Users

January 19 2010

It’s so difficult to track case dropboxes, rendering the feature pretty much useless. However a new shortcut allows you to put those files away using a simple forward slash (/deal AA Fly Home, for example). You’ll keep those deal and case names shorter to really get the benefit of the new feature, so impact how you use the app. When will we get API access to add tags to contacts? Still patiently waiting for that…

emailshortcuts

Bookmark and Share

Comments

No comments yet.

Join the dialog

We Totally Agree

January 14 2010

MarketingSherpa picked up a campaign we built on behalf of Fuze Meeting and the good folks at Fuze Box. I’m not sure we totally agree with everything in article, but most. Let the debate begin. (Yes, we really did get those numbers.)

CLICK THIS WAY >>

After you read the case study (and I know you will), please come right back here with some solid feedback. Bad or good, we can take it. In the meantime, take a peek at the microsite we built: www.seehowdifferent.com/prospectname

Bookmark and Share

Comments

No comments yet.

Join the dialog

Paywalls

January 13 2010

There are lots of reasons I read the Economist. One, to bore the heck out of the folks at VLG with economic minutae. Two, I love economic minutae, which brings me to the subject of today’s post. Paywalls.

Paywalls are those imaginary barricades that keep us from valuable content online unless we are paying customers. It’s nothing new, but the article I read did a pretty good job explaining and projecting how these monetary walls will be used in the coming year.

[You can read the full article here.]

It’s not the erosion of print advertising causing newspapers to consider building walls, but the erosion of online advertising revenue. A decline in print advertising revenue is expected. an industry that now finds itself in the entertainment business might find it worrisome with its inability to transfer offline readers to online readers and offline advertisers to online advertisers.

Let’s try a quick litmus test. Would you pay to read this blog? No. Would you pay to read the article about which this blog post was written? No, because you don’t have to or no, because this blog post told you all you need to know on the subject? No, because going forward you will not look for news, news will find you.

A Litmus Test

Where do you gather the majority of your news today? I get weather from my colleagues at VLG and my mother-in-law who is addicted to Weather Bug, I think. I get my traffic updates and Dallas Cowboys news from The Ticket (1310 AM) while driving. All but about 10% of my news comes from my wife, my colleagues and other family and friends at no cost.

Someone is getting news from a credible source, right? Finding out who that someone is and convincing them to part with the contents of a pocket book poses a huge challenge to the print industry today. Well, that and maintaining status as a credible source.

Bookmark and Share

Comments

No comments yet.

Join the dialog

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »