Email Marketing Help

DM News, a direct marketing magazine and website, have just published an email marketing guide and it is quite good.  Email is cheap, quick and overused.  Very few companies seem to do email marketing really well.

The guide from DM News provides some helpful tips as well as good emerging trend info.

The Right Way to Display Data

How you display data is everything. Great data, displayed poorly is like a brilliant idea that you can't explain to anyone. When you display your data correctly, it tells a story without a single word being spoken.

The New York Times does an excellent job of displaying complex data sets, often across multiple axis. If you haven't checked out their election maps, you must. Be sure to look at the county analysis.

A Great Marketer Shares a Great Presentation

Seth Godin has a new book out named /Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us. /He has posted a presentation about the book at slideshare, another very cool resource. This is how captivating presentations are done.

I know...you are thinking, I work in a very corporate (read as stuffy, conservative, etc) environment. You won't be able to get away with an entire presentation like this, but look at the impact of the images he uses and how little text there is.

What will people remember from your presentation? 84 bullet points in 12 point font?

Polls: Exact Science or Fuzzy Math?

Polling is either an exact science or fuzzy math depending upon with whom you talk. The major polls got it mostly right this time around. And how addicting was Real Clear Politics?

There is a good article in the Wilson Quarterly, which is by the way, a great magazine. It is called, "Poll Power" by Scott Keeter.

It is funny how the Founding Father's feared direct democracy....

"It is doubtful that the Founding Fathers would have taken much comfort in the reliability of survey research. They were skeptical of public opinion and fearful of direct democracy, believing, as James Madison artfully declared, that the public’s views should be 'refine[d] and enlarge[d] . . . by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.'"

The Sound of Democracy

So I am reading an interesting book, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, by David O. Stewart. On the heels of the most exciting Presidential election in a generation, it is interesting to see how we ended up with the electoral college.

It is funny how the Founding Father's feared direct democracy....they were democrats, small d, and elitists in the kindest sense of the word. They didn't really believe that everyone had a voice. How different we are now. Now any idiot with access to a computer can make their voice heard with blog or comment box.
And yet, the noise of it all is the sound of democracy.

I wonder how many of those guys failed to vote......

Worst Advertising of the Week

Prilosec OTC

They have a new commercial, or at least it is the first time I have seen
it. And I hope it is the last. It features a 40 something year old
white woman, dancing at what looks like a 25th high school reunion. She
is dancing like Elaine from Seinfeld, but it is not meant to be a joke.
Wow. What a bad ad.

Obama Campaign = World Class Marketing

There is a great article in Ad Age 'What Marketers Can Learn From Obama
<http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=132237>' which says, "Nov.
4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history
of marketing. " This is not an exaggeration.

The Obama campaign was pure marketing genius, from strategy to
execution. They positioned their product perfectly. Built an
unprecedented distribution network, changed consumer behavior and made
purchase of their product about far more than the product itself.

The genius of Obama's campaign is that it tapped into that truly
American desire to dream big dreams. He created a movement that at its
core was about redeeming this ability to dream. It only became clear to
me last night. I knew it was about change, and I knew he had created a
movement in this country to create change, but I didn't appreciate that
the lifeblood of the movement was this desire to dream.......amazing.