Recently, our managing director and fearless co-leader, Janice Thompson, was featured in an Advertising Crossing article.

Here are a few prime snippets from her interview, head on over there to read the whole thing.

The company has worked with a wide range of talent, focusing its campaigns on “delivering more direct sales or leads for [its] clients,” says Thompson, which include large nonprofit clients and Fortune 500 companies as well as middle-market businesses.

“We’re snobs when it comes to running campaigns that can be measured in terms of bottom-line results,” Thompson says.

Which is why campaigns that help decrease client costs — “campaigns where we’ve been able to decrease a client’s advertising costs by 33% while increasing the results by 34%” — are Thompson’s pride and joy.

“I guess it goes back to my financial background,” Thompson adds. “I know we’re delivering real value for the client.”

Great interview Janice!

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If you’ve been keeping your eye on the online world, you may have heard about a pending lawsuit against retail giant Target. This suit is being brought about because Target failed to provide ALT tags on its website - which the plantiff states constitutes discrimination against visually impaired users.

Has Target missed the mark legally? I won’t comment on that, but what I CAN comment on is that Target’s web developers have missed the mark on a basic (and very easy to execute) best practice. From the W3C Website:

The alt attribute is defined in a set of tags (namely, img, area and optionally for input and applet) to allow you to provide a text equivalent for the object.A text equivalent brings the following benefits to your web site and its visitors in the following common situations:

• nowadays, Web browsers are available in a very wide variety of platforms with very different capacities; some cannot display images at all or only a restricted set of type of images; some can be configured to not load images. If your code has the alt attribute set in its images, most of these browsers will display the description you gave instead of the images
• some of your visitors cannot see images, be they blind, color-blind, low-sighted; the alt attribute is of great help for those people that can rely on it to have a good idea of what’s on your page
• search engine bots belong to the two above categories: if you want your website to be indexed as well as it deserves, use the alt attribute to make sure that they won’t miss important sections of your pages.

Besides allowing for accessibility and standards compliance, ALT tags also offer some benefit from an SEO perspective, providing context for spiders as to what your images represent. The exact SEO value of this is up for debate, and we ARE NOT suggesting stuffing every ALT tag with keywords - however, since it can’t hurt, will likely help, and opens up your site to visually impaired visitors, and is very easy to execute - you have no excuse not to do it!

If your site isn’t standards compliant, and you need some help getting there, feel free to contact us and we’ll help you out!

SEO, Usability, Site Design | No Comments »

I was interviewed recently by Larry Dobrow for a story that appears in this month’s OMMA  (requires free subscription) about marketing to the military.  As the article points out, active duty and reservists, military families and veterans have been grossly overlooked and misunderstood when it comes to marketing budgets and messages.  So as we enter the holiday season, I thought I’d provide some specific tips for marketers who are looking for niche opportunities that can yield high ROI:

1. Know your audience–the military today is not the military of 20 years ago.  The US Armed Forces is 20% female, very internet savvy (for many the internet is the preferred means of communication), and are tightly networked.  Make sure your military marketing strategy includes a heavy-duty online component that reaches deeply into the social media networks and promotes word-of-mouth advertising.
2. Don’t over-patronize.  You don’t have to use a waving flag in every creative. 
3. Don’t make uniform mistakes.  If you choose to show someone in uniform, make sure the model is 100% authentic.  If your brand is positioned with someone in fake fatigues, it shows that you don’t really care.
4. Use discounts and special offers to say “Thank You for Your Service” rather than to promote savings.  Military households tend to have above average disposable incomes.
5. Customize your messages, creatives and media buys to reach the sub-groups within the military market (e.g. gamers, golfers, spouses, families, Hispanics, Asians, African Americans).  We have found in working with clients that are marketing to the military, it is more beneficial to create your own custom network than to rely solely upon traditional media buys.  The more microscopic and targeted your message, the better.

So this holiday season while all your competitors are fighting over the masses, why not reach out to the military community.  If you do it the right way, your bottom line will thank you.

Technorati Tags: niche marketing, military marketing

Niche Marketing | No Comments »