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Interview with Seth Godin
From the moment it hit the bookshelves Seth Godin's Permission Marketing hit a nerve. Godin's premise - that businesses can no longer rely solely on traditional "interruption advertising" captured the marketing community's imagination at the very time the best medium for permission marketing - the internet - was just taking off. Wired-Up catches up with Seth to find out what's new....
Wired-Up: Why do you think your book created such a reaction?
SG: When it arrived the web SEEMED to be an ideal marketing medium. But it wasn't working at all. Add to that the decline in interruption media, and marketers were aggressively looking for a new and better way.
The best thing of all, though, is that it works.
Wired-Up: Now the book is so famous, it seems you have become virtually synonymous with the phrase. For your own profile has that been a help or a hindrance?
SG: I think it's great. I make my living giving speeches, (I'm a ham and I love it) and without the book, it couldn't happen. I don't do consulting, but if I did, I'd be pretty busy. The most gratifying thing though, is to see one's ideas put to use. It's very cool.
Wired-Up: But the longer-toothed marketers would argue that the concept of permission is as old as the discipline itself. Would you agree?
SG: I think that smart marketers all agree that the tenets of permission... that delivering ads to people who want to get them... make an awful lot of common sense. What's new here is both an agreed upon lexicon (a set of words that let us all talk about the same thing) AND the realization that the old way just isn't working the way it used to.
TV worked when there were three channels. And you didn't have much choice but to wait for the commercial to end. The Web has a billion channels, and you can ignore the
"commercials". If the commercials get too hard to ignore, change the channel. Web sites trained consumers to ignore the ads!
When TV was making a fortune for marketers, they didn't need to worry about this. Not that interruption media will go away, but the cost of interrupting people with messages they don't want to hear is going to get higher and higher.
By contrast the web is the best medium ever for marketers--marketers who have permission. Marketers that need to interrupt to get (steal) your attention can't thrive there.
Wired-Up: But surely, with the increasing fragmentation of broadcast media, won't 'interruption marketing' actually become cheaper?
SG: No, I don't agree. It depends what you mean by cheaper; cheaper in terms of CPM, or cheaper in terms of dollars generated per dollar spent. Regardless of the fragmentation we know that the ads aren't as effective as they were. You can reach cooks with ads on the Food Channel, but those ads don't work so well.
So... the cost of building a brand that matters is 10 times what it was just a decade ago. We may never again see a great new brand for coffee or sneakers or cars or even computers. It's hard and it's expensive.
You simply can't build brands today in the way they did in the 60s.
Wired-Up: So, looking to the future, what follows on from Permission Marketing? What, in your opinion is the 'next big thing'?
SG: Implied in the "next big thing" is that there will be a big thing after that one. I think both the Web and permission are in their infant stages, and both (separately) will continue to gain in relevance.
I wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus (www.ideavirus.com) to talk about how ideas spread. I do think that that goes hand in hand with permission.
Because word of mouth fades out. If you tell six people you had a lousy flight on United Airlines, that's the end of it.
In contrast the ideavirus spreads. It grows and gets faster. So when the word spreads (in a negative or positive way) it has a huge impact. Which means it is a potent way to build a brand.
Examples include my own book: more than a million people have downloaded the free version or sent it to a friend. I spent -zero- advertising it, yet the noise it made placed it #5 on the Amazon bestseller list (for the insanely high priced $40 hardcover edition).
The Grateful Dead had no radio airplay, just the spread of an idea. Eminem far outsold Michael Jackson without spending a fraction of what Sony did on his title. And lastly, Hotmail.
For more on Seth visit www.sethgodin.com
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Legal Update - The new Electronic Communications Privacy Directive
The new Electronic Communications Privacy Directive is likely to affect most e-businesses' current direct marketing practices. One of the main provisions of the directive is that, as a general rule, the use of e-mail and SMS for direct marketing purposes will only be allowed on an opt-in basis (i.e. with the recipient's prior permission). Eduardo Ustaran, head of Data Protection and E-Privacy at City law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner provides some initial advice on how Wired-Up readers should deal with this challenge.
Download factsheet
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Independent benchmarking for email marketing from ABCE
Earlier this year Headstar became the first publisher in the UK to certify the distribution of live email addresses for its email newsletter e-government.
It was able to do this by taking advantage of the new audit service run by ABC ELECTRONIC (ABCE), the electronic arm of the audit bureau of circulation. Its role is the same as that of its offline counterpart - to independently audit circulation figures.
ABCE Managing Director, Richard Foan explains, "In practise what the ABCE does is independently verify the information that the owner of the data has provided. It undertakes this in accordance with industry standards, which in turn objectively inform the marketing decisions of online advertisers."
In essence the process counts the number of emails received, ensures recipients have opted to receive them and verifies any personal/demographic data the list owner has collected during the data gathering exercise.
Given the lack of client-side email tracking and measurement unveiled by the Frontwire digital survey 2002, does Richard think it will be easier for specialist bureaus to process an audit ?
"Not necessarily, as long as there are good systems in place run by good systems people anyone can go through the audit process relatively painlessly. Ease of audit is directly related to how well managed the counting side is. It's all about people deciding that managing the business is important."
Download ABCE's Email Audit Metrics from the latest Wired-Up factsheet.
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To read more
about Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
click
here
UK News: Marketing outshines CRM
According to new research from Aberdeen Group marketing campaign management deployments generally meet or exceed users' expectations. The report, Marketing Campaign Management: Benchmarking the User Experience, Aberdeen compares marketing campaign management to CRM deployment and concludes the former comes out on top.
US News: Will games save next generation mobile?
Major U.S. mobile carriers are expanding their wireless gaming options in a bid to generate more revenue. More sophisticated than earlier counterparts, mobile phone games have recently become serious business for wireless carriers across the pond.
The move is down to a new technology known as the BREW platform which analysts predict will help stir up the market by providing more entertaining games. Michael King, analyst at Gartner Dataquest said "It'll serve to jump-start mobile gaming by providing what carriers want."
The move may impact on mobile content and marketing strategies in the UK as the network operators seek to claw back the money spent on the hitherto ill-fated 3G licences.
UK Events: Webmaster conference to be held in London pub
The second annual Webmasterworld Pub Conference takes place on October 12 at the Cittie of Yorke pub, 22 High Holborn, London. Designed for the independent web professional, the conference is a strictly informal, peer-to-peer event where the participants lead the agenda. Early registration costs £45.
US News: Interactive TV AD spending growth forecast
Interactive TV advertising is expected to account for 6.3 percent of total
U.S. TV ad revenues by the end of 2005, according to a report from TRACE
strategies. The Boston-based high-tech research firm has predicted that total U.S.
revenues from interactive TV advertising --- interactive program guides,
video-on-demand, walled gardens and enhanced/interactive video --- will
reach $2.1 billion within three-and-a-half years.
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