The entertainment X-factor has always been a driving force behind advertising, one of my favorites being Macintosh’s release commercial in 1984…but what we’re seeing now is truly remarkable and only limited by ones creativeness.  Remember Volvo’s commercial with that cute Darth Vader kid, the Old Spice guy, or how Snickers helped to propel Betty White back to stardom?  Of course you do, those are some top recent examples of commercials that were highly successful and popular in the mainstream market.  With the web though, advertisers no longer are limited to 30second blips and ‘PC’ messages directed to a mass audience.   Case in point, K-Swiss‘ Kenny Powers commercials and his claim of “making marketing that touches people”.

Caution: Video contains flagrant and funny material.

You can now speak to and engage your customers unlike ever before and having a catchy video or slogan can help propel your message to the next level.  The key to creating what you hope to be a ‘viral’ advertisement, is knowing your fan-base and developing your strategy wisely.  K-Swiss would never get away with such an edgy commercial in the mainstream but by reaching out to their fan-base and those that will listen and engage with this type of message, it has been advantageous in defining their brand and creating hype.  People are choosing to see their commercials instead of being forced to, and that’s as good as gold to a marketer!  So in 2012, don’t be afraid to be bold, to entertain, to shock, to embrace comedy, to say what you really want to say, and go VIRAL!

In the simplest terms, FanMail is an marketing agency with a focus on direct-to-fan strategy, tools and campaign development. Yes, we do email marketing exceedingly well. Yes, we design and yes we build software. Our roots are in the music industry, but we have increasingly been getting interest from sports teams, media brands, gaming and retail. Our core philosophy rings true for almost every business and marketers worldwide are learning that by finding and serving their most ardent advocates, their marketing efforts are rewarded with stronger and more sustained ROI and greater, organic reach. Simple premise. Powerful results.

So after much work, I’m please to present the new face of FanMail at http://fanmailmarketing.com. This is only the beginning. Over the coming weeks, we will be continuing to add content to the site in case studies, knowledge base articles, product demos and service descriptions. We have a lot to share and are exited to have the right space to show it off.

2011, here we come!

Over the next few weeks we will be rolling the Interactive Marketing Hub out to our clients. If you interested in getting considered for the beta release, please sign up here.

The Interactive Marketing hub centralizes Social, Email, Mobile, Sites, Audience Builder, Automation Studio and Reporting into a single unified workplace. Hot damn dogs! This is a game changer. With a real time view of the living web, Interactive Marketing Hub is one of the most exciting product enhancements we have seen from our technology partner ExactTarget.

Here are some of the key features being rolled out as a part of release 139 and The Interactive Marketing Hub.

THE INTERACTIVE MARKETING HUB:

The Hub Brings it Together

SOCIAL MARKETING MANAGEMENT:

MOBILE MARKETING MANAGEMENT:

Mobile Marketing Management

AUDIENCE BUILDER:

Audience Builder Provides Lightning Fast Complex Segmentation

VISUAL AUTOMATION:

Easily build complex automation tasks

REPORT STUDIO:

Easily create simple, costom reports

MORE RESOURCES:

VIEW THE INTERACTIVE DEMO

FIND OUT MORE INFORMATION ON 3SIXTY

DOWNLOAD THE PRODUCT SHEET

Facebook pulled an interesting marketing strategy  this week by replacing its “fan” buttons with “like” buttons. On the surface it seems like just a minor grammatical change, but the ramifications of this small action can be huge. According to Facebook, the reason for this change was a “part of [their] ongoing efforts to improve the user experience, increase engagement and promote consistency across Facebook, [they] are changing the language [they] use when people connect to [their] Brand Pages. People will soon connect with [their] Brand Pages by clicking “Like” rather than “Become a Fan.” People already “Like” their friends’ status updates, photos and links everyday. In fact, people click “Like” almost two times more than they click “Become a Fan” everyday”.

Will this plan actually work?

I am not convinced. One of the reasons social networking has become so popular is because it opens up brands to the consumer, allowing them to access ‘their’  brands on-demand. This can inspire more than just a “like” feeling, it creates a fan. This is what marketers have been trying to get their consumers to be: brand-loyal fans!  I can guarantee a “fan” will buy a band t-shirt, someone who just likes a band probably will not. While this new “liking” strategy may get more people to “like” a brand, I would like to point out that quality is way more important than quantity when it comes to social and email marketing campaigns. It is the fan, the super-loyal user, that will always click on your email and will always engage with your brand on social sites and will bring you the most return on your marketing investments.

And how do fans feel about this?! I think some of them feel a demotion in status from a FAN who attended every single one of band x’s tour dates last year and has band x’s tattoo, to someone who has been to just one show. Fans love being fans, they love the status and they are your most brand-loyal consumer. Engage them instead of losing them in the crowd.

I feel a bit like Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School”.

As CEO of a pretty well respected direct-to-fan marketing shop, our clients kinda expect us to already know quite a bit on the topics of online, social and so forth. And we do. And we pitch and deliver outstanding programs every day. So it is a bit of a running joke around the FanMail office that that I might be bit overqualified for the class… and so likely doomed to failure based on murphy’s law.

I got a C on my first assignment for not answering the whole question, “Please outline your top 10 pros and cons (5 each) of a direct-to-fan sales and marketing approach. Which traditional outlets do you think are still effective for selling and marketing your music?” I got the 10 pros and cons but skipped the question on which traditional outlets still work. Rats… the details get me every time.

But it is the dialogue that I’m most interested in. That is the good stuff. The grade is really negligible for me.

I mean the music industry sucks for open dialogue. Generally there is just too much ego and posturing and and self congratulation and fierce competition for the industry to actually openly discuss what works or doesn’t work in their marketing methodologies. It is interesting. If you go to any number of main stream “corporate” marketing conferences often you find presenters (one person showing a case study or telling a real story of success) or round tables (open dialogue with the audience and a moderator). But in the music industry it is all about “The Panel” (a group of hand picked experts who are really there to propel their own agendas).

So I’m looking to Academics for dialogue and I applaud Ian and Shamal and team for bringing it into a forum where such things can hopefully thrive. My fear of course is that the promise of open dialogue here could quickly be clouded by the marketing agenda. We shall see.

I’m also interested in the Topspin platform. I don’t think that it is akin to the second coming of Christ as the hype would lead us to believe, but I do think that it is a game changer and puts some pretty powerful tools in the hands of artists and their team. At FanMail, we are hoping to expand our programming over the next months to execute services for our clients on the Topspin platform. This is a good way to “dip our toe in the water” without taking a full dive.

We have a number of clients who use both FanMail and Topspin in tandem. FanMail for email, sms, automation and database management and Topspin for transactions, media and widgets. I’m hopeful that as the dev team continues to build out their APIs, that the doors will be opened where these two world class systems can continue to compliment each other. Ian, can I hear an open source yelp?

To top it off (and inspired by the class project) I’m working with Josiah to bring The Lion’s Rampant album “It’s fun to do bad things” to market for a March release on Topspin. This band it too much fun and I’m sure there will be more insights on this to come.

Ok, I’m off to find an apple for the teacher.

Until next time!

David