What makes a great marketing campaign?

Is it a formula? Luck? Rohit Bhargava's "Influential Marketing Blog" describes the winner of the International Cannes Film Festival's award for a great marketing campaign: a marketing campaign called "The Best Job in the World" for a little-known island off the Great Barrier Reef. It's a good story, and worth reading.

He whittles the successful components to a great marketing campaign down to the following key items:

1. Make it believable
2. It's not about how much you spend
3. Focus on content, not traffic
4. Create an inherent reason for people to share
5. Don't underestimate the power of content creators
6. Give your promotion a shelf life
   

Read his blog post. It's worthwhile, and the list is one that I'll think about when I put together my next campaign.

The CPM Gap -- what does this mean?

Everything that Seth Godin writes gives me pause. Make sure he's a staple of your media diet. Just read "The CPM Gap." He believes advertisers consider their targets as victims to be interrupted. That doesn't feel good.

Advertising on the Internet is still too much like ads in a glossy magazine. Not relevant to the context. Something you have to flip beyond to reach the rest of the story. Occasionally attractive to look at, but not the reason you came to the magazine. (Unless, of course, it's Vogue magazine -- which is basically a magazine of ads.)

Tomorrow's advertising will be entertaining, educational, relevant, honest and content-rich. It will be integrated into a site's user experience in a way that doesn't distract the user and doesn't make them beg for a close box. How much do I hate the ads that float across my screen? A very great deal. I hate them so much that to click on them would be an anathema. And to consider buying the product they promote? Never. Ever. Ever.

It's time for a fresh new look, GM

Driving back from the Revenue Boot Camp this afternoon, I listened to an interview on NPR.Org with GM's Vice Chairman, Bill Lutz. He said it was his job to convince 300 million Americans that GM wasn't all about building gas guzzling cars with lame, tacky interiors. And he's been in sales and marketing in the auto industry since 1963!

I seriously don't wish to disrespect Bill Lutz. But let's get real. Surely you knew that your audience perceived you as a maker of gas guzzling cars with lame, tacky interiors a year or so ago? Well, actually a decade or so ago? Didn't you even talk to your users outside Grand Rapids or Flint? And you're NOW going to be the man to fix it?

Bill Lutz also said that they were going to 'experiment' with selling cars on eBay. eBay?!?! Errrmmm. Welcome to web 1.0, General Motors.

Someone needs to turn GM upside down and shake all the crumbly old men out of the corners. It's a new world. The creators of the old world ain't going to fix GM's image.

More information about YouSendIt's Freemium offering

Thank you to Guillaume Cohen of Veodia.com for providing me some more details about YouSendIt's freemium conversion rates. See this link on Gigaom from 2006 that indicates that YouSendIt has 2.5M registered users, and around 9M visitors per month. It expects $1M in revenue this year, based on advertising and has 12,000 paying users. Mr Cohen provided me this link to Bambi Francisco's video comment about YouSendIt as a good acquisition target for FedEx. Mr. Cohen estimates that YouSendIt has 9M registered users in 2009, with 100K paid subscribers and around $1M in revenue per month.