What's The Difference Between Marketing And Advertising?

People often confuse the concepts of marketing, advertising, public relations and branding. Advertising is marketing, public relations is marketing and branding is a result of advertising and marketing. However if you are still confused, I stumbled across a graphical representation on Ads of the World that does a pretty good at illustrating the 4 concepts.

For quite some time I have been a fan of the website Ads of the World. Obviously a large majority of the ads showcased on the site are from "overseas" and some of the ads wouldn't see the light of day here in the states. Nonetheless, it is a great site to see some good creative. ANYWAY, for those of you seeking the answers, here they are.



Oh yeah, happy Halloween!

 

Only In Iowa Does A Dog Shoot Someone

I started reading this and I thought it has to be a joke. Now, the dog didn't really pick up a gun and shot his master who was hunting with him, but the dog did step on the trigger and the gun went off causing over 100 pellets to hit the man.

"James Harris, 37, was shot last Friday while out with a party shooting for pheasants in Poweshiek county in the midwest state. The Iowa natural resources department said the victim rested his gun on the ground while retrieving a shot pheasant. As he crossed a fence a dog trod on the trigger and shot him in the calf from just a metre away."

The moral of the story? Always have your safety on.

 

Fun New Activity For Fridays.

As we were sitting around here thinking about stuff to do on the blog, we came up with a new concept that might have some merit and stay with the theme. Every other Friday we are going to post a picture and a company from a seemingly unrelated market segment. It will be your job to come up with a tag line that could be used in the ad campaign.

For example... We post a picture of a basketball hoop and then we tell you that the company is a small proctology practice in central Idaho. As you post your entries in the comments section, you are challenged to come up with the ad concept and the company name. We will sift through all the entries and the winner will receive a shirt from the Big Pappa warehouse. The winner will be drawn on Thursday and announced in the next contest post. AND as an added bonus, if you blog about the contest and you win the shirt, we will even throw in a 6 pack of Big Pappa stickers. Make sure you let us know where the post is located.

See you on Friday.

 

"What I Found In My Email" Mondays. Vol.1 - Issue 3

Look at all those nice bucks under this guys trampoline. Evidently these deer found out that this guy quit hunting.

 

Top Posts For The Month

Just a quick note of thanks to our readers. Thanks to you, our traffic has, again, doubled this month. As always, if you would like to see anything on The Big Bald Blog just drop us a line at: the big bald blog at impact mt dot com.

Here is the list of top 5 posts from October.

1. Google is Reading Your Gmail
2. Radios Reign is Coming to a Close.
3. Big Pappa's Top 10 Road Trip Rules for Guys
4. I Got These Things in my Email
5. Bad Logos and the Mistakes that Made Them

Thanks again. Until Tomorrow.

 

Shoemoney vs. John Chow

I guess it's a contest and the real winners are going to be the 2 holding the contest. However I wouldn't mind the full Wordpress blog redesign package worth over $750.00.

I guess I am rooting for the Chow. So help John Chow beat Shoemoney in their RSS competition. John is offering some great prizes for people signing up to his full feed RSS. Shoe is offering nothing so go John!

 

Big Pappa’s Top 10 Road Trip Rules for Guys

Here is a little tid-bit to enhance your Friday fun. Ever been on a road trip with the guys and someone completely throws a wrench into the works? Well, here is a simple list that everyone can follow and can make a road trip more enjoyable for all.

1. Wrappers and other trash ALWAYS goes on the passenger side
2. A Pre-flatulent window cracking is not only courteous, IT’S REQUIRED
3. Urination stops will only be executed in 2 hour increments.
4. If you call “SHOTGUN”, you better know your responsibilities. (see duties listed on website)
5. Falling asleep during the road trip ensures hazing activities
6. If you decide to “moon”, make sure the window is rolled down. This will eliminate accidental stains on said window.
7. Driver has ultimate control over ALL audio selection and volume levels. Driver can Veto any music at any time.
8. PACK LIGHT. You’re not a girl. If you pack more than a medium sized bag, you may be left behind.
9. NAGGING will never take place. If we wanted to be nagged we could’ve stayed at home.
10. Incoming OR outgoing calls from girlfriends or wives is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated

Get the shirt at BigPappaWorldWide.com.

 

Blogging And Disclosure

I got an email the other day from a company asking me to blog about a product they offered. In return they said they would link back to The Big Bald Blog. Of course I told them that I would do it; IF they would buy an ad on TBBB, send me samples of the product so I could write a proper product review. This made me thing of some things that I read a while ago regarding disclosure.

There is a split debate on whether or not you should disclose if you are blogging for cash. Some argue that it's no ones business but your own and you should keep your mouth shut. Other purists argue that if you don't disclose, it eventually chips away at your integrity as a blogger. If someone finds out that you are writing positively about a product because you got paid to do it, is that of any real value to your readers? I would say no.

Here is my bit of disclosure. Obviously we design websites for people as part of our marketing services. From time to time I WILL post about a customers website when we go live with it. This is just something I like to do and it gives them a little traffic to jump start the launch. They are not paying me to post on TBBB, I just enjoy it.

So what happened with the company that solicited me? I never heard back from them. Oh well I guess I won't have to be dealing with that disclosure issue.

What do you think a blogger should do? Should they disclose what articles they are getting paid to write?

 

Loving The Digg

So you've tried and tried to get your stuff dugg. You have submitted quality content but you always seem to get the hot goods to the submission table too late.

Well, BCM has an offer for you. Evidently there is organization where membership is only available by invitation called DiggBoss. If you are invited it sounds like it would be very beneficial to your site traffic.

Head on over to BCM and check out the offer.

 

Spoof Cards - Crazy Fun

One day I got a call on my cell phone and the call was coming from me and my number was showing up on screen. I answered the phone and it was a lady's voice. She was saying all kinds of crazy stuff about me meeting her at the bar last night. To make a long story short, I found out who it was. It was Chris, a friend of ours. I asked him what the heck he was doing and HOW the heck he did that. He told me he was using a "Spoof Card."

You can call someone, have any number come up on their caller ID and you can change your voice to anything you want. Above is the link to the company that sells them. Check them out, it's too much fun to pass on.

 

Page Rank - Can We Stop Relying On It Already?

Page rank, page rank, page rank. It is getting tiresome to keep hearing about it. Unfortunately we live under the umbrella of Google and we have to follow their rules. Andy Beard just wrote about an article called Digg Favorites Slapped By Google. It lists several websites that, evidently, got penalized by Google for some reason or another. Paid links missing the "no follow" attribute? Who know what's behind the "best" algo in the world. Most of the sites that Andy lists are very good sites with reliable content. I guess it's a big mystery.

After all the websites penalties have been dished out for whatever reason, the average decrease in page rank was 3 points. That is a pretty big jump for someone with a PR of 6. The least shocking was John Chow getting hit again. He has been on the outs will Google for some time now. I happen to love his blog and I know he has some serious links coming in. I don't think that his traffic will suffer due to his decrease in page rank. Want to know how I know? Uhh, 16,000 RSS subscriber and growing is a good indication.

Obviously, Google still has a page rank of 10 and I have seen a bunch of PR 8 sites and a few with a PR of 9. But I ask you, have you ever seen a PR 10 website other than Google? I don't ever remember seeing one.

Is this an unobtainable number? Are they reconfiguring the web? Is a revolt on the horizon? Conspiracy theorists unite?

Just kidding. Seriously though, has anyone ever seen a PR 10 site. If you have let me know.

 

Dude

Dude! Great commercial!

 

A New Look At Advertising

Hello gang, Just got back from God's Country - Wisconsin. Hung out at the cabin for a couple to days to unplug, unwind and recharge. The only advertising I am subject to up in the north woods is the occasional beer sign at the local tavern. So there you have it - the reason for no post on Friday.

I have been thinking about how advertising has taken on many new forms over the last few years. Vehicle wraps are all over the place and now you can see moving billboards driving around various cities. People have even gone to extremes by making their body an advertising space. Certain individuals like Kari Smith and "SundayBrew" Joe are tattooing themselves with logos or websites for certain financial considerations. Some of these dollar amounts are not that impressive. After all, you are going to have this tattoo the rest of your life. For me, it better be a life changing amount of money if I am going to do that. Good grief, Kari had an online poker website tattooed on her forehead for the paltry sum of $10K. I mean are you kidding me? To each his own I guess.

There are other forms of "on body" advertising out there that are much less permanent. I just ran across something called Handvertising. If I understand it correctly, you commit to buy a certain amount of impressions through "handvertising." You send your artwork to HandvertisingUSA and they will make a stamp with your logo or message. "We then give the stamp to our network and it will remain in use until the desired number of “impressions” (hand stamps) is reached" says Mike Brown, CEO of HandvertisingUSA. Apparently, the company has a large network of venues like clubs, bars, fairs, etc that the company has partnered with. Innovative for sure, I would hope the ink lasts longer and looks better than your standard bar stamp.

What have you seen that is new or upcoming forms of advertising? Let me know.

 

"What I Found In My Email" Mondays. Vol.1 - Issue 2

Country Preacher

As a young minister, I was asked by a funeral director to hold a graveside service for a homeless man, with no family or friends. The funeral was to be held at a cemetery way back in the country, and this man would be the first to be laid to rest there.

As I was not familiar with the backwoods area, I became lost, and being a typical man, did not stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late. I saw the backhoe and the crew, who was eating lunch, but the hearse was nowhere in sight.

I apologized to the workers for my tardiness, and stepped to the side of the open grave, where I saw the vault lid already in place. I assured the workers I would not hold them up for long, but this was the proper thing to do.The workers gathered around, still eating their lunch. I poured out my heart and soul.

As I preached the workers began to say "Amen", "Praise the Lord", and "Glory"! I preached and I preached, like I'd never preached before--from Genesis all the way to Revelations.

I closed the lengthy service with a prayer and walked to my car.

As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I overheard one of the workers saying to another, "I ain't ever seen anything like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for twenty years."

 

Google AdSense is Gone

Since I use Firefox, sometimes I don't see what others are seeing in IE. Yesterday it was brought to my attention that an IE user was seeing a "page can not be found" in some of the AdSense locations. So I dusted off my IE and went in and looked. Yep, sure enough, there it was.

I know that Google will only allow 3 ads per page to display. I have 10 posts showing on the home page and since I had the AdSense code in the header above each post, only the first 3 ads would show. Up until now there has been no effect on the other 7 posts that show up on my home page. Evidently something has changed. The second three posts were showing up with the "page can not be found" error in the header.

So I decided to venture out and take a look at some of my other favorite blogs. I went on over to JohnCow's site and it was doing the same thing in IE. Obviously I am not getting a fraction of the traffic that the Cow is but nonetheless, it looks bad. And that, boys and girls, is why I decided to take the AdSense off. If they get it fixed I will put it back up. It's not like I was making any money from having them anyway. With over 36,000 page views in the last three and a half months, I had only made $5.63. I can't even think of anything clever to say that I would buy with that.

 

The Top Secret GPhone

Most of you have heard that Googe's stock has bulldozed it's way past the $600 mark. Obviously this is an effect of the widely anticipated and top secret GPhone that is building momentum.

Adding legitimacy to the whole upward trend of Google's stock, the search giant announced its acquisition of an obscure Finnish start-up, Jaiku, holder of key Short Message Service patents. SMS is text messaging, the technology that enables the exchange of short messages between billions of ordinary cellphones.

Obviously Google is not discussing anything about the GPhone, but USA Today reports; "Trip Chowdhry, analyst at Global Equities Research, says Google also has already begun designing an advanced GPhone model, equipped with a Google browser optimized to display Google services such as Gmail and YouTube.

Aimed at young users, a browser GPhone would probably sell at a fraction of the price of an iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Treo or Microsoft Windows Mobile smart phone, Chowdhry says. One major hitch: Cellphone carriers are insisting on a cut of ad revenue. "The carriers want money any time the phones are turned on, especially if the call is to Google," Doherty says."

The hardware has already been developed. The only thing Google needs to do now is sign an agreement with a carrier. Once this is done, the phones could hit the market in a matter of weeks. When it happens, it going to happen fast.

It also sounds like it is going to be faster, cheaper and more powerful than the iPhone.

 

Finally - Spammers Get What They Deserve!

The Associated Press reports that, Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, of Venice California, and James Schaffer, also 41, of Paradise Alley, Arizona, were sentenced to 72 months and 63 months in prison, respectively, fined $100,000 and were ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL. They also were ordered to forfeit over $1.1 million in commissions they made spamming inboxes with pornographic emails.

They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails, prosecutors said. During nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages advertising pornographic Web sites, according to court documents. Even after Congress passed the law called the CAN-SPAM act, the 2 perps continued sending email via remote servers in Amsterdam. The authorities were able to track the spam back to the individuals in Phoenix.

To prove that there is no honor in spamming, 3 other individuals that were involved, turned on Kilbride and Schaffer and testified against them in court to in order to avoid prosecution themselves.

YES! I love to hear stories like this. Obviously there is some big money to be made in spam, I have always wondered how much people make spamming and why they do it. Now that those 2 are going to be in a prison cell for quite some time, someone needs to go to the door of their cell every 5 minutes and scream at the top of their lung, "Click here to see the hottest girls on the net."

 

The New Apple OS

Apple® today announced that Mac OS® X Leopard will go on sale Friday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple's online store is now accepting pre-orders.

“Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we’ve ever released,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “And everyone gets the ‘Ultimate’ version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just $129.”

Yeah yeah yeah, OK. This is fine and dandy but have you guys seen the new keyboard from Apple? And yes it is just called "the keyboard." No fancy name like the iBoard or the iType. Just "keyboard."

I'm not a mac user but I am going to head out and grab one of them at my earliest convenience.

 

The Shoemoney Show.

Here's a video from Shoemoney's website asking a big question. "Does Yahoo Even Matter Anymore?"



What's your thoughts?

 

"What I Found In My Email" Mondays

For those of you who weren't here last Monday, I started something new. What ever I find in my email on Monday morning that qualifies as slightly amusing or mildly interesting I will toss it up to the pages of The Big Bald Blog.

Here are some pretty amazing pictures that someone emailed me. I see that the one has a copyright on it. I am not sure whether or not I am supposed to publish that one. I want to make sure that the photographer gets full credit for that and if I am told to take it down, I will.

















That's is for "What I Found In My Email" Mondays! Check back next Monday to see what pops up in my inbox.

 

What's Behind Your Brand?

Contributed by Guest Blogger
Clare Price. Clare is a branding
expert who owns a California based
company called BrandVantage

"It's inevitable. Whenever I speak on branding, someone brings up cattle ranches and branding irons. Ouch! That hurts! Everybody laughs. But there is more to this analogy than meets the eye.

It's a well known fact that we as consumers "brand" ourselves with products from our favorite companies--companies like Starbucks, Ralph Lauren Polo and Coach purses. But it's what's behind that logo that really counts.

Cattle branding had two purposes in the Old West. First, the brand on the cattle identified the owner. You knew at a glance which steers belonged to you. Secondly, it identified the ranch. The size, importance and power of the ranch came from the size and quantity of its herd. Big ranch equaled big important brand. Little ranch equaled little brand. The respect that the cattle ranching community gave the brand came not from the brand symbol on the steer but from the size and power of the ranch behind it.

So what's behind your brand? What is the true size and power of your "ranch." Today when we talk about brand power, we mean brand equity. Your brand is your company's most important asset. Your brand is not just a logo or image; it is a capital asset with real net worth and financial power you can bank on. Brands have equity.

Brand equity is created by your company's ability to change market and customer perception into profits. To tap this brand equity, you must first understand what those perceptions are and how to harness their power so you can use your equity as capital to build your business.

Brand equity is measurable across five dimensions: Value and perceived quality of your product or service; market and customer awareness of your company, product or service; customer loyalty to your brand; market positioning, and competitive advantage...

For now, take a few minutes to think about how your company, product or service stacks up in each of these areas. Rate the following from 1-10 (10 high) for your business today:

1. Quality—How good are your products/services compared to:
   - Your ideal
   - Your competitors
2. Perceived value—How well do your customers value your product or service?
3. Loyalty—How strong is your customer's connection to your product or service?
4. Market recognition—How well known are you known in your product/service category?
5. Visibility—How much of your target market knows about you?
6. Image—How well does the average customer think of you?
7. Leadership—How much of the available market share have you captured?"

Thanks for the article Clare!

 

Web Designer Needed In Iowa.

IMT Inc. is hiring an additional web designer.

Qualified candidates must have a background working in a dynamic, interactive, and fast paced team environment.

Responsibilities: Design and develop custom web applications for a diverse client base. Analyze and troubleshoot technical problems, convert business objectives into a creative, functional and professional web presence.

Requirements: 2 Years development/design experience in a professional capacity. Must be detail oriented. Applicants must demonstrate a comprehensive working knowledge with some or all of the following: PHP or ASP, JavaScript, MySQL or SQL, HTML, CSS, XHTML, and Dreamweaver. Candidates must comprehend the basic fundamentals like cross platform browser compatibility, web graphic optimization, website to search engine relationships and the like.

Other Desired Skills: Working knowledge of WordPress, Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, and InDesign. Flash and 3D Studio experience is a huge plus. The ability to work in Windows and Linux server environments.

Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience. Please send resume and samples of work to: IMT Inc. 110 Fletcher Ave. Waterloo, IA 50701. Attn: Andy Mullinex or via email to andy2 at impactmt dot com.

 

I Am Jack's Raging Sense Of Design

As I was making my daily blog rounds, a headline on Seth's blog caught my eye. How to create a great website is what lured me over. I took particular interest in #8, #7 and #1.

"If you hire a professional: hire a great one. The best one. Let her do her job. 10 mediocre website consultants working in perfect harmony can’t do the work of one rock star." How hard are these rock stars to find? This is one area that is particularly difficult right now. But, once you get this person make sure you hang on to them.

"Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker." Design by committee has never worked. One person needs to make the decisions and live with them. Just like when you are designing a logo - there is only one person that needs to be making a decision. If you have 15 people on a design committee, you are going to have 15 different opinions and nothing will ever get accomplished.

Insight is good, clever is bad. Many websites say, “look at me.” Your goal ought to be to say, “here’s what you were looking for.” I couldn't have said it better. After all, isn't this the goal of any website. Properly constructing a site to give searchers the answers to their questions and the information that they are looking for is the key to success. So often this gets overlooked in the rush to make a site look good.

Great Post Seth!

 

Google Is Reading Your Gmail?!

I was perusing Webpronews website this morning and read a article by Doug Caverly called, "Microsoft CEO Says Google Reads Your Mail."

The article says that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, accused Google of reading email that is housed in their Gmail system. Why would he make this accusation? Maybe he was playing some dirty pool to promote their Windows Live Hotmail system especially after the fact the that they had just re-done the monetization.

Looking a little deeper the article on Webpronews references a write up on CRN.com by Ed Moltzen. This article says that, "...Google reads customer email as part of a failed bid to drive ad-based revenue. Ballmer isn't the first to fire salvos at Google's Gmail privacy policy. Privacy advocates have been critical over the policy almost since the beginning, but the popularity of the service has skyrocketed nonetheless."

To date, the big G has not come forward to defend themselves against these accusations. Google does publicly admit that they "processes personal information" on their servers but they never come out and explicitly say that they are reading your email. They haven't said that they aren't reading your email either.

So what do you do? Just like any other email system, whether its a free service or a hosted email service, don't send anything that would need to be kept private or secure. I am not real convinced that if you are exchanging recipes via email with a buddy, Google will step up and start spamming you with Pampered Chef and recipe oriented direct emails.

This whole thing is interesting nonetheless.

What say you?

 

Faster Internet For All - The Fiber Way

I was going to title this post, "More Fiber For Regular Traffic" but I didn't think that would catch someones attention if they were only an RSS subscriber. Anyway, back to the news at hand.

According to the Fiber to Home Council, in 2006, 1 million U.S. homes had direct access to the Internet from their homes with fiber. NOW, just a year later, 2.14 million homes have the fiber to home access. With the number over doubling in the last year it is apparent that "...American consumers want what only fiber can deliver – and that is a pipe big enough to handle the high-bandwidth Internet and video applications of the future,” said Joe Savage, President of the FTTH Council."

"Now in its seventh year, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council is a non-profit organization established to help its members plan, market, implement and manage FTTH solutions. Council membership includes municipalities, utilities, developers, and traditional and non-traditional service providers, creating a cohesive group to share knowledge and build industry consensus on key issues surrounding fiber to the home. Communities and organizations interested in exploring FTTH options may find information on the FTTH Council web site at www.ftthcouncil.org."

This is a great thing they are doing. It's too bad that we had to leave it up to a non-profit to further the interests of the U.S. people. After all the BIG Telcos did get a HUGE take break to the tune of 200 million that was supposed to be earmarked for this very thing. Where did that money go? Oh yeah, in their pockets. I think that those same companies that realized the tax breaks should have to give a certain percent of their sales to organizations like the FTTH council.