Author: Jeff Larche

With a background that includes direct marketing and customer relationship management (CRM), Jeff Larche brings an unusual approach to his work. What these other two disciplines have in common is database marketing, and they continue to strongly influence his work as marketing technology leader.
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Thank you, Macromedia, for giving us the next killer app

In a client meeting the other day, we were discussing with several individuals in the company their soon-to-launch international sites. The sites, which will have domain names in various European and Latin American countries, showcase the same streaming videos (with appropriate translations). So my team was asked a reasonable question: Will anyone have trouble playing the videos?

Even three years ago, this would have been a tough question to answer with confidence. Those were the days when you had to have separate formats for Quicktime, RealMedia and Windows Media. The answer would have been complicated and unsettling. Now, the problem is solved by presenting the videos in one format only: Macromedia’s Flash.

My reply: “Yes. Because they are presented in Flash, and because Flash is a universally accepted browser plug-in, you can be confident that everyone in every country will see them. After all, YouTube wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Flash!”

This was the first time I realized just how ubiquitous Flash really is. It’s true. I blurted out my YouTube declaration, but upon reflection, I seriously can’t imagine that the site could be so addictive if it weren’t for the ease with which you can view its contents. How addictive is it? YouTube is, as of today, the twelfth most popular site on the web, according to Alexa. That’s a lot of addicts!

When Flash emerged as a way to show rich content that was independent of browser type, I recognized its value for photography, typography and animation. But I never would have anticipated that it would be video’s “killer app.” Thank you, worldwide propagation of broadband connections.

And thank you, Macromedia.

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Attention B2B marketers: Your prospects are tired of white papers

In working with clients who sell to other businesses, I and my team are witnessing something I can only characterize as white paper fatigue. Remember when a truly well-written white paper that you could download from a corporate site was, although never truly a novelty, at least a welcome way to consume important information? Me too.

And it still is to some extent. I still find their contents valuable. The trouble is I’m spending less time reading and more time scanning. Therefore, the white paper has come to represent for me a workaday chore, not an opportunity to learn. Clearly others are in the same camp, because the offer of a white paper, when posed on a site or packaged in an email, is not as measurably compelling to our clients’ prospective customers as we have observed in the past.

There is an alternative, and I’m pleased to see it’s quickly on its way out of the “novelty” category of web site offerings. I’m talking about the audio white paper. AKA, the podcast.

Recent research reported in eMarketer.com suggests that the B2B audience is not just receptive to white paper content in this format: They want more of it. Here is an excerpt:

The respondents [in this survey of business and IT professionals] were actually enthusiastic about podcasting — and wanted more. Nearly 60% said business and tech information in white papers or analyst reports would be more interesting as podcasts, and 55% said they would be more likely to use the information if it were delivered in podcasts, rather than as reading material.

This same report showed how these are not just early adopters (from a statistical perspective) but are a growing base of business people who like podcasts, and use them both personally and professionally. This is encouraging news for companies who are seeking new ways to engage their target audience. 

As often happens with quickly emerging media trends, the challenge now becomes meeting this exciting opportunity — quickly — with content that truly takes advantage of the medium. Have any of my readers found strong examples of podcasted (and video!) white papers? I encourage your comments.

 

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The chasm between IT and “the suits” remains wide and deep

My work is the management of a decidedly mixed marriage. The business I oversee, which is part of an advertising agency (filled with your more traditional businesspeople), is chiefly populated by technologists. And we know how well these two groups get along. So it is my delight to report that for the most part, we all get along quite well, thank you. Visit us and you’d see a surprisingly high level of respect and productive collaboration between these two very different types of information workers.

Good thing, too. That’s what sets us apart in the interactive marketplace.

I bring this up because a friend, who is a very gifted programmer, had the following as his IM greeting today. It’s a link to a blog entry showing dramatically how wide and deep the chasm still is between the IT world and the “business world.”

The blog entry itself was interesting, and illustrates this ongoing mistrust. Moreover, the long list of comments it generated, which runs below the entry, starkly documents the passion of opinions on both sides. Man, the anger!

Every day I see the incredible things that can be accomplished when professionals of both disciplines work together. For this reason, I’m particularly saddened that much of the rest of the world has not yet found a way to agree on something that seems obvious:

Both parties — “techies” and “suits” — are invaluable.

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Two good resources to prepare yourself for the next 10 years

Thanks to Seth Godin for reminding me today that many readers may have missed the The Long Tail by Chris Andersonhoopla on Chris Anderson’s long-awaited book, aptly titled The Long Tail. This is an important book for those interested in the future of marketing and business design. It reports on a paradigm shift that we all need to get our heads around, in a similar way that The 1-to-1 Future was good intellectual grounding for what was to come, when it arrived on the scene in the mid-1990s.

You can find other support for your studies on the Long Tail Squidoo lens. And for this resource as well I have Seth Godin to thank. He is the original “squid” of this fascinating and fast-growing user-generated reference site.

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Quad Graphics buys a cool company

Success begets success. So I was not surprised when I learned this week that Quad Graphics has purchased a controlling share of OpenFirst. The company provides direct mail and digital printing solutions, but what has impressed me about them, ever since they formed ten years ago (under the name EPS) is their slavish devotion to database integrity.

I met the company’s president and CEO, Robert Kraft, shortly after they opened their doors, and what wowed me were stories about how they convert, merge and scrub the databases they use … as well as other ways that they use data, which I’ll get to in a moment. It should be common sense, but the programming and safeguarding that Robert described to me was something so thorough and ironclad that one might think he was talking about a nuclear power plant instead of a digital printing company. The reason for that is their chief technical officer, Chuck Olszewski. He’s an engineer who came to OpenFirst from the nuclear power industry. The guy is trained to prevent meltdowns … Exactly what a pricey and time-sensitive direct marketing program needs.

Okay, I know I’m gushing a bit, so I’d better give you an example of what impressed me back then, and still blows me away today. OpenFirst uses something called dataglyphs for at least one of their direct mail clients. It’s a way to embed a great deal of data, encrypted in a photograph or other screened graphic. This data is invisible to any observer other than a properly tuned scanner. To you or me, the photo looks perfectly normal.

What’s more, if you tear, stain or otherwise damage the image, you can still retrieve the data. Check out this dataglyph demo from PARC Research. You’ll be invited to use Photoshop, Paint or some other program to compromise the graphic that you create, and then see how accurately it pulls out and reports that graphic’s hidden contents. Incredible!

This application, which was originally created for the whole cloak-and-dagger-cold-war-passing-of-secret-information thing, is used by OpenFirst for a client who needs to get back from consumers information about them that is only available for use once the consumer has responded to a mailing. It’s a long story about how mailing list companies only consider their client owners of their data once the people on the list respond the direct mail message, but suffice it to say that this clever and private passing of data saves mailers a boatload of money.

And hey, it’s really cool.

Congratulations to OpenFirst. You’ve earned this opportunity to make yourselves and Quad Graphics shine even more brightly!