PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

By now I’m assuming you’re familiar with podcasting. You may have a number of favorites of your own, you may have listened to our inaugural episode with Phil Johnson and Mike O’Toole. But what about the long-term sustainability and adoption of such technology? What’s the market saying about it?
PodcastingNews reports that Tom Weber, a VP at Edison Media Research is about to release a report on the state of the podcast industry, and it’s good news. There’s still a way to go, but it’s reassuring to see the trends at play.
Here are some quick takeaways: (more…)

The Ides of March — it must be…conference season.

We are, as you have been hearing since 1980, in a year of disruption. A very long year. Out of disruption comes, of course, opportunity. As long as you’re on the right side of it.

Here’s what I learned on one little conference tour of duty. Some of the pieces follow. You can make a lifelike reality or revel in the bricolage.

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According to a recent piece in The Economist, Tim Berners-Lee, the real founder of the Internet, considers Web 2.0 to be a nice name for some Web publishing tools, but on the whole a lot of what he tried to build into the Web 16 years ago, in 1991. To quote the nicest guy on the net, “The web was designed so every user could be a contributor. That sort of participation was the whole idea and was there from the start.” So now that we’ve reached adolescence together, what’s next? (more…)

The Earth will be hit by a meteorite that will destroy all living creatures! Killer bees will decimate the state of Texas! Mixing Pop Rocks and Coke will make your stomach explode! We’ve all heard these incredible stories of impending doom, and hey, one day some of these may actually come true. So, a few years back when the Internet bubble was at its apex, I, being a print production professional, was quaking in my proverbial boots. Now that EVERYTHING was going to be online, what the heck was I actually going to produce? Was I going the way of poured hot lead type and acid-washed jeans? Well I’m here to tell you that print is in fact dead, at least as it was once viewed in the BtoB marketplace. Gone are the days of shotgun printing, where a mass distribution went out and covered a very broad spectrum of prospects. With today’s technologies in variable data print-on-demand (POD), coupled with an effective online program, a target can be so narrowly defined, it’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel. (more…)

One of the fine folks from Avenue A/Razorfish dropped this bon mot in a recent presentation to a client we share, and it got me thinking that a disconnect still exists between many BtoB companies and how much they should be devoting to search. As a client put it to her own eMarketing team, “We still get people saying they want to do a Web project or a microsite and that they have a $100,000 budget. Well, they don’t have a $100,000 budget, because I know they haven’t thought for a second about the ratio of what it will cost versus what it will cost to promote. I’m sorry, but ‘If you build it, they will click’ does not work as a promotional strategy.” (more…)