An accumulation of my random thoughts and ideas

Automakers Gear Up with 140 Proof Social Ads

2013-03-11T09:09:00.001-04:00

140 Proof is a company that a friend founded. He and another friend work there are innovating the social marketing space. They are doing a great job in the automotive space and here is a little write-up of the success and a quote by yours truly.

"140 Proof’s Blended Interest Graph targeting lets us go beyond just reaching general ‘auto enthusiasts’ and helps us connect with more nuanced, targeted audiences,” said Chris D'Alessandro, Director of Digital Strategy of Autoweek.

An open letter

2012-08-03T09:37:00.000-04:00

Overall you still have a branding problem. Your brands don’t really stand for anything. Sure some nameplates do but the brands don't. You pay your marketing agencies a lot of money; you have to find something that resonates and then be consistent for more than a month. Your media deals are interesting, but media is just a basket that needs to be filled with a message and one that resonates with your potential buyers. My fear is you are losing ground to Toyota and Ford so you are going to pull an old trick out of your hat to solve the problem - “cash on the hood” either customer cash or dealer cash. This will get you through another quarter or two but this won’t sustain the brand's long term. In the end your residuals will decline and you will be back at a $500.00 a month lease on a Mailbu. You don’t want to do this, you really don't. Take some time, find the message that has longevity for each brand and put a plan in action that will engrain that message into world.

I honestly want GM to grow market share and be the dominent player in the industry. I just hear/see them making the same mistakes and it pains me to watch from the sideline.

Gut Check: Data Shouldn't Trump Intuition | CMO Strategy - Advertising Age

2012-04-16T13:05:00.001-04:00

Gut Check: Data Shouldn't Trump Intuition | CMO Strategy - Advertising Age: Carone

I have been a firm believer of this philosophy for years. The "data revolution" has caused some people to only focus on the data and not on the whole picture. Data alone can actually do long term damage to a brand. What is the saying "short term gains cause long term pains"?

What Angry Birds can learn from Draw Something

2012-04-16T08:47:00.000-04:00

If you havent downloaded Draw Something yet, you will. It is a little app that creates engagement with your friends through a game of drawing simple to complex items. Think scrabble + charades. The app itself isn't something that Angry Birds needs to pay attention it is how the game is played. Think about playing Angry Birds and each board you compete with your friends. Who has the best score, friend rankings and just think of letting a friend beat a lever for you. Kinda like the Mighty Eagle functionality, yet to pass the level onto a friend and they complete it for you. I feel like that will take Angry Birds to the next level; the social and competitive aspects of Draw Something. Just my two cents.

The Return Trip

2012-04-14T15:48:00.000-04:00

The return trip from SC was a little different than the way down. We decided to go through Tennessee opposed to NC and West VA. We started out in Hilton Head; left around 11:00 AM EST and started the drive. It took us a few hours to get out of SC and into TN. When we got to TN the mountains we amazing. We drove through tunnels and sheer cliffs. Throughout the whole trip we were trying to figure out where in the Smokey Mountains we were going to stay. We continued to use the in car wifi (Autonet Mobile) to triangulate our stopping point. Susan was calculating nap time, with detonations and coordinating that with Luke's feeding schedule. We ended up landing on Pigeon Forge TN. That was a great idea as well as a horrible idea. We didn't realize the circus that was Pigeon Forge. It is the new Niagara Falls or Brandson MO. There was soo much going on in that town and people were running all over. We just drove straight to the hotel, checked in and then went to bed. The scene in the morning was not as bad as the evening, but the traffic was crazy. It was the 405 at rush-hour. It took us 45 minutes to get out of the city.

After that we traveled out to TN and into KY. Kentucky was really nice. Rolling hills, horse farms along I75 and a feeling of calm over everyone. We stopped at Cracker Barrel on our way through KY and into Ohio. We drove to a town just north of Cincinatti, Sharonville OH. Which is the birth place of Carmon Electra, who knew? We stayed at the Drury Inn, which had both free dinner and breakfast. That sounded like fun. Um, that was not so much fun. Now I know why we got such a good deal, and I see the type of people that come and stay at the Drury (most likely because the free meals).

The next morning we got up and drove the final leg, we spent the majority of the day in Ohio and finally ended up home in Michigan. We arrived at my mother-in-laws houe around 4 PM and everyone rejoiced. We all wanted out of the car and to be done with this drive. Mainly because Luke cried for the last hour. He is only 6 months old so he was just done.

All in all the trip was nice. The family enjoyed the stops and the views. I would recommend that either you spend more time at the destinations along the way, spend more time at the final destination or Fly. I think that the stop and go was a little much. Well I hope you enjoyed the post. If you have any questions just post them in the comments.

The Grove Park Inn

2012-04-06T22:07:00.001-04:00

We stopped on the way back from Hilton Head at The Grove Park Inn. The hotel was amazing and has been around forever. The stone boulder exterior was awesome. We were going to stay but due to the holiday weekend, it was over 600 per night. If you ever get a chance and are in Ashville, NC you need to stop.

Hilton Head part 2

2012-04-05T09:17:00.001-04:00

It is an interesting place, very easy going and protected. A lot of the road ways to the coast are either toll or private. I am told it is to keep the bad elements away from the coastal communities. The bad elements are the tourists.

Hilton Head

2012-04-02T19:18:00.001-04:00

We finally made it. Day one was pretty low key, we spent today at the beach and got fried.

Cracker Barrel (had to do it)

2012-04-01T12:55:00.001-04:00

We had a little time to kill so we stopped at Cracker Barrel somewhere in SC. We have about 90 minutes and we are at the resort. This was Luke's first high chair!

Huntersville, North Carolina

2012-04-01T09:57:00.001-04:00

We stopped at the residence inn in hunters ville NC. Nice place, inexpensive and free breakfast. Only 4.5 hours from Hilton Head.

Welcome to Virginia

2012-03-31T17:29:00.001-04:00

Quick stop at the Virginia Welcome Center! 66 miles to NC and 150 to the next stop!

Road Trip

2012-03-31T09:58:00.012-04:00

The D'Alessandro five has decided to drive from Rochester Hills to Hilton Head South Carolina. Our first leg was from Rochester Hills to Columbus Ohio. We are armed with a GMC Acadia Denali packed to the rim and an Autonet Mobile in car wifi. I will just be updating this post throughout the trip.

Day One - 4 hour drive to Columbus Ohio
Storms in MI cause a slight delay, the clouds parted in Monroe Mi. Then it was clear sailing to Columbus. We made it there in about 5 hours. For some reason Susan wanted White Castle, she dosent eat meat soe this is a little weird. Alex only asked "when are we going to get there 100 times, and we bribed him with Legos if he would stop. It worked. We arrived in Columbus @ 5:40 we decided to stay at the Marriot in the Easton Town Center (basically a mall) and then had dinner at the world renowned Panera Bread. We got back to the hotel after our excellent local fare and heard a fun noise, a tornado siren. There was a touchdown in the county next to our county. That was fun, the tornado missed us but we were blessed with a thunder storm. We all got to bed at 10 PM and now on to tomorrow. We are headed to Charlotte, North Carolina. That leg will be awesome; seven hours.

Day Two - 7 Hours to Charlotte, NC
The clan work up multiple times and finally at 8:40. I ran down to get $40.00 breakfast from the hotel (no it wasn't worth $40). We all ate and got packed. Back in the car and off to the road. First stop is Marietta, OH on the border of OH and West VA (exit 1 I70). We got some gas and had gross McDonalds. Susan is finishing up feeding Luke so I decided to get the blog caught up. We have another 5.5 hours to Charlotte.

Day Two - Part Two
We got back on the road and continued through the Appalachian Mountains. Driving up and down hills through tunnels and watching the south go by. You don't know how amazing driving through mountains are until you do it yourself. We wound through Charleston, West Virginia. The state capitol was amazing. We did notice that the city was a little worn and dingy. It was raining so you have to take the comments with a grain of salt. After Charleston we made it to Virginia and continued to stare out the window at the beauty. After 70 miles we crossed the border to North Carolina. We stopped at an exit because Luke was done and wanted to get out of the car. We pulled into a nice gas station and talked to a wonderful man. He was our server at Blimpie/Shell Gas Station. He wanted to know how close Canada was to Michigan and "What is Canada like?". I don't know maybe people in NC think Michiganders pine to be Canadian. I explained to him that even though Canada is vast it's population was about 1/10 that of the US. He was a little confused and wanted to know if I wanted my Blimpie's Best heated or not. I chose not. We ate at the lovely gas station / sub shop and then got back on the road. We finally arrived in Huntsville, NC (about 10 Miles north of Charlotte). Checked in and now it is time to get some sleep. Everyone is spent after a nine hour day of driving.

Day Three
We awoke in Huntersville NC and got back on the road. We drove through Charlotte and continued past through NC, we were out of NC in a few house and then we were in the deep south, South Carolina. It was quickly approaching lunch so we decided to stop at Cracker Barrel. The place was packed; yet we need a break. We put our name in and got a table in 10 minutes. The Barrel was surprisingly efficient for a place in the south. We were in and out in 30 minutes. We then got back on the road and on to Hilton Head. We were about 2 hours out. We got off the freeway and started down secondary roads, if was a little slow going with traffic. We finally got to the island. Crossed a bridge or two and circled the island to our destination. We are here until Friday then back for road trip back to MI! I will start a new post for the route back.

Personal Social Brand

2009-12-06T14:35:00.002-05:00

Social media is changing how and the way people communicate. We all have multiple persona's online. Each channel gives you another way to express yourself. Lately I have been segmenting/clustering platforms and creating a "purpose" for each. This is mainly due to the blurring of social platforms. A year ago Linkedin had a purpose, it was a social network focused on work and work relationships. Now Linkedin is connected to Facebook, twitter and (everything). Do you want your work persona to become your personal persona? Facebook is doing the same. "Facebook Friend" means different things to different people. There are tools to segment your "work facebook friends" from your "college buddies" and you family. I mean I really don't want my mom or 13 year old niece watching my interaction with my college buddies do I. My point is that we are all going to have to start building in time to manage our personal brands online eventually we will have to become "One two One" marketers to our own social circles.

The flaws in behavioral targeting or Please stop retargeting me

2009-08-12T11:11:00.000-04:00

I am just getting a little tired of retargeting. I mean if I happen to visit brand website for whatever reason; blog mention, twitter mention feed or whatever, it doesn’t mean that I want your brand in my face everywhere I go.

Retargeting is simple, basically you are an animal and the targeting network “tags” you. They follow you and put advertising in your “way” based on where you have been or what you have seen. I don’t necessarily like “Brand X” or want to ever buy anything from them, I just visited their site. Targeting companies don’t know intent or why you were there; they just know that you were there.

Things need to change, customers are getting annoyed and advertisers aren’t getting what they paid for “target advertising to consumers that are open to my brand”. I have seen a few up and coming companies come up with new ways to target. They are using Claritas Prism or Mosaic cluster to better target based on lifestyle. The flaw there is that this is extrapolated from IP and some computer based information and you are going to tell me that because I own a Mac I am 18 – 25 Male with an HHI of 65k – 85K and belong to the green segment. Um, no that isn’t me; sorry. It is better than the basic targeting but not quite there.

Targeting companies need to build out preferences and allow the customer to be able to pick which content to serve to the consumer. Google is the first that I have seen doing this, but someone need to create a service of global preference that is an open api (OpenID’ish) that all the targeting companies can access. But the preference need to be more than lifestyle, demo and Geo they need to be “hey don’t follow me if I visit your site” and “if I type these keywords don’t serve me ‘relevant’ ads”. It should list out the brands that are following you and you should be able to say “no, I don’t like that brand”. This method will also help with the impending congressional hearings around targeting and how it can or cannot be done.

All I ask is to present advertising to me that helps me and stop being a nuisance.

"The Internet is a Fad"

2008-07-14T18:35:00.002-04:00

I cant divulge where this quote came from but I can comment on it. There are still people/communities/societies that feel that the interactive medium we call the internet is a fad. It is just going to be here for a short time then "poof" it will go away as fast as it appeared. In some ways I feel that they are correct, but not in the same way that they mean "go away". I mean that the medium will evolve and become something different. We keep on hearing about the semantic web or web 3.0 an intelligent internet that understands you and caters the internet to you. I don't know how far this new frontier is but it will be interesting to say the least. As far as the internet being a fad, well to some people it is and it always will be one. There are companies that feel/felt burnt by the hundreds/thousands/millions they spent frivolously online and didn't get "anything" for it. They hope the internet is a fad because if it isn't then they will have to figure out a way to make the medium work for them. Yes, I know it is 2008 and internet spending is up double digit percent again and yes I saw that GM is going to spend over a billion online "some day soon". Even with that said there are companies out there that don't know how effective the medium is nor are they quantifying their spend. Companies that don't understand measurement and optimization, just spend and hope for the best. Eventually they too will hope the internet is a fad.

I am not a good blogger

2007-09-10T22:47:00.000-04:00

I have struggled with posting since this blogs inception. I don't know why, but I just cant seem to get on a schedule. I think it may also be that I don't/didn't think I had anything useful to say. I love blogs, I read over 50 different feeds per day. I think i am an internallizer opposed to someone that can let my thoughts run free. I have been able to semi-consistently update Twitter , so that got me thinking "why can I do one and not the other?" I think it is my expectation, I think about the blog posts too much and I need to just let it go. I am going to try the un-bridled approach and see what happens. Maybe something good will come out of my mouth.

CD

Measurability is the easy part, right?

2007-03-01T21:59:00.001-05:00

I think something that is consistently taken for granite is measurability. The practice of measuring or planning how to measure something. We are constantly just making sure the basics are covered we don't think about the bigger picture. If you just take the time to sit back and asses the situation you will have better results. The WA community need to embrace Measurement Planning.

CD

Tangible Technologies and Analytic Widgets

2007-02-27T11:08:00.000-05:00

I had a conversation with Chad Stoller (Organic's Marketing Wizard) the results are on ClickZ.

Answers

2006-07-31T23:00:00.000-04:00

I know I have not been attending to my posts. I think I have "posters" block. I have been noodling around an idea lately that may remedy the situation. I am coining it "Analytics Answers". It really isn't a blog it is more a free consulting service, yes I am letting the cat out of the bag and now anyone can do what I am proposing. I just want to offer free advice. Help on the most difficult problem. I know you can search the Yahoo! Group for answers, but I am planning on tagging everything so the questions and answers are easily searchable. What are your thoughts? What are your opinions? Should I invest the time and money into this initiative or should I try to focus my energy in posting more often?

Chris

Comparison: Web Analytics for Blogs

2006-06-01T22:09:00.000-04:00

Great overview and comparison of the three major blog analytic softwares; Measure Map, Blogbeat, and Performancing Metrics.

read more | digg story

Change

2006-05-03T22:21:00.000-04:00

Change is a good thing. Within web analytics change is what drives everyone of us, it is the reason we go to work. We are like school children waiting for that blip, rock or erratic trend. Without change web analytics would not exist, it would just be ho hum look at the data. Well, today I made a change. I started a new journey at Organic Inc heading up their Web analytics practice. I have spent the last four years building the analytics pratice at JWT, but it was time for a change. I hope I have the same success at Organic that I had at JWT. I am energized like a school child........

Multi-Variant Testing of Online Media

2006-03-21T21:30:00.000-05:00

Online media budgets have been growing exceptionally year-to-year, some analysts have indicated that one day online media will surpass good old TV. This really doesn't surprise me; you can purchase a target audience online. With TV you can only hope that out of the 10 Million eyes that viewed your spot some of them were influenced and may purchase your product. You can’t track them to sale, cart, or even a KPI. And that is only the beginning. Within online media you can continually optimize message, creative and calls to action to drive more actions. This is where multi-variant testing comes into play. If you are trying to assess if banner A is performing better than banner b you can run a split test to see which one wins. If you want to know if placement a with banner a and message a with call to action a performs better than placement a with banner a and message b with call to action a then you need to start building a multi-variant testing matrix. This is easier said than done. We were just discussing a test where the banner had four calls to action and we wanted to assess which combination was more effectually driving actions. Well this became a production nightmare. To produce every permutation we needed to create 75 different combinations. We then needed to run them in the same place with a comparable weighting, which meant that we needed to run them all at 1.25% of the time to ensure a proper distribution. This is all well and good but to get a significant sample we will need to run this placement for a month to get any actionable data.

Is this worth the time? Should we be doing this? Well those are really the two major questions. If the results display that one combination converts consumers at a significantly higher rate and by running that "winning" banner we offset the cost of producing 75 permutation then I would say yes, if the difference is negligible then you have learned not to perform that test again.

So, what I am saying is that no matter the outcome the results will benefit the company, good bad or indifferent. I also believe that the tests need to be controlled because if you have to create too many permutation you never be able to get an adequate sample and you will be in testing mode for years before you have actionable results.

Just test within your means.

What exactly is Web Analytics?

2006-01-01T17:50:00.000-05:00

I know this article is a little old, but I like where Eric is coming from. He breaks down the basics of web analytics and presents solid recommendations to the novice. I wish there was more information like this 3 years ago.

read more | digg story

Seven Thoughts to Arm Yourself With in 2006

2005-12-24T00:54:00.000-05:00

Good article written by Bryan Eisenberg. It outlines areas of focus for any company that has a web presence.

Enjoy

CD

read more | digg story

Even Michigan is getting into the WiFi game

2005-12-24T00:47:00.000-05:00