The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Pamela Parker

But Wait, There’s More…

by

When my husband first moved to the U.S. and we got married, one of our first family inside jokes involved poking fun at direct response TV. When one of these spots aired, we’d each take a guess on the final cost (“just $19.99” or “the low low price of $29.95”) and predict the moment when the full product line had actually been laid out — when there were no “but wait, there’s more…” lines left to say. These DR techniques are an integral part of American popular culture.

The WSJ today has an obituary for Arthur Schiff (reg req), the DR genius who came up with the “but wait, there’s more…” technique and marketed the legendary Ginzu knife set. (“In Japan, the hand can be used like a knife. But this method doesn’t work with a tomato.”)

Schiff died a couple of weeks ago from lung cancer in Florida. (The SF Chronicle obit.)

Blog Parodies

by

Funny piece by Lore Sjöberg in Wired News titled “The Ultimate Blog Post”.

One great graf: “Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it. One popular technique for building readership is to send e-mail to more well-trafficked blogs offering to exchange links with them. One popular response from those blogs is to laugh derisively and hit the Delete button.”

The article goes on to lay out “ultimate” posts for a number of blogs, including Boing Boing, FARK, Slashdot, Kottke, Make, and Digg. Good stuff.

Blogging Issues Get Top Billing

by

My how things have changed. We’ve gone from MSM’s utter dismissal of blogging as a phenomenon to a WSJ story (reg. req.) whose sub-head is “Bloggers Struggle With What to Do About Vacation”.

In the height of summer-holiday season, bloggers face the inevitable question: to blog on break or put the blog on a break? Fearing a decline in readership, some writers opt not to take vacations. Others keep posting while on location, to the chagrin of their families. Those brave enough to detach themselves from their keyboards for a few days must choose between leaving the site dormant or having someone blog-sit.

Amanda Condon + Pop Urls

by

The former Rocketboom star rises again, partnering with Pop Urls to host a daily videocast called PopHub focusing on, yes, popular URLs. (Full disclosure: Pop Urls is an FM site.)

Should be interesting to see if Amanda can command an audience in this venture. And it’s also noteable that, despite Hollywood ambitions, she’s not going all mainstream media. Is this by choice? Or by default?

UPDATE: Thomas of Pop Urls writes in and says (of an earlier version): “it’s not completely correct – her editorial selection of links on popurls is not ultimately connected with her video project and pophub.com is in fact the blog for popurls.com ;).” Ok, corrected.

When Online is One of the Only Appropriate Marketing Choices

by

It’s hard to think of a product more well-suited for online marketing than Plan B, the Barr Pharmaceutical drug approved for sale to over-18s this week. A WSJ piece (reg req) today lays it all out pretty well. They need to reach a wide audience because contraception failure is the kind of thing that happens to a lot of people once or twice. It’s not the kind of situation where you try to reach your endemic audience, say HIV+ people or diabetes sufferers, and then target tightly based on that goal.

It’s also the kind of product for which advertising is more appropriate online. People are accustomed to doing all kinds of personal things online — paying bills, indulging their sexual proclivities, etc. — so seeing ads for Plan B aren’t likely to jar. This stands in stark contrast to how people might feel if they see such an ad while watching TV with family members. (May I suggest that FM’s Parenting Federation might be appropriate?)

The company’s Web site, go2planb.com is already getting great search rankings. It’s top of the heap and page 2 on Google, and it also benefits from shortcuts and refinements because the search engine recognizes it as a drug. I would have expected this kind of generic phrase to be difficult to optimize, but I would be wrong.

Note to Barr: It might be a good idea to update your Web site to reflect the FDA approval, and give potential customers an idea when they might expect to be able to buy over the counter. Right now, the site still says you need a prescription. The FDA approval, and corresponding media exposure, is likely to drive lots of traffic. (Note Google Trends report on the term. It’s really popular in Bogota, Colombia, interestingly.)

Big Tobacco does UGC

by

Pallmall It’s fascinating to see what Big Tobacco does to market itself nowadays (to adult smokers only, natch), given all the restrictions these companies face. And now they’re joining the user-generated-media craze. The image here was from an e-mail I received after signing up for a mailing list (and verifying my age, and saying I smoke). If you’re under 18 or a non-smoker, navigate away now, before you accidentally become swayed by the marketing message.