The Big Fat Marketing Blog

You might think that a room full of catalog company executives and suppliers would be slightly hostile in the face of a U.S. Postal Service bigwig talking about how the USPS is here to help catalogers.

And that is kind of what happened during the American Catalog Mailers Association’s National Catalog Forum in Nashville last week. Deputy Postmaster General Pat Donahoe was doing his best to make nice with the catalogers, but part of the discussion did get a little heated. more

Did Lane Bryant pay ABC not to air its lingerie commercial? Surely the plus-size apparel company is getting much more mileage over ABC’s refusal to show the commercial during all but the final minutes of Dancing with the Stars than it would have had ABC simply run the 30-second spot.

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Advertising used to be told in thirty-second increments, a barrage of information or imagery swallowed up in one short gulp. Not anymore. more

I was searching for an image of a very old ballplayer, on a very old tobacco baseball card, the other day, and got this ad placement. more

Time is Twitter’s advantage. It’s also its Achilles heel. If you’ve got a time-restricted offer—say of discount hotel rooms if respondents book in the next six hours—Twitter’s your channel. Or if you want to float a last-minute promotion of breakfast pastries, there’s just no faster way to get a campaign up and running.

That is, as long as your biggest fans are watching their Twitter accounts within minutes of your tweet. Marketers who want to use Twitter’s real-time fire hose to get their messages out have to face the fact that for heavy Twitter users—and indeed for many average ones, depending on how many active users they follow—a marketing tweet will only stay at the top of the timeline for a short while, minutes to an hour. After that, it’s below the fold, buried under subsequent incoming messages where only the most diligent users will find and read it. more

Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression, the welcome e-mail, in which you thank someone for opting in to receive your messages, is critical. Alas, all too many marketers seem to think that simply responding with a confirmation is thanks enough. (And given how many organizations don’t even bother with that, they have a tenuous point.)

Several welcome e-mails that I recently received, however, show how it should be done.

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