The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Marketers rack their brains to offer prizes that will pull players into sweepstakes and contests: entertainment packages, trips to exotic locations, barbeque grills, free gas for a year. The goal, of course, is to immerse the consumer in the brand and hope that they will remember the experience when shopping.

But as we know, often times consumers simply play to try to win the prize and the effort on the marketer’s part to brand the product or service quickly drifts away.

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Once again, posts about the Postal Service topped the list of the month’s most-read posts on the Big Fat Marketing Blog. But posts about email and catalog creative were popular as well. Here were the five most popular posts for November:

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As the U.S. Postal Service continues to lose billions of dollars annually, the largest contributing factor to that unfortunate bottom line has been its obligation to pre-pay retiree health benefits to the tune of more than $5 billion a year. more

Every year I try and foresee what the coming year will bring from a advertising and marketing vantage point. Here’s what I predicted for 2010 last December:

Here’s my annual list of what to expect, marketing-wise, in the upcoming 12 months. Time will tell how accurate these are, although my 2009 list was fairly spot-on:

#10) Mobile advertising will still NOT flourish in North America in 2010. However, if the Google mobile phone becomes a hit it could make a late-year run and enter 2011 with great momentum.

I would say true. The Google phone bombed but its android platform was beyond successful.

#9) The web will continue to grow and play an even more important role in great, measurable marketing. Websites that create relevance, with smart use of microsites, and also help develop a dialog, will reign supreme. One-way websites will be viewed as antiquated and ineffective; YouTube will grow in its importance for traditional TV-based advertisers (:30 second commercials will decline greatly). Google Analytics will continue to gain users and importance.

I think I was spot-on, but let me know if you feel otherwise.

#8) Wal-Mart’s attempt to compete with Amazon will prove to be a failure.

Accurate as I can be.

#7) E-mail will lose more popularity to social media but will be even more important as a customer retention and communication tool.



Hey, I am a professional marketer. I’m glad I’m getting these correct.

#6) Printed matter – newspapers and magazines – will continue to struggle and more of them will switch to online only editions than ever before.

Yep.

#5) Direct mail will see a resurgence as data becomes better, more accurate and more segmentable than ever before. While mail volume will not increase, its role as an impactful, door-opening media will grow and its use as a powerful follow-up medium will increase. Those that do mail really well and commit to the channel will prosper as they will face less clutter in mailboxes. more

A couple of holiday shopping reports published a week ago posed a disturbing question: Had consumers gotten most of their holiday shopping out of the way early, and were December sales going to lag?

A week ago, a story on CNBC.com postulated retailers might suffer a Black Friday hangover – one which saw consumers front-load all of their buying activity, only to slack off for the remainder of the weeks leading up to Christmas. (The fact that Chanukah came early in the month this year couldn’t have been overly reassuring to retailers.)

The CNBC piece went on to question whether retailers would actively seek to keep the sales momentum going. It did offer a note of solace, observing that consumers were making purchases for themselves this holiday season, something they hadn’t done in years’ past. more

Last week I was feeling a bit smug about having read and analyzed all 563 holiday marketing emails I received the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Got that out of the way, I said, smugly, to myself. The next few weeks should be a cinch in comparison.

But smugness comes before a fall, and in this case the fall was more like a deluge—a deluge of Cyber Monday emails. On Monday of last week I logged in 191 Christmas-related marketing emails. In contrast, on Black Friday I’d received 118.

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