Welcome Gold Medal Wine Club

Please join us in raising a glass to welcome the newest client to Intersynthesis: Gold Medal Wine Club. Cheers to top rated boutique California wines being shipped right to your door!

Responsible Email

Over 20% of emails are undelivered according to an article in eMarketer today. To deal with spam, ISP and corporate filtering systems have gotten aggressive about stopping email that does not follow industry best practices. High frequency mailings, unsegmented distribution lists, and low value to your audience can cause your messages to be blocked from ever making it to the Inbox. Socially responsible marketing is not only about creating a positive impact on your community and audience, it's about being more effective in the long term as well.

The End of Browsing?

Internet time may have peaked for consumers, according to Forrester findings reported in Ad Age today. As people become more savvy about using the Web as a tool to quickly find what they want, casual surfing is on the wane. Search and email continue to be staples for online reach, but increasingly marketers will need to understand their audience better to offer meaningful interactions across multiple channels.

Interactive Marketing to Gain Share of Spend

Forrester research reveals the recession is a tipping point shifting the ad industry away from traditional mass media to interactive marketing. Their article in Ad Age says ad budgets won't grow much over the next 5 years, but the share spent on digital will grow from 12% in 2009 to 21% by 2014, increasing pressure on less effective and less accountable offline channels.

Multi Channel Integration

According to an eMarketer survey, 85% of marketers see the value in multi channel integration, but only 12% currently compare performance data across channels. This leads to channel conflict and sub-optimization (optimizing one channel at the expense of others, negatively affecting top level ROI). Intersynthesis can help with meaningful interactive channel integration.

The thing about Bing

Microsoft launches Bing tomorrow, its new search product. Ad Age reports that Microsoft will spend $80 Million on advertising campaigns to convince us to switch from Google to Bing. Admittedly, the marketing on this is well done so far. The brand name is simple and memorable, and the positioning as a "decision engine" sounds like good differentiation. But the proof will be in the functionality.

Microsoft is going out on a limb, betting that it understands the context of WHY people search for the terms they do. Not just what information they want, but what do they want if for? In particular, this idea holds interesting possibilities for travel, online shopping, local results and health care. The true mark of good service is anticipating your customers' needs before they even know what they want themselves.

So kudos to Microsoft for taking a risk and pushing the envelope. If they actually get this right, it will definitely be a step forward. If not, it will just make search results annoyingly irrelevant. And that would be a shame because the idea behind this new product is fundamentally sound. For all our sakes as consumers, let's hope it works.

Integrating SEM and Affiliate Marketing

Bidding on keywords that are also someone else's trademarked terms is a risky business. It's one thing if you're marketing another brand's products and you have permission to use their terms, but according to an Ad Age report released today, you can expose yourself to serious litigation if you or your agency are careless about how you use others' branded terms. And this risk can be compounded if your affiliate marketing program includes publishers who bid on keywords on your behalf. Even if publishers bid on keywords with branded terms you own or have permission to use, those bids may jack up the price of your own search engine marketing program.

When managing an affiliate program, present your publishers with a clear policy about what branded terms you may allow them to bid on to send you traffic, and any price limits you may require for your own branded terms. A little preparation up front can save you a lot of headaches later on.