August, 2006 | Marketing Darwinism

Using a Viral Contest to create Buzz in the Developer Community

StreamBase Systems is running a slick viral marketing campaign to get developers, programmers and business users to test drive its complex event processing software. The Quest for the Da Vinci Coder” is a peer-to-peer competition to build the most creative, complete and real-world StreamBase applications www.thedavincicoder.com. On the line are a $10,000 USD Grand Tournament [...] [...]

Mobile ads are coming – so where’s the Buzz?

Just about everyone expects mobile ads to be the next wave of advertising innovation. So let’s see if we can uncover some Buzz around this new selling medium. Advertisers are undoubtedly eyeing the new, mobile channel. In a MarketingSherpa survey of ad-tech cognoscenti earlier this year, mobile advertising tied with video for the top spot [...] [...]

The Best of Ideas from the Best of Company

The proverb says that a man is known by the company he keeps. If that’s true, you can understand my excitement at being one of 11 authors in the just released e-book The One Piece of Advice You Can’t Sell Without, a compilation of ideas for selling professional services. The e-book is published by RainToday.com, [...] [...]

Why advertise when your competitors do it for you?

SanDisk is trying to chip away at Apple’s hip customer base with its “iDon’t” campaign. Drawing creatively from Apple’s original iPod ads, the iDon’t campaign features ads attacking the iPod’s image (see photo). But however much these ads end up boosting sales of its competing Sansa music player, SanDisk appears to be a victim of [...] [...]

Get some Buzz with Google’s online video ads

Google recently introduced “click-to-play” video ads. The ads will run based on the Google AdWords bidding model and can be targeted contextually or to specific sites. Both approaches support a geographical targeting overlay, to a city level. Pricing for the ads can be either cost-per-impression (CPM) or cost-per-click (CPC). Google keeps the process simple. An [...] [...]