It would be great if everyone had time to carefully select their own food right at the source. But since no one does, there’s FreshDirect. That’s the premise behind the “Grocery Shopping Perfected” campaign, which positions FreshDirect as the most convenient way to get premium quality groceries.
The twelve days of the DIGO holiday party continue… kind of like an adventvertising calendar.
In my e-book, DIGITAL@speed, I included a brief guide to business cursing, explicating in hard language and a light-hearted tone the various ways in which deftly deployed common swear words can speed up a process.
Well, I’ll be damned! Now, the Obama Campaign has come out with another proven use of tactical swearing to improve results – the email subject line! The campaign learned that throwing out minor profanity such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks.
But they had to use the tactic sparingly. The novelty would tend to wear out and over time the results would regress to the mean.
This tracks with a DiMassimo Goldstein principle for optimizing direct response results — Test Outside The Lines.
Test Outside The Lines means that we should always question our own certainties about what is appropriate and inappropriate, what is too cool or too hot, what is on or off brand. This is the humility of the direct marketer, which leads to the boldness of the highly successful brand-driven growth leader. We are provocative, because we remain humble. We test outside the lines and often find the goldmine just beyond the edge of the map.
Damn, it feels good!
Read the full article about Obama’s digital campaign here.
Lot’s of good stuff happening in the social world this past week. Enjoy!
1. See What You’ll Look Like Old With Merrill Edge’s “Face Retirement”
2. Social Media Use Leads to Real-World Actions
3. Sulia: “Subject-Based” Social Network
4. Twitter to Offer Photo Filters By End of This Year
5. YouTube Makes Distribution Deal With Virgin America
6. Half a Million People Voted Against Facebook’s Governance Changes
7. Ford and Jimmy Fallon Turn to Twitter For Help Writing Lincoln Super Bowl Ad
8. Subtexter Knows Why You Posted That Brunch Photo
9. Viral Content:
Kobe Bryant vs Lionel Messi Turkish Airlines Ad (over 22 million views in 5 days)
Jay Z Explains Who He Is To Woman On Subway
Jimmy Fallon, Mariah Carey & The Roots “All I Want For Christmas Is You”
My first day I sat down and I thought “I am a spy working for an advertising agency!”
Each week I am given a list of events for Double Cross Vodka. When I attend these events I make sure to write down how they set up, what the brand presence is and if anyone talks about the brand. I document the night by taking photos.
The following day I report back to DIGO and show them my findings. We discuss the events and try to see if there was anything that could have been done differently.
I have learned so much about the spirits industry. I have seen everything from fashion events to liquor store tastings to sales meetings. I truly have the best internship ever. And I get to be part of the agency in action – part of the team that takes all the intelligence I bring back and transforms it into great brand strategies, and gorgeous creative. Yup, I have a pretty cool internship.
We who email naturally worry about unsubscribers. We limit how much email we send for fear of wearing out patience and in the confident expectation of diminishing returns. That’s probably a good thing.
But there is evidence to suggest that, at least for certain brands, there is a better approach to optimizing email success. It comes down to sending as much as possible, while testing for diminishing returns. The Obama email team did this and found that, for them, there was no limit.
“At the end, we had 18 or 20 writers going at this stuff for as many hours a day as they could stay awake,” says Fallsgraff. “The data didn’t show any negative consequences to sending more.”
Read more about the Obama email team here.
Most iPhone cases just protect your phone from drops. If you’re getting fancy, it may have a fisheye camera lens or a screen-printed back. But what about diagnosing coronary heart disease, arrhythmia, or congenital heart defects? The AliveCor Heart Monitor is an FDA-approved iPhone case that can be held in your hands (or dramatically pressed against your chest) to produce an EKG/ECG–the infamous green blips pulsing patient-side in hospitals everywhere.
“We think that EKG screening can be as approachable as taking blood pressure,” AliveCor President and CEO Judy Wade tells Co.Design.
There are already apps that take your heartbeat, of course. But there’s a big difference between the fast-paced standards of casual electronics and the strict sanctions of government-approved medical devices. “The heartbeat camera apps are good at wellness,” Wade admits, “but we see ourselves for use by people who want clinical-quality equipment.”
IMAGINE THE POTENTIAL: IN-APP PURCHASE FOR A FOLLOW-UP APPOINTMENT.
So unlike most iPhone cases that are squirted by Chinese factories at extremely high margins, AliveCor’s case has been in serious development since 2010. Aside from building the gadget itself, to become a approved for medical use by the FDA, AliveCor had to participate in two clinical trials to field test both the hardware and the accompanying app. One study investigated how its single-lead EKG compared to a traditional 12-lead device, the other examined if 54 participants could figure out how to use the case properly, with no previous medical training. The latter study was not only successful but led to the diagnosis of two serious heart problems.
Read the full article here.
Why do we under-test?
Here are some lessons from the winning Obama Campaign, via Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
I love this article because it neatly demonstrates what all marketers who use direct response tactics should know, but typically don’t. It gives some great examples of what marketers using direct response tactics should do, but overwhelmingly don’t. And it shows the results, including the large sums of money that most marketers leave on the table.
Their marketing crime: under-testing.
Listen to the leader from the successful email marketing leader of the Obama Campaign (JUMP), “We did extensive A-B testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for,” says Amelia Showalter, director of digital analytics, “but on the messages themselves and even the formatting.” The article goes on to say that the campaign would test multiple drafts and subject lines—often as many as 18 variations—before picking a winner to roll out to tens of millions of subscribers.
18 variations. Like we did in the old days. Like we still do today. Because doing less means leaving significant green on the table.
There’s even a neat chart in the article that shows exactly how much money would have been lost by rolling out poorer performing emails. In short, millions.
Shouldn’t we all think and test this way. Since we can’t take for granted that our competition will not, we should. Since we can’t count on the economy saving us, we must. Since we can’t expect yesterday’s successes to carry us into the future, we’d better get to it.
Why do you test? Because, you just just don’t know, numbskull! Again, listen to the successful campaign leader, “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” Amen.
Direct marketing testing leads to humility. Humility leads to more testing. More testing leads to success.
This is what we practice at DiMassimo Goldstein. It’s the heart of the “driven” part of “Brand. Driven. Growth.”
There’s a lot more to be learned by close reading of this article. Check it out here.
