by Glenn Chung | Aug 7, 2015 | Online Strategy, Content, Creatives
My kids have no idea who Waldo is. But I sure remember him. I also remember the headache I’d get after five minutes of searching for his little red-and-white scarf and cap in a sea of tiny faces. Oftentimes, I’d give up, leaving poor Waldo lost on the page. Connecting with your members can sometimes feel like a game of Where’s Waldo. But what if I told you there were now online tools that were the equivalent of putting a big red circle around Waldo? Let’s explore that concept a bit with a question: Where are you right now and what are you doing? If you answered “In Detroit, attending a major associations conference,” you should probably look to see if there’s a gigantic red circle around you. Well, there probably isn’t (and if there is we didn’t put it there), but in the online world, that circle definitely exists. How were we able to pull this off? The ability to “draw” these circles around specific groups online comes from the melding of big data and online ad platforms. We can now do real-time, location-based online ads, and we’re already seeing very meaningful advances in how finely and how sharply we can target ads. This ability may be the exact reason you’re reading this blog entry right now. Want to have ads show up in just iOS 8 device apps within 5 miles of a specific location? How about only on Android-based Web browsers within a specific zip code? Increasingly, the answer to these and many more questions about time and location targeting is “Yes, we can do that.”...
by Glenn Chung | Jul 23, 2015 | Online Strategy, Content, Creatives
The Martian is a major motion picture being released in October, 2015. It stars Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain, among other great actors in a stellar ensemble cast. Before that, The Martian became a New York Times best-selling novel for first-time author Andy Weir. And before that, The Martian was a self-published e-book on Amazon, listed at $0.99 because that is the lowest price Amazon allows authors to charge for their work. The funny thing is, at the same time the e-book was available on Amazon, it was also available FOR FREE on Andy Weir’s personal Web site. Free vs not free… you would think the free version would have been downloaded in bucketfuls, with the Amazon version languishing in obscurity. That’s not what happened. In actuality, the Amazon version of The Martian ended up being paid for and downloaded at a rate ten times higher than the free version of the same e-book. Why? Simple, actually: people just found it easier to get to the Amazon book. A simple search of “The Martian” and a couple of clicks led to Amazon, who in turn made it very easy to pay for and get the e-book. The value of ease of access and ease of acquisition swamped out the $0.99 cost of the e-book. This most likely would have been the case had the e-book been $1.99, or even $2.99. As I thought about this story, the lessons for membership-based organizations were not lost on me. Members, like anyone else, value their time and guard it jealously. In particular, members interact with online properties – from news organizations, shopping sites, and your...
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