Failed Ideas In Blogging

Every new blog has bad ideas every so often...granted, so do longstanding blogs. Bad ideas are a part of everything, especially marketing and advertising.

I wanted to start doing a weekly marketing/business podcast review, most likely posting every Friday. Looking through iTunes, it is true that there are quite a few marketing style podcasts, but other than a few, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing reviews of them. I'm not going to name any names, but most of them were not even close to on topic to what the podcast claimed it was.

Of course there are podcasts from commercial entities like Business Weekly, New York Times, etc, those are pretty much going to be on topic. I realize that marketing and advertising are a tremendously broad genre, but then again, so is music, or computers, or most of what podcasts are created about. Why does the business community have to be so fragmented in regards to podcasting? There are hundreds of awesome blogs or newsletter sites about these topics, but podcasting seems to be elusive, at least from what I was able to find. I realize that iTunes is no longer the be all end all of the podcasting community, but poking around anywhere else isn't likely to get me much other information with such broad search terms.

I suppose that having a failed idea is going to happen occasionally. I've had them happen in many other parts of my life, and I'm sure you have too. The key is to pick yourself up and keep going, and maybe coming at the failed idea from another angle will one day result in success. Maybe one day there will be some podcast reviews in my blog...in fact, I'll pretty much say there WILL be at some point. In the meantime, I'll be going back to doing what many of the above podcasters were/are doing...having a forum for talking about a particular subject, and then only really half paying attention to said subject. If you can't beat em, join em, right?

Thanks for reading...

"Traditional Marketing" Gone Forever?

I think not. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who's ever thought so, either. Hell, I'm probably late to jump on the bandwagon as it is.

The world we live in is to cyclical for traditional, or older style marketing to disappear. Clothing styles go in and out with astonishing regularity, and tend to circle back on a generational term. Music does the same thing. Look at the ska, swing, and psychedelic periods that the music industry went through. Popularity comes and goes, and yet there are things that are always there. Good old standbys, if you want to think of them that way. Jeans and tshirts. Manufactured pop music. Even the movie and television industry falls into cycles on occasion.

Why would marketing and advertising be any different? Word of mouth, viral marketing, and banner advertisements are great, and have many plenty of people tons of money...but so have traditional advertising means. There was a point in time as all of this next generation stuff was coming along, that Yahoo! was running television commercials. They aren't anymore. Yeah, probably because everyone who uses the internet knows what Yahoo! is. Now people are all excited about Google. With good reason, of course, because Google is growing into a category and an industry all to its own. I can't for the life of me remember a tv commercial or a magazine ad, or any kind of other "traditional" advertisement for Google. Or Blogger. Or Twitter. Or MySpace. Facebook. Sure, they got written up in technology magazines or computer magazine or stuff like that...and it probably did them a world of good. But abandoning what was once traditional advertising is a bad idea.

Why? Because sooner or later, the cycle will come around again, and for some it will be too late. Maybe they just sunk a ton into whatever newfangled promotional thing that just came down the pike, and they have nothing left for print or television. Maybe they just didn't think the cycle would come around again.

I've yet to see a company that does more than a slightly passable job (if they even attempt it) at balancing new and traditional marketing and advertising concepts. At least not to the point where it's all that noticeable. Is it being done? I hope so, but I'm not really sure. Will it be done? That's for time to show.

Thanks for reading.

Introduction

I've always been fascinated by advertising and marketing, and when I was younger, wanted to know how to be involved in them. I was able to go to school for marketing and obtain my bachelors degree from Central CT State University.

Being a technology dork, most people would think that internet marketing or next generation marketing would be my specialty. Its not, at least educationalwise. I do have an understanding of how that stuff works, but its all from self education...which I do believe is just as valuable as book learning. However, I'm more familiar with traditional avenues of marketing and advertising.

I'd have to say my favorite marketing campaign of all time is the Real Men of Genius radio advertisements. Every single one of them made me laugh, and the way they were put together was memorable and entertaining. I'm also a big fan of word of mouth and similar concepts, basically the kinds of things that evolved into viral marketing. For example, the early materials on Blair Witch Project, trying to convince people it was real, etc. For its time, that was genius.

I plan to post here as often as possible, but please follow my twitter account, it's linked on the right side, I should post bits and shorts there more often. Thanks for reading.