advertising

Don't let Steve Yelvington's excellent rebuttal (started to say "analysis," but it's more direct than that) to the American Press Institute "Newspaper Economic Action Plan" pass without due consideration.

Jeff Jarvis discusses the notion of advertising as failure:

"The ideal relationship a company should have with its customer is that it produces a great product the customer loves and talks about and thus sells; there is no need for advertising there. It’s only in the case of failing at that idea that one needs to advertise."

Go check out his post because he expands significantly on this idea in three video segments.

I see the logic, at least in cases with these characteristics:

• A given company and its given product have existed long enough to develop any reputation, good or bad.

I attended RevenueTwoPointZero last Saturday, spent most of my time working with the amazing ad hoc team focused on marketing solutions for small and medium businesses, wrote a hasty summary, then came back home and said nothing more about it.

That silence does not indicate lack of interest -- far from it! Alan Jacobson and Matt Mansfield did a super job putting together the roster, despite my gripes and doubts through the planning. We accomplished much in little time.

Greg Sterling reminds us why we all chase advertising dollars from locally focused, small and medium businesses:

"We're in a recession; everything is down including local. And local is harder than other segments because of some of the factors mentioned above. SMBs are hard to sell to and they don’t spend lots online. But there are millions of SMBs online in various forms today. As I've argued before, from consumer behavior perspective, local/offline is a much, much bigger deal than anything else going on online. It's just often hard for people to see it."

When a former boss and a former corporate colleague (not to mention guitar-playing pal) -- both good friends -- gang up to form a new venture, naturally I pay attention.

Not to mention the fact they asked Small Initiatives to engineer their Web site (a Drupal project, natch) and design corporate branding.

Catching up to two posts from mocoNews.net:

• Is mobile advertising the next big thing?: In the United States, at least, mobile ads remain hobbled by the persistence of multiple incompatible networks and technologies.