So we've come to the end. Today I will be posting my final blog.
I would like to thank you all for reading my blog, so let's start with the last one.
Today, I will be talking about 3 trends that will be very important for the rest of
2013.

The first one is channel convergence. The marketing world is flooded with channels.
With all these channels, opportunities to engage with customers and prospects have
increased. Marketers use communication channels, marketing channels, advertising
channels, and more. The experts say that this will continue to grow and evolve. So it's
important for marketers to align their strategy with the different channels and listen to
their customers for feedback.

Second trend is customer experience. According to the marketing expert Sweetwoord,
the customer is always going to be a trend. There will never be a year where
something about the customers and marketing isn't important. But experts see a shift
in marketing, marketers start focusing on customer experience. When using this
trend, it's important to look at all the points of the customers experiences. Important
questions to ask yourself are: How do they react? How do they exchange information?
When do they engage?

The last trend that I will be discussing is the analytics.
In the other two trends we needed to look at the customers behaviour, but how do
you get an answer to all your question? Well simply by using analytics. The use
and importance of analytics as a part of the marketing strategy is a growing trend.
Analytics can empower organisations to understand the customer’s behaviours,
interpret engagement strategies, improve customer experiences, with the ultimate
goal: better results for the organisation.

So these were the most important trends for the rest of this year.
I hope you liked it!

Bye Lisa

Hi everyone!

Today I have an amazing website for the creative readers! It’s called kickstarter.com. 
It’s a website that gives creative people the opportunity to fund their dream project.

So kickstarter.com is a platform for filmmakers, game designers and musicians, people that are into art, design and technology. It’s full of projects that are fund by the direct support of people like you and me.

The website leaves the creator with complete responsibility for his or her project. It’s a platform and a resource; they aren’t involved with the development of the projects themselves.

So how does it work?
If you have a creative idea, you post it on the website of Kickstarter. You set yourself a goal and deadline. If people like your project, they can donate their money to your project.

But there is a catch! It’s all or nothing… Your project needs to be totally funded by the deadline; otherwise you’ll get nothing. Overall 44% of the projects have reached their funding goals.

An important aspect is that the creators keep 100% ownership over their work. People that support a project just help the idea come to life. They don’t profit from it financially. But creators sometimes give the big donors some advantages. Big donors of a film project for example might get into the premier or get a private screening.

Kickstarter is a for-profit organization and they are based in The Lower East Side of New York City. They get the money to work with from the successfully funded projects. If a project was totally funded, they get 5% fee to the funds collected.

And I would like to end my blog with some interesting facts:
-       10% of the movies at Sundance were Kickstarter-funded.
-       Stanford teaches Kickstarter for class credit.
-       Thanks to Kickstarter some Kentucky sixth graders send a camera to space.
-       In 2012 a total of $ 274,391,721 was collected.

So www.kickstarter.com is definitely worth a visit!

See you next week!

Lisa

Hi everyone!

Today I wanted to talk about something else than a marketing trend. About a movie I saw, and I can hear you all think why does she post a movie review on a marketing blog?

Well, the movie I saw is called ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Sold!’ it’s a documentary about product placement. But the moviemaker Morgan Spurlock – who you probably know from his near-fatal fastfood diet ‘Super Size Me’- made his documentary fully sponsored by product placement.

The film’s slogan is “He’s not selling out, he’s buying in”. So the documentary shows you the work Spurlock putted into the finding of sponsors and him giving pitches to them.

The most companies he contacted immediately turned him down. Big companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola are only interested in sponsoring the big movies like Iron Man, because millions of people see that movie. They’re not interested in sponsoring small documentaries because the investment is too big. Spurlock than focused on the smaller brands for example Sheetz. They are a chain of gas stations and convenience stores, so Spurlock promised only to do interviews with people in the bar of Sheetz of at the petrol pump.

Another big investor was POM, it’s a pomegranate jus. So after the deal Spurlock was only allowed to drink POM-jus in the documentary. What stands out in the movie are the contracts that the companies give to Spurlock. They are about fifty pages long and they held a lot of rules that Spurlock was supposed to follow. But he decided only to give them a slight idea about the way they were going to be portrayed in the movie.

In the end the whole movie was sponsored and Spurlock got about $1,5 million from the companies featured in the movie.

I think that this movie is definitely a must for anyone who’s interested in product placement and the way the industry works. It’s very interesting to see how companies influence the movies made nowadays.

So this was it for this week… See you next time!

Lisa

After the IMac, IPod, IPad, IPhone and Itunes, Apple has now come up with a new way to advertise, the IAds.

So what is IAd? It’s a mobile advertising platform for the Ipad, Iphone, Ipod Touch line of mobile devices. It allows third-party developers to immediately embed advertisements into their applications.

One of the advantages for companies is that they can reach millions of IPhone, IPad and Ipod Touch users around the world, when those are using their favorite apps. Apple gives companies some facts to convince them of the IAds.
First of all the IAudience has installed over 15 billion applications and purchased over 315 million iOS devices. So obviously you can reach a big audience.
Apple makes sure that the IAds are only shown to an audience that the company wants to reach. And they only show the IAds on the apps that their customers love and use the most.

IAd can captivate the audience of a company cause it combines the storytelling of TV with the engagement and utility of digital. Companies can create IAds that are shown to customers, wherever they are. Apple uses the IAd logo as a quality sign; this way customers know that the brand meets certain expectations.

By using iOS, the IAds can incorporate a variety of interactive experiences in the advertisements.  For example by using the location settings, companies can show the closest store to customers, they can use social media, give digital coupons and so on.

Apple offers the users of IAd also other advantages. When we look at the metrics that they provide, the range is really brought. It goes far beyond the standard measurements of exposures and clicks. Companies get to see how much time the average customer spends on their IAd, how many times their IAd was viewed. But also the course of the campaign…

For larger campaigns it’s even possible to get insights into user engagement, performance and cetera on the overall network results.
So IAd, gives companies a whole new opportunity to advertise.

This was it for this week!

Lisa