Happy Birthday and Thanks for the Molotov Cocktails!

Saturday I turned 40. I forwent the Botox. I couldn't justify the enormous vanity expense right now. Maybe some other day. We stopped at UPS to pick up a mystery parcel Friday morning. It was 2 old Anchor Steam bottles filled with SOMETHING and stopped with 2 old wine corks. Maybe it was free Restalyne? I think it was Molotov Cocktails.


It was a singularly strange weekend.


While I was having a Happy Birthday Cocktail the phone rang, and with that ring, there went the weekend.


It was a friend (he collects the strays of the world) of my Dad's who is WAY down on his luck and always has been. He has some health issues, mostly mental as far as I can tell. He is variously a Druid, a Native American, a Vietnam vet.... All of it may be true. I've heard stories about him doing a Native American dance 'n chant around a fire in his yard. Glad I missed it. I was at a party there once. I am pretty sure I was served, and ate a bite of, human flesh. My husband swears it was bear. I was told it was prime rib. OF WHATTTTT!!!!!


He and his wife, a wonderful, smart, well-read woman, live in a shack, an actual real, live, honest-to-God, shack in the woods. She used to be a teacher. I don't know what happened there - why she chose the eventual life she chose. It's none of my business. There really ARE people who live outside the box. I know more than my fair share of them. Some of 'em are scary lunatics. AVOID.

This man's wife, my friend, died suddenly Friday afternoon.

**ASIDE**My Dad knows another dude who is definitely from an important military family. The OSS has been verified. I'm certain the Army tested out the LSD on him. He's not too bad, just nuts. His wife, she's evil. They live in a shack too. No way am I visiting that shack, let alone cleaning it.


I have spent countless summer and fall evenings knocking back more than a few beers with her (the teacher, not the Devil's Hand Maiden), talking about literature and ideas. Thoroughly enjoyable times. I'm not too fancy for a shack and cheap beer. I'm such a heel too - I haven't been to see her since my Mom became ill, for a number of reasons, mostly because I didn't have time. LAME. She has sent books home for me to borrow, that I haven't read and haven't returned. Note to self: read those books and quit it with the HuffPo in the evenings!


What does this have to do with advertising and marketing? Nothing. Sort of.

Saturday morning I rode to the mountains with my Dad to pay my respects. The road to my Dad's hunting lodge was closed due to a hydrofluoric acid spill. Heck, why not, it couldn't get any creepier could it? I'm surprised we weren't involved in the accident that caused the spill!


We made it to the mountains in twice the time. We dropped off a chicken and stuffing dish, enough to feed a small army. I asked her husband if he needed help. He said "yes" so I spent my 40th birthday helping her sisters clean the shack for the memorial service. I challenge any gym to have a better work out than vacuuming a home with a Dirt Devil!


I asked him what he had planned for food the service. He told me he had no money whatsoever so he no food planned. Oh dear - not on my watch. There will be no party of any sort without church-clean and plenty of food. My chicken and stuffing was not going to cut the mustard for an entire memorial service! I ordered sandwich and desert trays from the grocery store (then called my Dad at his cabin to tell him when he could pick them up and pay for them). I can't believe it but I used a phone book! There was a computer available but I was too stressed out to even think of it.

We made it in home from the mountains in twice the time. My sister was at my Dad's so we could go out to dinner for my birthday. Forget it. I needed a shower more than anything (that shack was pretty dirty) and then a drink. We ordered pizza. I had a drink before the shower. In fact, I had ½ a bottle of wine. It wasn't cheap wine either. It was Special Birthday Wine. I didn't even taste it.

We spend so many hours thinking of how to get ahead, how to be the witty innovators, the cool kids. This Creative Class or whatever you'd like to call it - we are a walking advertisements for living outside the box. Are we though? Do we even want to? I guess it depends which box we're talking about, or shall I say, "shack"?

At the end of the day, we are advertisers and we are consumers. We innovate by what we consume. We're walking advertisements for ipods and iphones, Doc Martens and vintage clothing.

Sure, I'll sit around drinking Schlitz in a shack, but Heaven forbid I'm not in a pair of Juicys with my super funk glasses, Havaianas and vintage cut-up t shirt.

Before this economic melt down or whatever moniker it's going by today - Heaven forbid I miss that Prince concert, no matter if it was half-way around the world. I never left the country for a Prince concert, but I thought about it.

I've been called a princess by people who have allot more money than I do. I'm really not. You won't catch me butchering a deer.... or drinking those Molotov Cocktails, but you're darn tootin' I'll break my back to scour a shack in the woods, including the toilet.

I think it all depends on your audience. Who are you selling to? How do you reach them? Especially NOW? Newspapers are going, going gone; network television is less relevant. You could reach ME on Huff Po but all I see there is yellow teeth, Acai berries, and flat bellies.

You could reach the Shack People via the internet as well. There were TWO computers in the shack. I'm sure they go online and open email. They have to have opted into a great many lists. And that's just the Shack People (and I could be one of them any day, so I have nothing against Shack People).

Ima shut up now - however, I truly think the new advertising/brand building tool will be some combination of internet tools, Facebook, Twitter, Google, blogs and email blasts. Whaddya think?

I Stood Up and GOT It!

Dang it - I never got that sweater. To be honest, I just didn't feel like going shopping the day of the sale. HMMM, I'll bet they still have some mark downs. I shouldn't give up so easily.

I promised in my last post to praise the implicit, vital importance of traditional marketing/advertising. I feel guilty leaving web site promotion in the dust for a while... which, I suppose, is the point.

Every business needs to have a great looking, user-engaging web site; I mean EVERY business, because more and more, every person is looking to their browser rather than their phone book for goods and services (that sounds so corny, but it's true). The phone book was never that great when you think about it. Unless a company is really huge and has a ½ page ad full of information about product lines and services offered, it was like a really bulky Information Dartboard. If I was looking up "high-end clothing" it's a crap shoot. What category do I look in? Then I either have to call 12 stores to ask if they carry what I am looking for, or drive to all of them. Time is money! No, time is better than money because you can never buy an extra allotment of time.

I digress. Traditional advertising, as in direct mail, outdoor, and magazine spreads not only drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar - they drive quantifiable traffic to your web site. Some examples:

1) Applebee's. I don't normally eat there, I don't normally watch television, but if I see an Applebee's billboard or catch a commercial on teevee... I'm THERE! I have no idea why. It looks like allot more fun than pork chops and peas at home. Kudos to their agency.

2) Direct Mail. As previously mentioned, I sort through my mail and separate the wheat from the chaff. The wheat is bills (no sense throwing them out!), catalogs (I'll look through almost any catalog) and simple post cards advertising from stores that have me on their mailing lists. My favorite pottery artist, Davis Salks, he has the post card down to an art, no pun intended. If I get a notice that he has created a limited edition line, I am on his web site in 5 minutes to order. If I get a list of shows he'll be attending, I hang it on the fridge and head to the shows. I BUY allot of his pieces.

3) Magazine Ads. As with the catalogs, there not too many magazines I won't page through. There are some super small companies out there offering things I WANT - but I'd never hear about them if not for them graciously placing an ad in a magazine so I can tear out the page (unless I'm in a doctor's office; other people do it - I can't), go to my computer and get some nifty yoga pants, home decor, gifts (you have to strike while the Mother In Law rooster-gift iron is hot!), you name it. I'm not condoning reckless spending in these crazy days; I'm saying as an advertising professional that people do have money to spend on things that you sell if they know how to find you - even if you don't have a brick-and-mortar. Better still if you have no physical location, a magazine ad will drive MORE and BETTER traffic to your web site. For example, gosh I go on! my friend visited from Oregon last summer. She had on the funkiest tribal print dress. I had to have it! She looked in the boutique where she bought it but they didn't have my size -so I asked her to look at the label. I looked up the designer on line and bought the dress. If the designer was a savvy marketer, she would have kept my email address in order to inform me of new lines. By now I forget her name. I guess I could look at the label - but really, you have to be in the customer's face.

4) Magazine Ads II. It isn't only specific trinkets that grab a reader's attention. Services, such as restaurants, cosmetic surgeons, hair salons, hospitals, physician practices and oh - antique stores.... benefit from a well-designed magazine ad. It builds "brand awareness" - in other words, lets people know you exist. They might not come on over this afternoon, but a really great ad, published on a 3-12 month schedule will keep your business in their minds. The magazine doesn't need to be Vogue or People; it can be a regional Style publication - which I LOVE. A further benefit: of course you will include your web address in the ad - therefore, you get more web traffic, more attention - who can forget you?

I know I'm long winded, but I'm a passionate advertising professional and a passionate shopper. I cannot emphasize enough, especially in this crazy economy, the absolute importance of marketing.

Visit our web site to see how simple it is to get your message to the masses. I just might buy something from you!

I Was Born

I work at a small, some may say, "boutique", advertising agency. We like it that way: zero bureacracy, zero useless meetings, free-flowing creativity and best of all, flexibility.

In order for us to remain small and flexible, we all have to wear many hats; Master of Many Domains - our business cards could be four feet long!

For example, I am the Controller. It sounds pretty fancy - as if I have a CPA, or Great Caesar's Ghost!, an MBA. It just so happens that I majored in Philosophy in college but I REALLY wanted to be in advertising, so I took the long way and got in any way I could, which was doing the Bookkeeping, which is also being the entire accounting department.

I like the symmetry of numbers. There is a certain beauty to the simplicity of the correct path through a transaction.... and back out of it. There is even creativity in Accounting in that there is not always one solution.

I digress. I am the Accounting Department at LMI Advertising http://www.lmiadvertising.com. I am also the Office Manager. It's all fun until someone gets bored. The Universe abhors boredom, therefore, boredom must be a vacuum (I had to sneak a little logic in there, stay true to my roots).

I got bored. Then the Universe dropped Google in my lap. At first I simply tallied up the click throughs and the cost in order to bill our clients. No fuss, no muss. It was, however, not only boring but a royal pain the butt.... UNTIL someone asked me to create a couple of campaigns.

I was like the old deer in the headlights. What to do? I had never created a campaign. I hadn't even bothered to look at conversion rates. There was no way I could "lose face" by asking where the heck to begin, so I jumped in feet first - and loved every minute of it.

You could not keep me out of my campaigns for ten minutes. I was researching the ins and outs of optimization on the web all day long and on weekends too. Negative keywords! Mirabile dictu!

The Keyword Tool! Lookee here, four pages of keywords! Obviously I had allot to learn.

Enter chance, Serendipity? I found Lunametrics http://www.lunametrics.com in one of my strolls through the internet forest. They were hosting a full day of training on Google Analytics. I got on a train in my pajamas (in order to carry my laptop as well as a change of clothes) and off I went.

I was born. I had used GA in my day to day analyses of our campaigns - but what wonders to behold! This was a great class. I learned how to use GA in a methodical manner; there really is a method to the madness (I mean gobs of data under all of those buttons).

The most important Aha! moment I had was doing a content drill down. Our clients' customers were not looking for them in the same way we thought they would. I can have four pages of keywords but if they aren't the words our clients' customers are using to find what they want, none of them matter. The fact of the matter is, the Lunametrics Folk were so nice, so approachable and so, so knowledgeable: I had no choice but to throw myself into our Google campaigns with every spare minute I have.

I even went so far as to study like I was writing a thirty page paper for a graduate Philosophy of Language course, just to take the Google AdWords Professional exam. What good is know how without a little title and logo to make it look as pretty as it feels?

In my next installment I will elaborate on the importance of a really great web site to go along with a Google campaign. Right now, I have a burning desire to engage with my campaigns! Until then, Cheers!