The Blog of Brandon Milford - Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Design

Rob and I landed at RDU yesterday morning around 1:30am(David, thank you again for picking us up). We
almost missed our connecting flight in Dallas.
Our plane was delayed in San Francisco,
but the connecting flight in Dallas
wasn’t delayed quite as long, go figure. We ran through the Dallas
airport from Gate A 30 something, onto a SkyLink train and over to Gate D 27.
By the time we arrived the desk was frantically waving us into the tunnel. Rob
and I ran down the tunnel and the airline personnel had literally closed the
door of the plane. She turned, saw us and began banging on the side of the
plane, lucky for us they opened the door and let Rob and I, along with several
others who were on the same flight, onto the plane. Everyone applauded, we took
our seats, and we were off to Raleigh-Durham.

It was a long, but fun week. We arrived in San Francisco
Monday afternoon at 6pm, checked into our hotel and walked around San Francisco
for a bit. Rick Baccari, one of our salesmen, flew in Tuesday evening from Boston.
After registering and setting up the booth on Tuesday we made it back to our
hotel where we ate at Max’s On The Square, a restaurant within Maxwell Hotel.

Wednesday was the first day of the show and we were told
that over 9,000 registered for Ad:Tech San Francisco, woohoo! We received a large amount of
traffic at our booth and introduced IntelliContact to a number of marketers who
were not familiar with us. Rob and Rick were stationed at the booth for the
majority of the time while I attended a number of sessions and spoke with many
of the attendees and exhibitors.

On Wednesday I sat in on a keynote presentation from the Vice
President of Marketing for Clorox, Tarang Amin, Vice President of Marketing for
Red Envelope, Gary Korotzer, and the CEO of Cendara Inc, Susan Bratton, who
moderated. Although the presentation was entitled “Mastery Series: Brand”, half
of the discussion centered on general marketing topics. Regardless, the
discussion was very interesting. Each talked about their target market and what
has and has not worked for them. It was very interesting to hear two marketers
talking about their businesses who share the same market, however operating
different business models.

On Thursday I attended a presentation entitled “Email
Marketing: The Cinderella Story” from Barry Stamos, Senior Director of Strategy
from Responsys, Michelle Thomas, eBusiness Strategist from Philosophy, and Dre
Madden who is the Manager of Strategy and New Channel Development at
StubHub.com. It was a great presentation on email marketing and spoke volumes
on the design of your email newsletter and how it can significantly impact your
conversion rates. Barry Stamos talked a lot about what they had done for their
clients and how landing pages can complement your email newsletter
and assist in increasing your conversion rates. 

There was a lot of talk about what’s next in marketing, but the
buzzwords/phrases from Ad:Tech San Francisco were:

• Behavioral targeting

• RSS

• Mobile marketing and commerce

There was a lot of talk about the future of these mediums
and a high interest among top marketers.

Overall, Ad:Tech San Francisco
was great! I’m looking forward to exhibiting IntelliContact at Ad:Tech again in
the future. It was a great conference for marketers and entrepreneurs alike.

You can check out all of my photos from San Francisco here.

I’m heading out to San Francisco tomorrow for Ad:Tech. We’re exhibiting IntelliContact on Wednesday and Thursday
from 10am – 6pm, so if you’re
attending be sure to drop by and visit us at booth #6182. Also, there are a number of
great speakers including:

• John Battelle, Founder and Chairman, Federated Media
  Topic: The Future of Search

• Dave Balter, Founder and CEO, BzzAgent, Inc.
  Topic: Workshop: Word of Mouth
  as a Media Channel: Designing Your Own Campaign

• Shawn Gold SVP, Marketing and Content, MySpace.com
  Topic: Social Sites: The Dynamics of the Genre and The Opportunities for Marketers

• Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
  Topic: Organic SEO Fireside Chat with the Experts

• Katie Kempner, VP/Director of Communications, Crispin Porter + Bogusky / WebmasterRadio.fm
  Topic: Podcasts and Vidcasts for Marketing & Public Relations

• Martin A. Nisenholtz, Senior VP, Digital Operations,The New York Times
  Topic: Mastery Series: It’s All About Targeting

This is only a handful of the 173
speakers this year. It should be a great show! Stay tuned as I’ll be sharing my
thoughts, and photos, from Ad:Tech San Francisco.

As mentioned over at Marketing Pilgirm, it looks like ClickTracks is taking measures to compete with Google Analytics. Recently they announced the addition of click fraud monitoring to their arsenal of services. Now they’re taking steps to get more people to try ClickTracks by offering a free version. They’re calling it ClickTracks Appetizer. This is definitely a wise move. I think this will help ClickTracks in the long run and hopefully help their fight against Google. I’ve used ClickTracks and it is a solid analytics package, with powerful tools, and it’s easy to use.

On another note, Google still hasn’t launched it’s analytics tool for bloggers, MeasureMap, after the acquisition in February of this year. It is still in private beta. Although it’s a bit different from your standard analytics app, I’m curious to see how it stacks up in terms of power and usability.

Google has just released a web-based calendar. It has a very clean interface and is a cinch to use. So not only does Google know my history, but now they also know my future…

It can be confusing when comparing bitmap and vector and deciding when to use each. The confusion is even greater when we get into icon design. Vector images typically scale without losing their clarity where bitmaps become pixelized if we significantly increase their size. So you’d think that making icons of various sizes should be done using vector images, right? No. The gang over at Firewheel Design have provided a great article on breaking down the differences in bitmaps and vectors and why you cannot simply use vectors for icon design and scale them to any size you wish. Check it out!

Paul Scrivens raises the question; “what would happen if all
the designers and developers in the [9rules] Network got together for a weekend
and copied the 37signals suite of products
and then we just released everything for free.”

No matter the industry there will always be copycats, but
how much of an impact can they have on established software? I don’t believe someone
can create all the products that 37signals has created, offer them at no cost,
and severely impact 37signals’ efforts. It’s not just about the software. It’s
about the people behind the software, the support they can offer, and the
resources they can lend to better your efforts in achieving your goals. 

I love the fact that we
operate in an environment where it’s possible for someone to create something
and offer it for free, but it’s important to remember that although we’re doing
business online people purchase from those they know and trust and will even
pay a premium to do so.

We all know the importance of brand recognition. It doesn’t
make a difference whether you’re in Germany,
China, Japan,
or the US, if
you see the swoosh you know it is Nike. If you see an alligator on a golf
shirt, you know it is Lacoste. But how well do you know your brands? Monochrom performed
an interesting study recently where they had a group of Austrians draw 12 brands from
memory. Check out the results from their study.