Alain Thys

by: Alain Thys

by: Alain Thys

If advertising is so effective, why are CNN, airport billboards and business magazines free from ads in which agencies promote themselves to business audiences?  I always ask this question "tongue in cheek", but lately the cheekiness is waning.  Ad-effectiveness is plummeting all-round and both brand owners and consumers are nearing the point where indifference turns into annoyance.

by: Alain Thys

Exactly a year ago this blog went "live" and we just wanted to thank everyone who's been part of making it something much more successful than we ever thought it would be. Today, we've got about 25,000 regular readers, over 1,400 posts, and more importantly, our base of daily feedburner subscribers keeps growing by the week (currently at 2,500).

by: Alain Thys

Today I had a lunch meeting in which the topics of conversation included Net Promoter Score, delighting customers and making sure consumers care enough to carry your brand's message into the world.  Yet when you put all the buzzwords aside, I think this video of an Apple fan and her dream says it all.  

Would your customers care enough about your brand to include your brand in something like this?

by: Alain Thys

By now you should be close to having all of your top-line budgets approved and be heavily into the detail of spending the marketing funds you've just been entrusted with. Yet before you rush off to fill the pockets of agency wizards and media-moguls, I'd like to stir things up a bit. For this post, I have come up with 7 budget recommendations against which to benchmark your decisions.

by: Alain Thys

Imagine the following situation. A man sees an attractive woman at a party. They talk and decide to have a few dates. After giving all the right signals for being a loyal, caring, trustworthy and relationship-oriented guy, he convinces her to spend the night. The next day he is gone and when she calls it is clear he doesn't want to speak to her....

by: Alain Thys

As I compiled the most read posts on this blog, I couldn't shake the feeling that "there was a lot of great stuff missing". That's why I decided to do the "old media" thing and make a selfish editorial selection of what I thought were the twenty strongest thoughts expressed on this blog since its inception (one per contributor). 

by: Alain Thys

It's the season to make lists and hitparades, so to end the year we'll do our bit as well.  According to Google Analytics, here's a list of the ten most read articles since the launch of this blog on March 5th, 2006. It's an interesting mix, which for me, is also a testimony to the way the Long Tail seems to be working.

by: Alain Thys

Alex Eperjessy on our own (slowly decloaking and still finding it's feet) business & games blog has conducted an online mini-focus group/survey on where a few of his friends/gamers think advertising could and definitely couldn't work in their favourite virtual environments.

by: Alain Thys

We've been a bit quiet over the past few days because of a busy week at the Marketing 3 conference in the Netherlands, yet to make up, we wanted to bring you a few early Christmas presents in the form of key videos from the conference.