OBSESSED WITH RESULTS

Great marketing minds think alike. So I would like to believe we keep in good company with renowned marketer, Seth Godin. He recently made an accurate distinction between mass marketers vs direct marketers which got me thinking under which category we, as a company, belong to.

Mass marketers such as Best Buy and Microsoft capitalize on their ubiquity. They have successfully infiltrated our homes and our spending habits and in doing so, now enjoy massive revenue.

On the other hand, direct marketers focus on a capturing a specific niche, getting terrific response rates and only then will they venture into expanding reach. They don’t need to be in every home, but they need to count in each home they actually get introduced to.

Godin says, “The key distinction is when you know it’s going to work. The mass marketer doesn’t know until the end. The direct marketer knows in the beginning.”

These things considered, Ionic Media prides itself in being prolific direct marketers – with a huge emphasis on testing creative thoughts on a well-researched niche, followed through with the ability to analyze results. Only then do we expand into a bigger reach with data at hand and calculated, educated risks. This is not to say we are unable to go big and handle ubiquity. With big brands such as B+L and Disney under our belt, we need to think like mass marketers as well. But we do so intelligently and profitably. It doesn’t always work. But it usually does. And when it doesn’t, we figure out why and do better on the next go.

Bottom line is, we care enough to do the work upfront to reap the benefits of being right (or wrong) in the end. We understand that the best mass marketers, it seems, start off as excellent direct marketers.

Ameetess Dira
Account Director

There are so many different types of “new media”.  The question is “Where’s this all going?”  Well, there are lots of probabilities, but all of them add up to another revision of the Internet called “Web 3.0″.

The nerds call it the “Semantic Web”.  Business analysts call it the “Personalized Web”.  This article from “How Stuff Works” suggests that “Many of these experts believe that the Web 3.0 browser will act like a personal assistant.”  An article in PC Mag from 2007, recalls “To many, Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web. In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read Web pages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we’re looking for. “It’s a set of standards that turns the Web into one big database,” says Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, one of the leading voices of this new-age Internet.”

So you know what?  Its already happened.  Web 3.0 is building 10X faster than Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.  The telltale signs are the number of APIs out there from a site that just got acquired called Programmableweb.com.  The crux of Web 3.0?  A simple conversation between companies that goes a little something like “We love your application.  I’m just wondering….Do you have an API?”.

What will rule with Web 3.0 for you and your company if you are an advertiser?  The rule will be how helpful you can be to your customers with providing them with convenient data.  I guess old fashioned customer service and care will become new again.  Maybe Web 3.0 should be nicknamed “Back to the Future”!

Marie Smith
Social Media Manager
Ionic Media Group