AKMG journeyed to ad:tech London this week to attend our first ad:tech outside of the United States and experience UK affiliate marketing. It was an experience from day one which started with 30 minutes of sleep the entire night on the way to London and ended with Kim White, AKMG President, and me running to our gate at Heathrow. It was our own version of National Lampoon’s European Vacation!

It was an interesting experience to immerse ourselves in the culture for a few days to see how the average consumer is bombarded with advertising. There is much more advertising there than in the United States. They cover entire taxi’s with advertisements that are every color of the rainbow, digital advertisements line the walls of the underground stations, even the bottom of the seat covers that flip down in the taxi’s have ads on them. You can’t walk more than a few steps in London without seeing some sort of ad. It makes sense that advertisers need to have an integrated approach to their marketing plan to include outdoor, print, TV and online. Affiliate marketing campaigns across the pond are in luck to have such offline support to the campaigns being run online.

The show itself was a mix of US and European networks so we saw a lot of familiar faces. But many of the UK networks were extensions of existing US networks. The offline advertising is abundant but it seems like affiliate marketing is still in its infancy. This was evident at the show because it was mainly networks and we were told that the show was half as large as last year. But it was a great experience nonetheless.

If there are any UK advertisers that do affiliate marketing, please get in touch as we’d like to test the waters!

Mastering SEO, SEM and PPC tactics can be a daunting task. Companies tend to either ignore it completely & hope for the best or outsource to the experts. For a large scale project, it makes sense to outsource but there are things that you can implement that will go a long way. SEO is a long term investment and is well worth it when you see your website land above the fold on a Google search results page.

As an advertiser, there are basic things that you can do to help the organic search results for your landing pages & website. To start with, always make sure to have your title tag, keyword and meta data for each page. Then, be sure to update your website regularly so that Google will view your site as an authority in your vertical. You can do this with fresh content in the form of articles or a blog. Finally, you’ll want to regularly do keyword research that is relevant to your site. There are a bunch of great, free keyword research tools out there like Trellian.

CKMG, our internet brand development and SEO company, has taught us these simple steps that really go a long way. It’s been a great learning process for us working along side with CKMG on optimizing landing pages and developing brands. Be on the lookout soon for the brands that we’re developing and will be launching later this year!

I attended the Brand Activation Summit this week in New York and spent 2 days learning all about the Digital Out of Home (DOOH) Media space which is the new emerging media. It is an exciting time for this space as the medium is really starting to boom and people are beginning to recognize its power & reach. DOOH is experiencing exactly what the Internet went through awhile back - lack of standardization of ad sizes & accepted measurement tools, apprehension of some to embrace the medium because it is an unknown - but it has had such great success recently that the possibilities and room for growth are limitless. Things can only go up from here, as well as know from riding and surviving the wave of the Internet growth cycle.

Agencies and brands were on hand to discuss how they evaluate the medium and the success & challenges they face using it. Most are anxiously awaiting the standardized measurement tools in order to be able to evaluate how this medium fits into the overall integrated media plan. It finally seems like online is an absolute must for advertisers and agencies as a part of their plan. Other hot topics were Facebook, social media and mobile.

2009 is projected as the breakout year for the new emerging media DOOH. I’m glad to know that online and mobile will be there to support DOOH so that the medium reaches its potential.

Now is the time to start thinking about Q4 and the upcoming holiday season. It’s amazing when you think that there are so many businesses that are sustained for the entire year just on sales from these 3 short months. There is so much planning and thought that goes into this holiday and it’s tough to say what will come out on top sales-wise out of all of the ideas. It’s usually the one you never expect to succeed. That’s why we plan to have as many product offerings as possible to in order to cover the breadth of products out there this holiday season.

With the high gas prices and stagnant economy, the online market is in luck. It’s predicted that more consumers than last year will go online to shop in order to save money any way they can. That’s where we come into play to service that need. Too bad I don’t have a little crystal ball that could tell me what the latest holiday trend will be before anyone else knows! Since I don’t have one, please contact me if you have a great holiday product that we can promote or send your affiliate managers any offer ideas. Let’s make this upcoming holiday season a success for our advertisers, publishers and AKMG!

Some people are thinking about back to school, some are looking forward to the long Labor Day weekend and others have politics on their mind. Not me. I’m just trying to figure out how to possibly attend all of the upcoming marketing trade shows. September, October and November are full of great shows that really help to solidify existing relationships and open doors to new ones. We really value the importance of face-to-face meetings and know that they go a long way in establishing a long term client relationship. So the AKMG team will be on a whirlwind tour attending several marketing trade shows this fall.

Please contact us if you plan on attending any of these marketing trade shows so we can be sure to meet.

Brand Activation Summit - NYC
Ad Tech London
DMA 08 - Las Vegas
Ad Tech NY

I hope we cross paths and can get some business going!

With the current economic state, all marketers are being held accountable for their budget and need to prove a clear return-on-investment (ROI). Each project needs to be justified in this tight market and rightfully so. The days of just spending money to spend it are over. In comes performance based marketing and only having to pay for a sale or lead and not the media space.

Savvy marketers just need to choose the right ad network (AKMG, of course) and can then basically make the network an extension of their marketing team. We handle everything as far as dealing with publishers, paying them monthly, determining ways to optimize the campaign, etc. And the best part, the marketer only pays once a sale or lead has been generated. In addition, the network & affiliates bear most of the risk by investing in a team, in the technology & infrastructure to make the promotion of the campaigns possible. Of course choosing the right partner is the key because if not, the marketer may be at risk if the network they use isn’t committed to protecting the marketer’s brand. Also, I don’t know many other businesses that can claim they earn money while they are sleeping but that is possible in our world. Affiliates never stop and they work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

In summary, here are the advantages of performance based marketing for a marketer.

1) Able to easily justify your ROI when you only pay for sales or leads and not the media space
2) Access to affiliates who work around the clock promoting your product or service
3) Advertiser has less risk because the network & affiliates invest in making the campaign a success

In summary, implementing a smart performance based marketing strategy will increase your ROI and make your life a lot easier when having to justify what you spent on online marketing and why you spent it. So here’s to making money while you sleep!

Many people have written about the benefits of email marketing over the years and there are many myths about email marketing. But one thing most people can agree on is that email marketing is an extremely cost-effective marketing tool. Email marketing is immediate, targeted and easy to do! Compared to other marketing methods, it is very simple & inexpensive as there is minimal production work needed or additional materials or postage expenses. It is also very effective in terms of being able to reach existing and potential customers instead of waiting for them to come to you.

With more people visiting a website, advertiser’s can expect more sales and loyal customers. If that isn’t enough, email marketing is also so effective that it can be used to turn people with minimal interest in your product or services into prospects, turn prospects into customers and turn customers in repeat customers. It is very important to constantly maintain contact with your consumer base and develop relationships with them over time. That is the way to truly retain loyalty.

In summary, here are the benefits of email marketing and why it works:

1. Outperforms all the direct marketing channels from an ROI perspective
2. Cost effective marketing tool
3. An unobtrusive method to reach potential consumers & develop loyalty
4. Compel consumers to make purchases which increases sales conversions
5. Generate repeat sales
6. Upsell and cross-sell products
7. Support offline media & brand recognition
8. Immediate & easy marketing method

If you’re still not sold on email marketing, call me and I’d be more than happy to give you concrete examples of how effective this marketing method really is. We’ve have so many success stories with email marketing at AKMG.

There are people that think quantity is much more important than quality, whether it be from a personal or business perspective. From a personal perspective, some people feel comfort if they know “everyone” in their area and can walk through their town and say hello to most people that the see. It’s a false sense of security but it makes that type of person who craves comfort, feel better. I’m the exact opposite. Sure I know a lot of people but I have a small inner circle that I trust and consider to be true friends. I prefer to keep it that way. I’d rather have 3 people that I know I can call for whatever reason and they’ll be there for me, rather that having a full address book with no true friend to call for a favor.

In business, there are marketers & business owners who believe that having more consumers who visit your website or store equates with more revenue. Again I’m on the opposite of the spectrum here too. For example, you can have 1,000 unqualified consumers visit your site because they are looking for a deal and only a handful actually purchase anything. Or you can have 100 qualified consumers visit your site and 50% of them purchase something. Option 2 is a much better scenario in my opinion since this group of people weren’t just looking for a deal so they’ll most likely be more long term, loyal, repeat purchasers.

We have the same posture at AKMG regarding the affiliates & advertisers that we’ll work with. We’d rather work with the best of breed in each vertical rather than just working with everyone to say we work with a lot of people. After all, quality is much more important than quantity.

I find myself in awe of those people that somehow are always able to come up with the next big thing, so much sooner the rest. I wonder how they’re able to do that so effortlessly. I think anyone in the Internet business is ahead of the curve already; but then there are those that lead the pack. Those are the ones that amaze me. I had a conversation with an advertiser today about this very topic. He was telling me about his biggest competitor who always seem to know the fads before the rest & is able to get a head start on everyone. You can’t help but respect him for that and my advertiser couldn’t help but agree.

I often try to figure out ways to come up with new & interesting ideas to get ahead and be THAT person. I analyze all marketing that I see, no matter the format - TV, billboards, radio - it doesn’t really matter where it’s coming from. It’s funny what you see when you leave the online silo (not that I do that very often!). If only there was really enough time in the day to daydream about this. If I had the time…I might actually come up with the “next big thing”.

The team we have put together at AKMG is always looking for the next big thing.  The first step in finding such a revolutionary idea and implementing it for profits is to have the right frame of mind to NOTICE the next big thing when it presents itself.  That is what separates us, not just from other performance based networks, but from other business professionals.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes AKMG stand out from the rest this past week. Luckily for me it wasn’t that difficult of an exercise. I always told myself that I would never do “sales” since I’m not a good liar. I’ve said that for years. So I’ve stayed away from sales or business development, whatever you want to call it, until the idea of creating a network came about. It was very clear from day one that I would be able to do business development and never have to lie. What a novel concept…knowing that I’m honestly representing AKMG when I talk about our capabilities makes my job a lot easier.

Of course I’m not going to spell out what makes us different and give away secrets right on our website. But for those of you “in the know” understand what I’m talking about! For those advertisers that want to be in the know, just email me and I’ll fill you in! Just know that I won’t tell you one thing and deliver the complete opposite…as I said above, I can’t lie!