I should be reading about Cannes and relaying said information here. After all, what kind of ad blogger am I? I think you know by now, I’m the ad blogger who doesn’t give a shit about Cannes. Thankfully, there is a multitude of other ad-related things to care about.
Doug Perlson, CEO of RealDirect, cares about small businesses optimizing their advertising opportunity via new developments in advertising technology.
In a post on Business Insider, Perlson explains:
Every day, a local business is pitched by a local ad salesman (or woman) in a given market, and they each make good points about how certain keywords/media/etc. will bring in new customers. However, one size doesn’t fit all advertisers. For example, search engine marketing may be fantastic for national retailers, but it is likely not the most efficient form of advertising for the local dry cleaner. The problem isn’t price — it’s opportunity cost. They dry cleaner has to learn a whole new language and a whole new business model to make that advertising pay off. And even if it does, the scale may not warrant continued effort.
But if the sales team could instead offer the dry cleaner a “platform” for them to easily manage their ads in the five forms of media that matter to them the most (direct mail, email marketing, local search, supermarket receipt tape, and local newspaper) and have a common way to measure performance (integration into the point of sale device – i.e. cash register), you would see many more of these businesses willing to not just dip their toe into online advertising, but make it an integral part of their business.
Damn, that sounds wonderful. Let’s get an inventor and some angel investors on it…
