Gmail as Competition – Another View? This week, while many from the industry have been in Brussels at the outstanding yet oddly-named MAAWG conference for ISPs and filtering companies, internet marketing pundit Ken Magill had a scary, scary headline related to Google’s insertion of ads in email — Is Gmail Feeding Your Customers to the Competition? The assertion is that Gmail’s contextual ad program, combined with image blocking in commercial emails, could easily lead to a situation where one of your subscribers doesn’t see your own content but then sees an ad for a competitor in the sidebar. Scary, I admit, but how much is that really happening? We analyzed some data from our Postmaster Direct business that is quite…
Tag
A Good Laugh at Microsoft’s Expense, Part II
A Good Laugh at Microsoft’s Expense, Part II Three minutes of quick video entertainment awaits you. What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging? Watch here. This could be any big company, not Microsoft. Makes you really realize how much “less is more” in terms of product design and packaging. Like Google. Thanks to Frank Addante from StrongMail for turning me on to this clip. See Part I if you want another quick clip about punishing developers for buggy code.
Why Email Stamps Are a Bad Idea
Why Email Stamps Are a Bad Idea (also posted on the Return Path blog) Rich Gingras, CEO of Goodmail is an incredibly smart and stand-up professional. I’ve always liked him personally and had a tremendous amount of respect for him. However, the introduction of the email stamp model by Goodmail is a radical departure from the current email ecosystem, and while I’m all for change and believe the spam problem is still real, I don’t think stamps are the answer. Rich has laid out some of his arguments here in the DMNews blog, so I’ll respond to those arguments as well as add some others in this posting. I will also comment on the DMNews blog site itself, but this…
How Much Marketing Is Too Much Marketing?
How Much Marketing Is Too Much Marketing? It seems like a busy holiday season is already underway for marketers, and hopefully for the economy, shoppers as well. Just for kicks, I thought I’d take a rough count of how many marketing messages I was exposed to in a given day. Here’s what the day looked like: 5:30 a.m. – alarm clock goes off with 1010 WINS news radio in the middle of an ad cycle – 2 ads total. Nice start to the day. 5:45-6:30 – in the gym, watching Today In New York News on NBC for 30 minutes, approximately 6 ad pods, 6 ads per pod – 36 ads total. So we’re at 38, and it’s still dark…
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?
Counter Cliche: How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia? Fred’s VC cliche of the week this week, Opening the Kimono, is a good one. He talks about how much entrepreneurs should and should not disclose when talking to VCs and big partners — companies like Microsoft or Google, for example. In response to another of Fred’s weekly cliche postings back in April, I addressed the issue of opening the kimono with VCs in this posting entitled Promiscuity. But today’s topic is the opposite of promiscuity, it’s paranoia. I was talking with a friend a few months back who’s a friend and fellow CEO of a high profile, larger company in a similar space to Return Path. He was obsessing about…
Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part I
Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part I As you may know, we published a book earlier this year at Return Path called Sign Me Up! Sales are going quite well, in case you’re wondering, and we also launched the book’s official web site, where you can subscribe to our “email best practices” newsletter. The process of publishing the book was fascinating and convinced me that publishing will never be the same. Even in two parts, this will be a long post, so apologies in advance. Front to back, the process went something like this: – We wrote the content and selected and prepared the graphics – We hired iUniverse to publish the book for a rough total cost…
Promiscuity
Promiscuity I figure the title will entice someone new to read this (although he or she might be sorely disappointed with the actual content). Fred’s posting today about VCs’ conflicts of interest, besides giving me fodder for my weekly counter-cliche posting, brings up another interesting point, one about entrepreneurs and their levels of confidentiality or secrecy about their business plans. I heard a quote once from Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins that has stayed with me for years: that “to be successful in the new economy you must be open to the point of promiscuity.” I think Khosla is right. As Fred says, VCs are notorious for meeting lots of companies before making an investment, and as an entrepreneur on…
Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part I
Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part I I had breakfast a few weeks back with John Greco, the new CEO of the Direct Marketing Assocation, and was telling him why I felt it was essential that interactive marketing be included in the DMA’s mainstream mission and not regarded as separate. The substance of my argument was that the Internet has turned every company into a direct marketer, whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not, and whether they care to act like one or not. I was happy that John agreed with me! I’m going to write a three-part posting on this topic. First topic: Why is this happening? 1. The mechanics are now ubiquitous. Every company’s…
Gmail – I Don’t Get It, Part II
Gmail – I Don’t Get It, Part II Back in June, I blogged about Google’s new Gmail service, how I didn’t understand the fuss, and how its features would ultimately be replicated and true usership stalled at a couple million. I stand by those assertions (just look at what Yahoo, Hotmail, and Lookout have done to the landscape since then), but my company Return Path published some data today that’s interesting on this topic. We run the largest Email Forwarding and Email Change of Address service around, so our data on email switching is pretty solid — we’ve had about 16 million consumers register a change of email with us in total, and about 25,000 new ones come in every…
New Media Deal
Americans have long operated under an unwritten deal with media companies (for our purposes here, let’s call this the Old Media Deal). The Old Media Deal is simple: we hate advertising, but we are willing to put up with an amazing amount of it in exchange for free or cheap content, and occasionally one of those ads slips through to the recesses of our brain and influences us in some way that old school marketers who trade in non-addressable media can only dream of. Think about it: – 30 minutes of Friends has 8 minutes of commercials (10 in syndication!) – The New York Times devotes almost 75% of its total column inches to ads – We get 6 songs…
Gmail – I Don’t Get It
I honestly don’t get all the buzz about Gmail, Google’s new email service. I took a look at it today to see what the the big deal was. It’s got a few features which are marginally better than other webmail services, but not too many and not massively better. The free storage is not a big issue for most users, although it may cause a few power users to switch over. The most interesting feature in my mind is the ability to use Google Search on your own email file, which is very useful. All in all, it’s a good product, but all these people talking about how 30mm people are going to switch over to it must be seeing…