A Different Take on The Gates We went up to Central Park today to see The Gates. We thought it was ok, but boy was it a madhouse up there. Anyway, we were struck at some angles by the similarity between the gates of the gates, and one of the most famous gates in the world which we saw on our trip through Asia last year: the O-torii. The O-torrii is one of the most recognizable images of Japan. It is a 53 foot high vermilion gate rising out of the sea in front of the Itsukushima Jinja shrine on the island of Miyajima, off the coast of Hiroshima. It was built out of trunks of local camphor trees in…
Archives / February, 2005
Oh, Behave!
Oh, Behave! This week, we launched behavioral targeting for email through our PostMasterDirect group. This is a great development for us and will produce great value for clients over time by increasing response rates. It may seem like a bit of buzzword bingo since BT is the phrase of the year in the online media world, but it’s actually a product we’ve had in development for some time now. Our VP Engineering for list and data products, Whitney McNamara, had a great posting on his blog about BT and how we do it. The whole thing is worth a read, but the real gem in my mind (and what’s most consistent with Return Path‘s philosophy about consumers and targeting in…
Spam, Hot Spam, Now Only $0.10 Each!
Spam, Hot Spam, Now Only $0.10 Each! By now, you may have seen news of the report from Ferris research citing the annual global economic impact of spam at $50 billion (apparently the U.S.’s share, $17 billion, is 0.17% of our gross national income). I have no doubt that spam is an expensive problem. IT managers and sysadmins spend lots of time dealing with it, and much hardware, software, and bandwidth are consumed. But the one number that strikes me as odd in the report is that the economic impact of not having a spam filter (i.e., manually filtering spam, more commonly known as hitting the delete key) is $718 per user per year. I guess it depends how you…
Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part III
Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part III With every company as a direct marketer, and with (hopefully!) every company embracing some of the best DM principles, what does this shift mean for the way companies will be structured in the future? First, let’s talk about the internal structure of a company. The biggest shift going on here is that customers are becoming a more important part of all employees’ daily lives, not just those in the advertising department. I wrote an earlier posting called Everyone’s a Marketer which applies here. Most likely, more and more members of your organization are touching customers every day — and they need to be trained how to think like marketers. But beyond that, companies will…
Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Well, Part II
Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Well, Part II I posted Part I a really long time ago — it’s pretty self explanatory. I was given a related gem today from fellow blogger Hawaiian leadership coach Rosa Say: "If you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?" Now there’s something to keep in mind every time you’re doing something halfway!
Now, This is What Blogs Are All About
Now, This is What Blogs Are All About In case you missed it, this article from Peggy Noonan in today’s Wall Street Journal is a great follow-up to my rant yesterday about how blogging isn’t going to eviscerate commercial email. This is what blogging is all about, not replacing marketing tools and techniques.
The Rumors of Email’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part IV
The Rumors of Email’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part IV This one could also be entitled “What Are The Bloggers Smoking?” Reports from last week’s Blog Business Summit like this one are starting to filter in (pun slightly intended). This one gets a big yawn from me, even more so than the other times I’ve posted on this subject, here, here, and here. I’m as much of a blogger and a believer in blogs and RSS as the next guy — maybe even more so — but honestly, people, blogs are going to replace email? I’d like to address a few critical points here head on, although a large part of me doesn’t even want to dignify yet another…
A New VC in Town…Sort of
A New VC in Town…Sort of My friend and Board member Fred Wilson just announced last week the formation of his new VC firm, Union Square Ventures, along with his partner Brad Burnham. Brad Feld beat me to the “way to go” posting, so while I chime in with my congratulations to Fred and Brad and assert to the rest of the VC/tech blogging world that this firm will succeed famously, I thought I’d comment on two other aspects of Union Square Ventures’ formation. First, NYC has long been a haven for later stage private equity and buy-outs, and there’s a big need in the NYC area (even the DC-Boston corridor more broadly) for top tier early stage venture capital…
Everyone's a Direct Marketer, Part II
Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part II (If you missed the first post in this series, it’s here.) So, all companies are now direct marketers — their web sites and email lists make it so, they can’t effectively reach their fragmented audience without it, and consumer permission demands it. Why is this new to some companies and not others, and what lessons can companies who are new at it learn from traditional direct marketers? First, the quick answer — it’s new because it’s being driven by the new technologies the Internet has brought us in the past 10 years. Those technologies have opened up the possibility for 1:1 communication between any company and its customers that was previously unaffordable to many…
Doing its Part
Doing its Part Fred had a good posting on spam today, riffing on a New York Times article that is very “doom and gloom” on spam and how it’s taking over the world. I’ll buy the Times’ argument that there’s an increasing amount of spam out there these days, but as with Fred, I still maintain, as I did in this earlier posting, that we’re out of crisis mode and are on the path to resolution as improved filtering technology and false-positive identification services trickle down to broader usage. What I think is interesting, though is the amount of criticism that the CAN-SPAM legislation is getting, including in this article from the Times. It’s not a perfect law — what…