The Funnelholic

How many times these days has the trailer been better than the movie?  Movie marketing is more important than the actual movie production itself.  The job of the Hollywood marketer is to get people into the movie house on opening weekend. That’s it.

They don’t worry how much of the plot they have given away in so-called spoilers, whether they have away the best jokes or scenes in the entire movie in the previews, or whether they market the actor  that sell vs. the actual “star” of the movie. Forget the fact that  actor getting top billing may only be on “stage” for a brief stint in the movie. You could almost argue that the shooting of the film is where the marketing machine gets rolling. How many shots of movies midproduction have you seen in the pages of “People”? And don’t forget The old bait and swith. Dark dramas have been cast as comedies in TV ads just to lure you into the movie theater. Been there. Seen that.

Case in point: “The Dark Knight.”  It should have been called: “Joker Returns.”  As a matter of fact, did we even see the actual Batman in the previews?  Batman was played by the obscure Christian Bales, whereas the movie was all Heath Ledger, all the time.  He basically had an academy award nomination from the preview alone and the record shattering box office stemmed largely from the studio’s brilliant marketing campaign. Unfortunately, the untimely death contributed  to the posthumously released film, but the marketing cogs were moving full throttle before his tragic demise.

So, what can we as b2b marketers take from this?  Two things:

1.     Get ‘em in the seats. Sound crazy?  There is a difference between marketing to get buyers to register and commit vs. overwhelming them with your overall messaging platform goals. The b2b marketer often falls trap to two things: A new, fancy acronym or market they are trying to pioneer (insert acronym flavor of the month here) or a high falutin’ value proposition that doesn’t really say anything.  Yes, you want to get your point across, but you can’t do it if no one is listening. Don’t let your ego get in the way. Yes, you know the latest terms and technologies, but does your audience? How can you convince someone that they need something when they don’t know what it is?

When you are promoting your white paper or webinar, think about what actually sells. You can explain everything until the cows come home once you have captured the audience.   Focusing on the benefits and targeting is key to get interest, not big words and obscure acronyms.  “Seven Reasons your business needs…” will work better than: “The primer on Acronym X, the dynamic, robust, dada, dada…”.  Give them a call to action. Give them something they can print out and give to their boss to justify a new investment.

2.    Don’t be afraid to give away some of your best scenes to get buyers to bite:  Yes, there is a fine line between temptation and giving it away, but there are sooo many choices today and so little time.  This is especially true in the case of business targets. Remember, they have their day jobs.  I talked to one of my contacts at ON24, the webinar platform company.  He sees what works and doesn’t work in both producing and marketing webinars.  He said one of the better advertising vehicles is to preview the webinar itself when users click on the page. Nothing sells like the real thing.

See you at the movies.

So I was watching the movie Tropical Thunder and a random thought popped into my head. Where did the term white paper come from?  I wish there was some clever analogy I could draw between the term and the movie that led me to such philosophical noodling, but no such luck.

The phrase white paper is part of my daily vernacular, and I realized I don’t even really know what it means. So I went to the font of all thing obscure — Google — which in turn led me to, of course, Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, the definition is:

A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions. They are used in politics and business. They can also be a government report outlining policy.

As you can see in the definition above, the government bandies about the term as well, and while I’m not explicitly pointing my finger at the government as the source, I believe we can credit them in this case.

It seems the British actually dubbed the term white paper, but it’s the informal variant of the more common “command paper,” which is used to lay out government policy. Interesting, the British also publish “green papers” (a.k.a. “consultation documents”), which propose strategy and even, on occasion, take public opinion into consideration. That’s a novel concept and a possible precursor to social media, but that’s a topic for another day.

Heck, Churchill even produced a couple white papers. Because they proposed topics of international importance that are still controversial today, I think it may be untoward to compare them to those that have become common parlance in the business world.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, business folks didn’t start dubbing their marketing treatises as white papers until the 1990s.

So while the industry uses the phrase “white paper,” many of whom without knowing the origin of the phrase, I may start using “command paper” in reference to my writing. That should garner me some more respect.

I have a number of iPhone business apps on my phone: LinkedIn, Twittleator, Facebook, Google. I haven’t seen much data on business user adoption of the iPhone or its apps, but progressive organizations have built iPhone apps and others will follow suit.  So it is with great pleasure that I award my “First to Market” honor to Marketing Profs.  They have provided an iPhone widget, and I love it.

My award presentation to Marketing Profs goes as follows: Continue Reading »

I am writing this blog from one of my customer’s conference rooms.  They are demand generation marketers supporting a 19 person call center that follows up on their leads.  They brought up that a couple of their lead sources had developed acute “Negative-Call-Center-Reputation” and they can’t resuscitate  them.

What is “Negative-Call-Center-Reputation?”

Continue Reading »