Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

Are You Man Enough to Write a Great PPC Ad About a Woman VP?

I’m using the puzzling choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP pick to engage in a crowd-sourced search marketing experiment. Namely, who among you can write the most effective Google PPC ad featuring her?

The winner will receive $200 cash from the gilded vaults of Convince & Convert, as well as big-time bragging rights throughout Twitter, the Blogosphere, and maybe even among real people. 

The Rules

• Enter this scintillating contest by adding your best effort to the Comments of this post (see below).
• One entry per person please. Honor system.
• All entries are due by 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern time on Monday, September 1. This gives you something to do over your Labor Day weekend.
• The top 4 semi-finalists will be selected by me. I may throw open voting on Twitter if we have some close calls.
• I will create and launch a PPC campaign on Google next week and will run the semi-finalists as an A/B/C/D test. Bid amounts will be the same for all ads, etc. Search terms will be “Sarah Palin” and “Palin” - broad match
• The winning ad will be the one with the highest average click through rate, and will be announced next Friday-ish, September 6.
• Winner will receive $200 cash, check, or PayPal from me, and the opportunity to write a guest post on Convince & Convert about their winning technique.

Remember…

Google Adwords allows 25 characters (including spaces and punctuation) in the headline, and 35 characters for each of the two body copy lines. Please format your entry as:
Headline
Line 1
Line 2

…in the comments section. Don’t worry about a URL. I’ll make something up.

It’s Sarah, not Sara.Similar Posts That You Might Enjoy

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Welcome. If you liked that, there's plenty more. Please subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also find me on Twitter @jaybaer

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been elected to co-chair the Consumer Education Roundtable for the Email Experience Council. 

The EEC is the global professional association for email marketers, striving to enhance the image of email as a tactic while advocating its importance for business.

In partnership with the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), EEC also puts on an excellent (dare I say definitive) conference for email marketers called Email Evolution. The next edition is February 9 - 11 in Scottsdale, AZ. (Information here)
 

Help Me Help You

My EEC Consumer Education Roundtable is charged with building the definitive Web site or online application to help marketers understand email best practices, design, statistics, regulations, etc.

Currently, there are a lot of resources online about good email marketing, but they are spread all over the place and its hard to determine to whom to listen. This new EEC initiative will help solve that problem by aggregating “approved” email marketing information.

Even the EEC itself is perpetuating the current problem, as the online resources section links to a variety of white papers, blogs, stats, columns and other flotsam and jetsam. (I’ve been waiting for the day when I could use flotsam and jetsam in a blog post)
 

I Need Your Comments Please

Please help me get the new roundtable off to a rousing start. Please leave a comment (or hit me on Twitter @jaybaer) and tell me what you really want to know about email marketing.

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Convince & Convert launches consultancy to help agencies figure out a digital marketing game plan

(July 8, 2008 — Flagstaff, Ariz.)
Thousands of advertising and public relations firms find themselves under siege as new tactics and digital specialty agencies chip away at their client base.

What’s an agency to do? Outsource digital marketing? Hire an in-house expert? Merge with a digital marketing agency? Ignore the Web and hope it goes away?

Convince & Convert, a new digital marketing consultancy, has launched to answer those questions – and more. The firm is believed to be America’s first devoted solely to helping agencies get better (and more profitable) at digital marketing. Convince & Convert improves agencies’ in-house expertise in email marketing, search marketing, Web strategy, Internet advertising, social media, and mobile marketing.

The company specializes in Digital Marketing Audit and Actions, an intensive, 2-day analysis and examination of an agency’s digital capabilities, with a detailed roadmap for improvements. The firm also works with agencies on an ongoing basis to increase in-house digital marketing expertise and profits.

The firm is led by Jason Baer, a 15-year Internet veteran who has worked with dozens of agencies and hundreds of major companies including: Nike, Fujitsu, Pulte Homes, Cold Stone Creamery, and RJ Reynolds. He founded the award-winning digital marketing firm Mighty Interactive, which he sold to integrated Tempe, AZ agency Off Madison Ave in 2005. He remains a senior consultant to Off Madison Ave.

Notes

•    To provide a true competitive advantage to its clients, Convince & Convert will work with only one agency in each U.S. market.

•    Digital marketing is expected to double in the next 4 years, according to eMarketer, yet many advertising and PR agencies continue to struggle with integrating digital marketing tactics and executing them competently and profitably for their clients. A recent Forrester Research report says agencies “…must build new interactive competencies quickly in order to succeed.”

•    Convince and Convert maintains an active blog on digital marketing issues for agencies

Tags

digital marketing, digital marketing consultants, ad agency consultants, interactive marketing consultants, internet business consultants, PR firm consultants, social media consultants, ad agency roundtable

Links

Convince & Convert digital marketing blog

Convince & Convert digital marketing consultants services and fees

Jason Baer Biography

Are You Digital Ready? Quiz for Agencies

Quotes

(attributable to Jason Baer, President Convince & Convert)

Advertising and PR firms have been having their lunch eaten for years by digital-only shops, and I’ve done some of that eating. Agencies must act now to dramatically improve their digital capabilities or their core business will begin to erode.

Ultimately, there shouldn’t be a “digital” group within an agency. Every marketing tactic should have a digital component. That’s what Convince & Convert does - shows agencies how to integrate and profit from interactive marketing.

Attributable to Forrester Research Report “Agencies Must Build Digital Skills to Survive) April, 2008

Traditional advertising agencies face significant technical difficulties. Clients are shifting business to digital shops, and consumers have turned away from media channels that built the agency industry and toward emerging Internet media. Ad agencies must build new interactive competencies quickly in order to succeed. How? They must build digital skills with a three-tiered approach of establishing digital commitment at the executive level, retraining existing staffers, and building a pipeline of future talent.

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Jason Baer
Convince & Convert
(602) 616.1895
jason@convinceandconvert.com
Twitter: @jaybaerSimilar Posts That You Might Enjoy

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