It seems that people are beginning to enjoy a daily mental workout at The Dojo. I’m glad to see that. I hope the trend will continue.

Here is my prejudiced view on trade fairs.

Trade fairs are mostly about gunslinging salespeople selling mediocre stuff (which they don’t even know anything about) to people who sadly don’t know better. I just hate the tricks that some of the exhibitors are playing in order to catch people’s attention (or to distract their attention away from their actual products).

Well, I’ve just returned from the OMD (Online Marketing Düsseldorf) in Germany and I must say I enjoyed it. It was great fun and I think that most of the companies we met we’re awesome! Most of the exhibitors had created some pretty spectacular, imaginative, and luxurious stands. We hadn’t. We decided to keep it simple; I’ll elaborate later this week…

But I also experienced a few things fitting my prejudiced view: The used car sales techniques. Clearly the cheapest attempt of grapping the audience’s attention came from a company called BusinessAD. They had decided to showcase TOPLESS woman (example picture found on Flickr) and male body builders while being body painted. After the actual paint job they wondered around in the exhibition halls all day. I think it was stupid, completely irrelevant, and so exceptionally cheap.

I know this might sound a bit rescued … But it just provokes me a little so see companies think that people (potential customers) are so stupid and primitive that they’ll act on BS stunts like this. I know that it didn’t have the slightest impact on me whatsoever. NO WAY! Naked who? Where!!!???

Our focus in TraceWorks is to develop solid and easy to use marketing software. Our target segment is large and big enterprises as well as marketing agencies. This last group is very important to our business model. An essential feature requested by most of the agencies we work with (especially media agencies) is so-called “3rd Party Adserving” - which is included in our first version of Headlight.

What is 3rd Party Adserving?
It means that banner campaigns are actually centrally hosted on our servers at Traceworks.com. Everytime a banner is displayed on a media you advertise on the banner will actually be hosted and delivered from our server.

The benefits
Imagine that you in real-time can change e.g. 200 banners (marketing message) on 25 different media placements in just a few seconds. This would normally take days. Adserving is all about flexibility - and we know this flexibility can dramatically increase marketing efficiency. It simply saves time and money.

In today’s fragmented media landscape it is much too expensive to have your campaigns running at the wrong websites; you need to target the right audience, elsehow you are just wasting money.

With Adserving you also receive important information on the performance of the creative assets used in your campaigns. This means than you can analyze exactly which messages that motivates people to click on your ads and if they subsequently converts on your website.

Some more advanced (yet easy to use) features:

• Performance reports broken down by media, creatives and campaign pages.

• Automatic generation and emailing of tags and tracking codes to relevant parties.

• Easy handling of Flash formats.

• Support for CPA, Flat Rate, CPC, CPM pricing models for campaigns - or a combination.

Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.

I’m thinking of buying this book. I just imagine it would be an interesting and meaningful experience since we try to design (if not simple) less complicated software (in contrary to most other business software companies).
The author of the book is John Maeda who’s a graphic designer, visual artist, and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He’s been dubbed “the Master of Simplicity,”. The book outlines ten laws of simplicity over 100 pages. I read this extract from the book on 37signals’ blog which made me think a little:

“Imagine a world in which software companies simplified their programs every year by shipping with 10% fewer features at 10% higher cost due to the expense of simplification. For the consumer to get less and pay more seems to contradict sound economic principles…Yet in spite of the logic of demand, “simplicity sells.”

The ten laws are:

Law 1: Reduce
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

Law 2: Organize
Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

Law 3: Time
Savings in time feel like simplicity.

Law 4: Learn
Knowledge makes everything simpler.

Law 5: Differences
Simplicity and complexity need each other.

Law 6: Context
What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

Law 7: Emotion
More emotions are better than less.

Law 8: Trust
In simplicity we trust.

Law 9: Failure
Some things can never be made simple.

Law 10: The One
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Has anybody read it? Is it any good? Will it revolotionize my life? Make me sing on my way to work?

Headlight is a web-based tool that let’s you easily plan, manage, execute, and measure the effectiveness of marketing activities – online as well as offline.

One of the important features that many of our customers ask for is to be able to quickly execute, measure and optimize PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords. Now that the Google Adwords API is finally stabile we’ve of course included this to our first launch of Headlight!

Very quickly explained it means that it’s possible directly from within Headlight (through an API integration with Google) to create, place, and execute campaigns on Google - super simple and quick. All the tracking URLs necessary to e.g. measure con%/ROI% is added automatically.

More advanced features include bulk upload of keywords and the capability to quickly import all your existing campaigns.

All you need to get started is to relate your Google Adwords account to an active My Client Center (MCC) account and to obtain a Google Adwords Token. You can either create your own MCC or simply relate your Googe Adwords account to TraceWorks’ MCC. When this is done you just type in the #API Token, Username, Password into Headlight and the rest is done 100% automatically.

Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.

Do you sometimes feel like you are talking to a machine when contacting support where ever it is you contact support? I know the feeling and despise it. It’s the canned (predefined) answers that do it. Even though a person might have selected that specific canned answer for your question it’s still slightly off, because it was made to solve as many questions similar to yours as possible. If you are lucky you will be able to decode a solution to your problem from the robotic ramblings, but you might also receive something complete and utterly useless, like the example below.

This is the answer I got when I asked why one of my domains suddenly stopped redirecting to another of my domains when I hadn’t tampered with anything (left out the company name, throwing mud is not my point).

“Changes to the settings of a domain take up to 48 hours to become effective because of the number of networks involved, and because these networks are controlled by several different agencies. This delay applies to all domains with any Registrar, not just [bliiip]. Please allow for this delay when planning web sites or configuring a domain to work with your services.”

The answer has scaringly little to do with my question and I had to waste my time contacting their support again with the same question explaining that their first answer didn’t solve it. Eventually the issue got solved, but a bad experience could have been avoided if the support staff had taken the time to look up my account and read my question, instead of just feeding me from the can.

What they should have done is what this other web hosting company did (again not mentioning any names). A short and precise answer to my specific question, with a good sense that there’s actually a thinking individual behind the email.

This answer is what I got when I asked if I could still use a domain with that specific web host; just not transfer it until after 60 days.

”Yep, you got it! Once the domain is pointing to our nameservers you will be able to host it here indefinitely and then transfer over the registration of the domain once it’s passed the initial 60 days of registration.”

The only service/support there is in canned answers is that someone else searches an FAQ for you. You don’t really need help with that do you?

I know we shouldn’t be complaining about not delivering your product on time, and I also get all the “Vista/Office2007/PS3/whatever is delayed – again” news.

But I was puzzled today, when I read a headline on a Danish website claiming “Nintendo Wii will ship in time”.

How the bleeping **** can this be a headline?

Is the entire IT business really so bad at reaching deadlines that fulfilling your promises can make it as news?

I just heard about a fairly new marketing acronym which makes sense to me: SMO or Social Media Optimization. The definition on Wikipedia:

“Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a way to optimize websites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites. For example allowing RSS feeds, easier linking, incorporation of third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos.”

Some interesting posts on the topic of SMO:

New Rules for Social Media Optimization

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social Media Optimization - Get to Know SMO

Managing marketing assets is still a problem for many teams. Files that cannot be found, out-of-date images being used and way too much time and money spent on exchanging and distributing material. And these are just some of the most common problems.

Headlight includes simple Digital Asset Management (DAM). This feature makes it easy to organize, share, and distribute your marketing material to other members of your team or to external partners. Simply upload the files, fire up your web-browser and they’ll follow you always.

Besides these benefits the DAM feature also allows you to quickly create campaigns using the centrally stored assets. All performance numbers (impressions, CTR%, CON% etc.) are then linked automatically to each asset why it’s easy to gain an overview of the most valuable marketing assets.

Marketing assets in the first version of Headlight can be a media (Yahoo, Google, Wall Street Journal etc.), a creative (flash banners, .gif banners), a campaign page (the destination page of a campaign), or a list of keywords (which you use when creating campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MIVA, MSN etc.).

Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.

Most companies are very different from each other and most have different overall marketing objectives. This is simply how the world is and also how Headlight has been designed: with flexibility (e.g. customization) as one of our overall product paradigms – both regarding the user interface (UI) and with the backend architecture.

One example of customization and flexibility is our central Performance Dashboard. It is very straight forward to define/create/add/remove the most relevant information to your specific business.

Sample elements you can create could be custom Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and/or custom Performance Goals. These are defined and added to the Performance Dashboard in just seconds:

Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.