SAGE: OUR BLOG
adj: wise through reflection and experience
Advertising and Marketing
Super Bowl Ads – A Million Dollar Investment?
Super Bowl Sunday — that magical time of year where everyone gathers around the TV not just to watch grown men slam into each other for fifteen seconds at a time, but also to watch the commercials. This past week, the news cycle was dominated by discussion of Kim Kardashian, the Budweiser puppy and the controversial Nationwide commercial. It’s the [...]
Holidays offer what small businesses do best
As the days get shorter, many retailers prepare for consumer buying power to exercise its influence in this year’s holiday shopping season. Many retailers have already seen evidence that the season has begun. Especially now that political ads are gone, traditional holiday marketing can begin. New products, especially in the technology category, e.g. smartphones, are pulling forward consumer spending. Holiday [...]
Direct Marketing: Science & Art
If you had to prove how your direct marketing programs impact revenue, market share or customer value, could you do it? Measurement and analysis help marketers become smarter, give us the basis to set benchmarks, and ideas to test and optimize. The term “analytics” as early as the 1600s, meant applying logical analysis to discover and communicate meaningful patterns in [...]
Keeping Pace With Your Customer
At one point or another, we marketing professionals are asked to come up with a cross-channel marketing plan. What we propose and how we formulate the proposal is the secret to our success (or possibly our failure). As marketing professionals we never, ever use the F word though. Campaign “F”ailure is always relabeled as testing. And testing is never [...]
Online video ads continue to propel localized marketing forward
Localized marketing is the customization of a message or materials used to convey a message to a very targeted community or group. If you consider the fact that newspapers in America have been in existence for over 250 years and Yellow Pages for over 110 years, communicating and marketing to the local-level is not new. It is the means [...]
Radio Advertising: To Stream or Not to Stream
Thank you to Joey Taylor-Moon and Amanda Cheese for also contributing to this blog post. There’s no question that the rise of data-driven online advertising has changed the media landscape. While traditional radio is still big and still relevant, the ability to target your audience directly through a streaming service like Pandora or Spotify is hard to ignore. Deciding how [...]
Building Brands
In a former agency, I had a creative director who would respond to every common office greeting like “How’s it going?” or “What are you up to?” with “Building brands. Just building brands, man.” He believed it, too. He believed passionately that every time he had the opportunity to create something that represented a brand, he wanted that piece of [...]
SA Helps with Public Health Initiative: Count the Kicks
In 2008, SA began work on an awareness campaign named Count the Kicks, a public health initiative started by five Iowa women who turned the heartache of losing their baby girls to stillbirth or infant death, into a movement of saving babies' lives. The campaign was officially launched in 2009 and since then, Count the Kicks has grown, continuing to [...]
Corporate Mandates: Do They Help or Hurt Local Marketing?
Governing a franchise or dealer advertising program is challenging for corporate-level marketing departments. Accurately positioning a brand and product or service descriptions is difficult when dealing with entrepreneur-minded managers at the local level. With the intent to protect the entire dealer network, corporate marketing teams often institute rigid product or brand standards related to local marketing. For years, this has [...]
The Power of Dynamic Digital Billboards
What’s not to like about outdoor advertising? You take a big empty space, fill it with your message, and put it up along highly trafficked areas for all to see. It’s simple and efficient and has remained virtually unchanged for centuries. Until now. Enter the Digital Billboard At first, digital billboards seem harmless. Yes, the printed material was replaced by [...]
