Marketing Pilgrim

Have you ever played hide-and-seek at IKEA? I have, though not intentionally. The stores are set up in these funky little mazes that make it very easy to lose a husband or a child while shopping, so it’s no wonder that people have taken to playing the game there on purpose. This week, the idea rose to new heights when a person in Australia set up a Facebook event announcing a “massive” game at their local store. Since then, almost 4,000 people have signed up and the news has gone viral.

Smart Company Australia quoted the local IKEA spokesperson as saying that they weren’t behind anything that might endanger shoppers, but they weren’t going to go so far as to ban the game.

Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners and bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization says there are “Four Pillars Of Trust” that you need in order to make your landing pages convert. At a recent marketing conference covered by Top Rank, Ash emphasized the fact that the winner is not always the guy with the zippiest website. Trust is about people and that’s the link that binds together his four pillars.

Let’s take a look:

1. Appearance

Imagine you live in Philadelphia and you have a blog. You are like about 99.9 percent of the world’s bloggers so you make no money and the blog is a labor of love.

Now imagine that you are going to be charged $300 for the privilege of having your blog start from the City of Brotherly Love. Yup, that’s right, Philly is hitting bloggers with this and other measures. If you haven’t had enough of the government on every level getting into everyone’s business this may put you over the top.

This comes from NBC Philadelphia’s web site:

Taking a step closer to an eerie Orwellian state where creativity is crushed in the name of “the greater good,” the city of Philadelphia is demanding that bloggers pay $300 for the privilege of writing on the Internet.

You may or may not have heard about Google’s latest test with search results. If you did, you have likely already formed your opinion on this experiment. If you haven’t check out the video below from Rob Ousbey. In the interest of not trying to influence your take on this particular Google experiment I won’t tell you my opinion just yet.

So Pilgrim readers, is this something you would like to see as part of the Google search results?

Let’s take a look at what is being said here just from the headline. The advertising community with its publishers and advertisers loves the idea of being able to target ads more directly to users with the right ‘profiles’ for products. That makes sense. A survey reported on by emarketer from DM2PRO and AudienceScience conducted recently shows just how much publishers love it.

Here’s the rub. The people being targeted really don’t like the idea of giving up what is needed to be targeted. In other words, people don’t like having a lot of data collected about them. Take a look at the numbers below that say that nearly ¾ of those surveyed have concerns about too much data being collected on theme.

The Annoying Orange (AO) is quite simply what the title says, and a whole lot more. Not only is it annoying, it is creepy, void of plot, horrible writing, and, quite frankly, pretty pointless. Therefore, it might surprise you to find out that by very conservative estimates, its creator has taken home close to $300,000 in ad revenue in under a year of the web series existence. It has amassed somewhere around 227,425,302 total YouTube views with around 1,100,095 subscribers.

This annoying piece of talking fruit has become a force to be reckoned with on the Internet. AO’s creator, Dane Boedigheimer, has quickly found himself at the center of a very popular, very odd, and very profitable web series. Which begs to ask the question, how the heck did he know that was going to be popular?