We Think About Branding All Day (jschmid.com)

Want to make a huge difference in response across all your channels? In this fast-paced digital era, capturing and retaining customer attention requires a thoughtful and strategic approach. But sometimes, we create complicated marketing programs without a true understanding of the consumer or what we ultimately want them to do. The formula for great marketing is quite simple. We must DISRUPT their busy lives, we must DELIGHT with content that emotionally resonates and most importantly, we must DRIVE them to do something. Disrupt: Breaking Through the Noise - In today’s oversaturated marketplace, capturing customer attention is an ongoing challenge. Delight: Creating Content that Emotionally Connects - What is it you are truly selling? It’s not about the product and it’s not always about the discount. Drive: Creating Immediate Action - While disruption and delight are essential, your goal in the omnichannel world is to drive customers to act.

Direct mail is experiencing a long overdue resurgence for retailers, hastened by the pandemic. Increasingly crowded ads on social media and Google, full email inboxes, SMS dings all day long ... while the much-maligned mailbox remained emptier as credit card offers dwindled and in-store postcard coupons were recycled. It’s not surprising that many e-commerce brands decided to communicate in a new “old” way and test direct mail. We had the pleasure of assisting several launches in 2020 — some planned before the lockdowns, others as a new COVID strategy. Two of the biggest surprises for folks new to mail are: 1. the amount of time it takes to properly put together an effective mailing; and 2. how expensive mailing can be. One of our print partners and I assisted a pure-play that mailed within three weeks of our first discussion … this is NOT typical and we don’t recommend it. Haste makes waste.

Two thousand twenty four has gotten off on an upward start, with U.S. ad spending rising 4.3% over January 2023, according to just-updated data from Guideline's U.S. Ad Market Tracker. Sequentially, January was the 10th consecutive month to post a gain, signaling an end to the U.S. ad recession beginning with the second quarter of 2023. The momentum continues to come from smaller ad categories, which in aggregate, rose 5.3% over January 2023, which compares with an aggregate gain of 3.7% for the top 10 ad categories.