Dr Joe's Printing Industry Blog

Advertise all the time... according to Google...
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=115115
Google's VP-advertising sales, Tim Armstrong, touted his company's ability to court brand advertisers... He talked of a Long Tail of products, explaining that previously, by using traditional media, marketers could only advertise one or two products at a time because of how long it would take to create and execute the advertising. With services like Google's, however, he said, brand marketers are advertising all of their products, all the time... "Most marketers are used to advertising just a fraction of their products due to that human scale required to advertise them"... Five years ago, he said, Hewlett Packard was running only two or three of their products on search. Today they're running thousands. "Consumers are on 24 hours a day, you should have all your products available to them." ... the company has led road shows to reach out to chief marketing officers and creative agencies to get them to think of Google products for other uses. One oft-cited example is how Saturn used Google Earth and Google Video to create an online ad application where customers "fly" around Google Earth, then through the doors of their local dealership and watch a video of the actual sales manager welcoming them into the dealership.

Double opt-in registration is supposed to be the cure for spam and ensuring deliverability of e-mail messages, especially marketing messages. Here's a new wrinkle... and another reason why brand and product support still needs direct mail and space advertising.
http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/opt-in_list_spam/
Anti-spammers and others promote double opt-in as the only fail-safe way to build a permission-based e-mail marketing list. But one e-mail service provider recently found its messages blocked by a major Internet service provider because of the very confirmation process designed to prevent spam. The problem: A so-called spambot—a program designed to collect e-mail addresses off the Internet—repeatedly registered an e-mail address on the e-mail service provider’s Web site. But the e-mail address was a spam trap and every time a confirmation e-mail was sent to the address, the ISP considered the message spam. As a result, the ISP repeatedly blocked the e-mail service provider’s e-mail, said the company’s ISP relations executive, who asked that all names in the story be withheld.... So what’s the lesson for everyone else? For one thing, a good ISP relations program is crucial, said the executive. “To me, it means really get in close contact with whoever is blocking you, and talk to human beings on the other end of the phone.” The executive added that the spambot still hits the company’s site about once a quarter. “All we can do is send a pre-emptive email to the ISP telling them: ‘It's back, please don't block us again,’” the executive said. Meanwhile, the only foolproof way to guard against this spambot’s actions would be use a CAPTCHA—an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart—requiring subscribers to type in the letters of a distorted image. “Convincing people to switch to double opt-in is hard enough,” said the executive. “Double opt-in plus CAPTCHAS and you might as well ask them to do calculus.”

Publishing guru Bob Sacks (Bosacks or "Capt. Bo" among his acquaintances) has written an excellent piece in Production Executive magazine. I know it's excellent because he mentions me.... :) Seriously, Bob and I come from totally different directions about the publishing business and our experiences, but somehow we keep ending up at the same place...
http://www.pubexec.com/story/story.bsp?sid=47352&var=story&publication=Publishing%20Executive&publicationDate=2/1/07&slug=PE_0207_BOSACKS&category=Management§ion=Unknown&page=1
The Interactive Advertising Bureau is starting a print publication
http://www.iab.net/news/pr_2007_02_21.asp
IAB has one of the best e-mail newsletters around. This is in conjunction with AdWeek so there's nothing really nefarious here about IAB resorting to print. They know just as well as anyone, especially now, that your brand has to be everywhere. After all, the former head of IAB was one of the authors of What Sticks. Now that there's a new executive director there, what's the first job of any trade association leader? That's right... non-dues revenue! It'a a 16-page magazine with about half of it as ads... mission accomplished.
The magazine is available as a web site/digital magazine at http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/vnu/adweek021907/index.php
It's rather cool. You can save it as a separate executable file, and it opens quickly and is easy to navigate. It seems faster than Zinio, using the NXTBook software
http://www.nxtbookmedia.com/

Newspapers are doing just fine... according to this article... and the biggest pain is in the big dailies... they're big so they get all the press.
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_9914.asp
(Which reminds me of an old line for some reason: never tick off someone who has a warehouse full of paper and truckloads of ink)

I was interviewed by Margie Dana of the Boston Print Buyers... Here's the link to Part 1
http://www.bostonprintbuyers.com/printtips/print/07-02-19.html

Big announcement coming next week... it'll be posted here first...