Welcome to the Week #23

Welcome to the week!

We’re back. Yes, last week there was no Welcome to the Week post as DOZ was busy launching our new product, Quoter. Quoter is the easiest and fastest way to launch a marketing campaign and users can move from plan to price to launch in just minutes. It got a lot of notice on Product Hunt, in Tech Crunch, and around the web. If you haven’t already checked it out, DOZ CEO Anji Ismail wrote a short piece about Quoter on the blog last week – check it out.

For those of you who did give Quoter a try or have already launched a new campaign in one of the half dozen countries where Quoter is already up and running, here’s what else you need to know to make your week in marketing rock.

Drudge in the Three Comma Club. Again.

The May media site traffic rankings are out and there are some movers and shakers among the top publishers and publications in the US last month. Chief among them are Google News which is ranked for the first time and – no surprise – finds itself in the national top five. With more than a billion page views last month Google News is one of only five media publishers to be in the traffic three comma club. The other sites with more than a billion views last month: MSN, Disney Media, Time Warner, and Matt Drudge.

That last name should encourage anyone who thinks the current media publishing and traffic acquisition models are trending towards a single, copy-and-pasted mess of video, click bait, and reality TV. Unlike Disney, Time Warner, and MSN the Mat Drudge’s Drudge Report site is straight out of 1995 with its collection of links, only the odd image, and nothing more interactive for the visitor to do than click a link to go elsewhere.

Despite being a site that is essentially run by two people and has been from the outset, Drudge continues to define what is newsworthy and has traffic statistics that other media groups can only dream of. To put his billion visits in relative perspective, in May Drudge’s traffic was approximately equivalent to the combined traffic of Bloomberg, Vox, the BBC, Forbes, and News Corporation!

Marketing, Smarketing?

Mention publishes some great content and their latest piece by Joei Chan is no exception. It talks about the importance of aligning marketing efforts with sales efforts, and includes the remarkable (but no doubt true) claim that 60% of the sales cycle is completed before a salesperson is ever involved with the customer.

HubSpot, the focus on Chan’s piece, calls this “smarketing”. I’m all in on the process and the theory behind it, but the name? Smarketing? I’m not sure about you but we’re professional marketers here. Surely there is something better HubSpot could have come up with to describe their approach than smarketing, right?

Objections to the name of the concept aside, the piece is worth reading in full. There’s plenty of value in there for people building their digital funnel, or for those who are having trouble converting and want to look for the places where their approach might be falling down.

Nike Knows Ads

The Euro 2016 tournament got underway with the opening match between France and Romania on Friday night. Here on the ground in France the advertising, marketing, and promotions around the Euro 2016 tournament is coming on thick and fast, and it seems no matter where you turn there is someone selling something with a soccer ball emblazoned on it.

Nike, though, have come to the Euro 2016 advertising table with something a little different: a six-minute film starring Portugal star Christiano Ronaldo switching bodies with an English ball boy after an in-match collision. It’s clever, self-deprecating, allows Nike to showcase its biggest European stars, and brings the sort of high production values that people have come to expect from Nike and their football efforts over the years.

Check out the ad below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scWpXEYZEGk

This Week on The DOZ Blog 

We’re getting our groove on this week at DOZ with a suite of posts at the nexus between music and marketing. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the music industry, the effect of streaming sites on the industry, and how it is affecting marketers and the marketing of music. On Wednesday we’ll take a look at how marketers can emulate a rock star’s journey to the top in their own business, and on Thursday we’ll meld music and politics by looking at campaign songs and political branding. Finally, we’ll close out the week with a look at mashup marketing and the world of the AMV. It’s jam packed and there’s plenty of toe-tappin’ stuff to enjoy.

Want More Marketing Goodness?

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Time to Get to Work

Know a great piece on marketing that we missed? If so, let us know and we’ll share it with the world, crediting your good self, of course, with the tip. Send your sources straight to Content Manager Dylan and you could be featured in next week’s Welcome to the Week post.

We’ve got elections, football tournaments, the NBA finals, and Apple’s WWDC all coming up at the same time. Yep, it’s going to be a busy week for those of us who spend their days on the web and their nights cheering on their teams. It’s going to be a big one, so buckle up: welcome to the week – now get stuck into it.