marketing/PR

More tangible, less “smart”

November 14, 2017 by Ted Cuzzillo

First came the prediction: “The whole ‘smart’ thing is about to get real.” Really? What made this apparent insider say so? The prediction, given in a forum where other predictions flew in the breeze, was on the record. Then two months later, it had gone off the record.

What happened? Apparently, there had been a corporate-wide retreat from “smart” — as explained to me, a retreat from the aspirational to the tangible.

That’s unlike conventional marketing, which blows by the tangible in its rush toward aspiration. Does this portend a wider retreat from the term “smart”? Is it a shift toward a market that prefers the tangible over the dream? Or is it just dumb?

Notable marketing: ThoughtSpot and SpotGirl

May 2, 2016 by Ted Cuzzillo

Promote a data-reporting tool with a comic book? Even the few vendors willing to break from whitepapers and blogs might not look natural doing it. But ThoughtSpot’s done it, and it works.

For How to Defeat the Top 5 BI Villains at Your Company, ThoughtSpot wins the Datadoodle Occasional Prize for Notable Marketing. The hero is SpotGirl, and she fights five villains business people know well.

SpotGirl’s weapon is a magnifying glass. When a villain known as DataGhoul taunts her, she just raises her glass and flings back good, smart data. When DataGhoul yells, “Your quarterly sales are down! A lot!” SpotGirl keys in the question: “How did last quarter’s sales volume compare with the previous quarter?” The answer comes back, and SpotGirl replies, “No, DataGhoul! It’s actually up!”

Notable marketing: Have imagination, will be read

December 7, 2015 by Ted Cuzzillo

For all the marketing collatoral the data industry produces, there’s little that I can read without forcing myself. But when the good stuff comes, it’s like a gust of spring air blowing into a stuffy room. That kind of marketing blew into Datadoodle headquarters Friday morning. VisualCue, maker of visualization software done with “tiles,” won the Datadoodle Occasional Prize for Notable Marketing with “Have Data, Will Travel.”

“This week we’re using data to travel through time!,” it declared. We’ll forgive the overuse of the exclamation marks and give credit for the rarest of elements, imagination. This tastefully designed, lively, and jargon-free creation is credited to the “Visual Crew,” but I’m sure it was hatched by just one person.

The email links to two blog posts about time travel with visualized data. The first asks how long would it take to travel from London to Los Angeles in 1914? That’s answered with a 1914 isochrone map of Earth created by King George V’s cartographer.

“It got us thinking,” the post said. “What would such a map of the world look like today?” That’s exactly the kind of thought that VisualCue wants readers to do, too.

The ending, “Until next time,” breaks the rules. It skips the call to action for something stronger, the reader’s little voice in the head. By the end, that voice might be saying, “Hmm. I wonder what I could do…” And who else to help do it than this vendor? There’s no better call to action than that, and there’s rarely a better marketing pitch than this post.