Some high-level changes I’ve noticed:

• Easier cross-report access
• Instead of reports existing as individual entities
• Tighter integration with AdWords and inclusion of TV; interesting…
• Different integration of Intelligence into the interface

It is going to take a lot of time to figure out all the implications and cool new features… and I’m anxious to discover every last one!

P.S., I also discovered the Analytics blog and the cool new feature of Analytics TV… I’m sure there will be many lunches spent watching and digging through this resource.

It is the last part of that statement that is the most important; they are in touch with activated consumers. We have done work with other services with databases containing similar numbers of people. Without a doubt, Groupon’s consumers are the most activated and the most likely to buy. We have also found that the members of the Groupon database, at least in the Greater Cincinnati Area, are not just 20-somethings in search of a good deal. There are a quite a few “Golden Households” in their database, too.

We (IMPACT) determined this via a batch of group coupons we did for two of our clients. The first was a group coupon we did for Reser Bicycle Outfitters. This Groupon was for a ½ priced tune up and was run in the Spring. This Groupon sold over 450 tune ups. A repeat of that same Groupon in October yielded similar results.

Jason, the store’s owner, was so overwhelmed with repair work that he had to seek additional storage space for the bikes as he worked on them. For him, Groupon proved to be an awesome seeding tool both times. The tune ups yielded significant repair/upgrade work and parts purchase for his shop. In addition, it exposed new customers to the shop and positioned Reser Bicycle Outfitters to capture their sales when they upgrade their existing bikes or look for new ones.

Groupon was and continues to be a hugely successful initiative for Jason Reser.

Another initiative done by IMPACT that gave us insight into the diversity of consumers enrolled in Groupon, was for Totter’s Otterville in Covington, Kentucky. Totter’s Otterville is an incredible place where children learn through play, indoors and out. For their Groupon initiative, Totter’s offered discounted admissions ($8 admissions were sold for $3). We were all shocked when that initiative sold 4,587 Groupons. A little flip-flopping of the data set showed that there were 1,308 unique buyers in that list (there was a limit of 4 per person). 1,308 moms with kids bought this Groupon. Considering that Totter’s target market is NOT the 20-something single individual, we now respect not only the size of Groupon’s database but also the diversity of demographic and psychographic profiles in their database. Oh, and by the way, we have hear unconfirmed reports that Totter’s Groupon was the number 2 performing Groupon in the US… Hats off to us, Totter’s & Groupon. That’s impressive!

Needless to say, John Martin, the owner of Totter’s Otterville was very impressed with this marketing initiative. The Groupon was coupled with some in-store efforts to convert these new consumers to registered users in the Totter’s Otterville database. Many of these new consumers have bought annual passes to Totter’s Otterville and many more have come back, buying full-price admissions time and time again.

Group couponing appears to be an awesome seeding mechanism for businesses. From a marketing standpoint, we caution against using it to drive sales. It does drive sales, but at the significant cost of lost revenue (50% discount to consumers to drive sales of the coupons and the resulting revenue is split between the business and Groupon). It is important that the offer is constructed to be a net-zero for the business and that other initiatives/tools are put in place to convert new customers to future, full-price-paying customers.

If you need help constructing a Groupon or other marketing initiative that works for your business with positive return on investment, please contact us. We’d love to learn a bit about your business and craft new ways for you to build revenues in this difficult economy by making an IMPACT with your target market.

Affective August 31st, Twitter changed the authentication mechanism by which applications interact with the service moving from stored authentication to a system known as OAuth.

For those not inclined to read the Wikipedia article on OAuth, in a nutshell, it stands for “Open Authorization”.

To date, Twitter has worked via stored passwords.  So, in the case of tools like TweetDeck and Seesmic or online services like 4Square, people’s username/password strings were stored at the application level.  This allowed those applications to authenticate with Twitter as that person.

Obviously, this creates limitations with respect to what can be done and creates the opportunity for major security issues if username/password lists are lost, compromised or misused.

OAuth is very different. With OAuth, you actually authenicate directly with the service (Twitter in this case) and then Twitter and the application share a key (essentially like an HTML cookie) for the duration of the “conversation” so that the particular application can behave on your behalf without ever knowing your username/password combination.

This change opens up the “always on” capability of Twitter and more “network-aware” capabilities similar to Digg… which, by the way, utilizes not only Facebook Connect but also the new Twitter interface and the Google OAuth interface as well.

It will be interesting, to say the least, to see what people come up with.

With that in mind, we created a 6′ x 11′ wall cling for Otterville which promotes the utilization of the family fun center for birthday parties.

While that is awesome and all, we wanted to influence families to consider the venue and to ask questions at the time they were coming through the main gate to Otterville. This is how it looks from the point at which Mommy and Daddy would be checking in little Jane and Johnny….

Attention grabbing and activating! What an awesome piece!

If you would like to know more about our capabilities and how we can deliver more IMPACT to your marketing plan and business, don’t hesitate to contact us!

1. Drive brand recognition and recall
2. Drive subscription to the Reser Bicycle Outfitters e-mail newsletter

We created a custom t-shirt (front shown here) for RBO to give away throughout the month in store and at Bike Month commuter stations around Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky… then we decided to kick it up a notch.  We wanted an easy to distribute and carry form factor that also reinforced Reser Bicycle Outfitters as THE full service bicycle shop in the area.

Handing people another free t-shirt (despite the fact that it is a really cool free t-shirt) seemed so also-ran and cumbersome…  so, we came up with this awesome compression execution with a bicycle-wheel insert. This form allowed for easier distribution, carrying and reinforced the bike shop’s equity.

All-in-all, it was an awesome project that served its purpose…  on any given day you can see them around town AND the newsletter subscriptions grew by 50% via this initiative.

Do you have something to say?  Let us help you find a creative and high-IMPACT way to do it…  Just reach out to us and we’ll get started on creating some magic for your business!

This banner was one of a series used at different events targeted at road bikers, mountain bikers and more recreational, family-orient, bikers. They have proven to be effective at drawing attention and further extending the Reser Bicycle Outfitter business name and brand.

Do you have something to say? Let us help you find a creative and high-IMPACT way to do it… Just reach out to us and we’ll get started on creating some magic for your business!

An organization has a need.  It is a BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal) whose product is obvious but whose pathway is fraught with complex pitfalls and executional details.  To further confound the issue, the organization lacks the specific expertise to generate the RFQ and solicitation of an RFI necessitates significant human resources and implies existing in-house expertise to evaluate, parse and reassemble the data into an effective RFQ…

So, how do you specifically instruct some one on what you want built when you don’t know how to build it or what you should even be considering in the construction?

The US Government came up with a quite elegant answer.  Ask the experts and Web 2.0 it…

For quite a while, the US Government has be leveraging FedBizOps.gov to post government contract opportunities and to procure everything from pretty pictures to F-16 parts.  Even with a great tool like this, the RFI process is still difficult and the RFQ process requires expertise that may not exist internally.  To solve this problem, they piloted http://betterbuy.fas.gsa.gov.  Better Buy is a MediaWiki site where vendors essentially create the RFQ solicitation collaboratively which is then priced by each of the individual participants.

Imagine this post to the Better Buy wiki:

“Create a multi-channel awareness campaign that communicates  Federal Government and BP Oil efforts to resolve the current leak and spill-related damage to the Louisiana shore line within a budget of 2 million dollars, monthly.”

While see issues with this methodology, I think it is a beautiful way to get your vendors to create a best-in-breed solution that they all understand and can bid on with minimal confusion or doubt as to the desired executions and program plans…

Hats off to you, GSA!  This is a very interesting pilot that I hope proves successful and moves into other areas of the GSA acquisition (like the AIMS Schedule 541 work). I think it will both streamline acquisitions and level the playing field for all vendors involved in the pursuit.

The consumer is always right and markets will develop that even the most savvy marketer would have never imagined.

All this is said as an intro to the video. It is one where low-tech meets high-tech. Bliss is merely an iPad and a few Velcro strips away…

So, drop us a line and let us know of unique applications on or of iPads and what your thoughts are on how this platform will change personal computing in the years to come.

Our client, Margarita’s in Cold Spring, Kentucky wanted a great way to announce their big shindig on Cinco de Mayo. They had bands, drink specials and tons of food. These banners were part of a larger initiative to drive traffic to the restaurant for that event.

Below is one of two identical 10′ x 3′ banners that were produced. One was posted at the street, along I-27, shown below, and the second was posted along the parking lot (as shown in the 2nd picture).

The second design was a15′x3′ banner that hung under the awning of the restaurant as shown below.

These banners were designed and produced in house and are an example of what we can do to promote businesses very inexpensively. We have previously mentioned our ability to print work like posters, brochures and business cards. This work is an example of our other capabilities with promotional, advertising and marketing pieces like coraplast signs and vinyl banners.

If you’re looking to get the word out about your business, online or off, contact us and we’ll help you make an IMPACT.

CRAZY stuff here!! These guys, put together an incredibly technical solution, leveraging an iPad, a laptop, wireless local networks, TouchOSC, Ableton, a python script from Mono, which allows them to wander around amongst the crowd while they DJ and rock out…

What I dig…  Their passion, creativity, personality and their pure pursuit of the cool which is driving the project.  Oh, and their mixing together of a handful of my favorite songs in a way that could “never be done with vinyl” was pretty impressive, too…

I can’t wait to see their demo of the “shake box”.  This functionality looks like it will add an even more tactile interaction and response to the whole setup.

Get to the 5 minute mark to hear the pretty cool mix they threw together using this crazy configuration…  The details are not for the faint of heart; sounds like they leveraged some of the best and brightest to make this magic work.

Oh, the tools made available to you when you’re a celebrity… or you have minimal responsibility and massive amounts of time on your hands.  So jealous…

Great work, Andrew & Andrew!