I read the book, Marketing Outrageously, by Jon Spoelstra during my epic flight to San Francisco for ad-tech in April, and I think that was one of the most enjoyable marketing books I’ve read.
Jon Spoelstra has been a very successful sports marketers, and his contention is that there is less risk and more payoff in creating outrageous marketing.
Marketing Outrageously is based on 17 ground rules, and it includes lots of examples and anecdotes of successful efforts from Spoelstra.
Some interesting concepts worth trying out, such as ground rule #6: if you mimic the market leaders, you’ll just add to their dominance. Lots of the advice here can be leveraged by affiliates, merchants, and networks.
In the spirit of Marketing Outrageously, I tried an experiment in marketing Affiliate Summit.
I registered the domain, AffiliateSummitSucks.com and created a blog with some unusual postings that were critical of the conference. The posts were actual criticisms we’d received or read on forums and blogs.
So I decided to put them all out there, and in the process, I gently answered the criticisms within the same posts.
The blog turned out to be an interesting study in perceptions and assumptions. Despite the source of the blog (me) being in plain site (WHOIS, About page, and IP location), many folks fell for it.
And plenty of people didn’t fall for it, but they talked about it. They talked on blogs and forums, plus they called me to say they shared some of those criticisms and now they looked at them differently.
The most important metric was that I was able to measure a significant incremental lift in registrations in the week after the blog launched. This was based on the registrations the previous week and the same time before the conference compared to the last few shows.
Not bad for an investment of $18.34 for registering the domain for two years.
You know, traditional media gets a little mundane sometimes. It’s fun to do something out of the ordinary, and sometimes you just may get extraordinary results.
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I LOVED that book. I think it is an awesome celebration of creative thinking and great model of business in general. It gave me some great ideas for my company–they were WAY too traditional to use them but… I have given it to the owner of my current company and I’m hoping he’ll break out. I’m also using it for a series of workshops that I plan to start next year. The marketing tools are phenomenal but the human resources/management ideas are even better!!!
I haven’t actually thought that far ahead. I was thinking I’d post to it whenever I heard a new criticism of the show.
So what are your long term plans for the domain? Will you maintain it? Eventually set up a redirect back to affiliatesummit.com?
I love your idea I am just curious what one would do with it down the line.
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