Everyone knows this but here comes the million dollar question – when exactly is ‘right’?!

Recently, I received the below from Professional Association of Diving Instructors, PADI

(click to enlarge image)

It usually requires a combination of factors to fully optimise the potential electronic direct mailer (EDM).
-          Clarity of the purpose
-          Accurate and relevant targeting
-          Engage the recipient personally and trigger response

You won’t believe how impressed I was. It was not merely a generic email congratulating that I’ve passed my advanced open water diver course. The EDM was simple yet it fulfils the ‘Right’ criteria.

Firstly, accuracy – it got my name correct with a friendly touch.  Not ‘dear George’, not ‘dear gregory@f5dc.com’, ‘dear customer’, ‘dear S9876543A” and not ‘dear diver’.

Simple thing but not always used.

Secondly, update – it acknowledged my completion and informed me my new card is being process.

Thirdly, association -not only it got my name correct, my instructor’s name is there too.

Fourth, relevance – it proposed appropriate next course of action, the Rescue Diver certification and accompanied with the related links for further information.

Well, from what I see PADI can make it even better.

For next step, the EDM can be integrated it into a dedicated 1to1 website. It should be personalised in a way that when log in, divers can track their own progressions or download soft copy of their certification! With other information such as location, diving history made available, opportunities of further targeted marketing will be present. The website can also evolve into a niche social networking site. The success of that will be another story, of course.

If you are sick of your temperamental vocalists or low on budget to hire a good singer, Vocaloid might just be the solution for you.
Developed by Yamaha, this program utilizes a standard piano-roll-type MIDI editor design that users of sequencers should find familiar.

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Basically, you key in the lyrics of the song you want to be sung and mark each syllable to the pitch and nuance you desire.
In addition, Vocaloid is also made more interesting with the release of different original Anime characters such as Leon, Miku and the upcoming Gakupoid, who is voiced by a popular Japanese rock artiste Gackt.

Just to illustrate how the end product of this programmed singing could turn out to be, here’s a YouTube video made using Gackt’s voice to sing Last Christmas, also featuring Hatsune Miku (a Vocaloid character).

Gackt and Miku – Last Christmas

On a more serious tone, perhaps this would further convince you of how threatening this program would be to the actual singers – a fully developed Hatsune Miku PV singing ‘Love is War’.

Hatsune Miku – Love Is War

Perhaps the singing industry should really keep their eyes peeled for technological competition now.

The key to successful sales is a consistent proactive marketing strategy (Steven Stralser, MBA in a Day)

We all know this. The question is how proactive can we get to optimize the right content to the right audience at the right time impeccably and cost effectively?

MySpace’s MyAds, or even Google’s display ads for AdWords have made the advertising medium more appealing because they utilize the personalization and targeting strategies that made search engine advertising so attractive to advertisers. However, there have been criticisms that these approaches are not getting the clicks that they ought to generate. In retrospect, shouldn’t ads deliver both clicks and branding ideally?

In this constantly changing dynamic world of online marketing, we have not one but TWO companies offering solutions to bring audience segmentation to a whole new level.

ADISN, based in Long beach, has proven that the aggregate of web conversations, web profiles, online blogs, and behavior create millions of relationships between seemingly unrelated topics. Their technology mines through those relationships and applies the strongest ones to enhance online targeting to the benefit of publishers and advertisers across the web, known as Relationship-based Targeting.

Adisn’s approach has been to build a database of related words so it can assess the content of a Web site or blog based on the words on its pages. Adisn then buys space on Web sites, and uses its information to find an appropriate ad to show visitors to those sites. If a visitor views pages about beaches, weather and Hawaii, it might suggest that the visitor is interested in Hawaiian travel. Based on that analysis, Adisn’s system pulls different components — actors, fonts, background images — to make an ad.

For example, a woman looking at a kitchen with a stainless steel refrigerator, they can show a stainless steel product. It takes anything that’s going to be appealing to customers, even in combinations of purple, orange and turquoise.

Based in Mountain View, California, Tumri believe that relevant content can be delivered to consumers by combining:
•    the sciences of predictive machine learning and massive algorithmic performance optimization, with
•    the art of creative marketing and messaging.
Tumri’s approach is slightly different. It creates a template for ads, including slots for the message, the color, the image and other elements. Unlike Adisn, it does not buy ad space, but lets clients — like Sears and Best Buy — choose and buy space on sites themselves. And rather than building a contextual database like Adisn, Tumri uses whatever targeting approach advertisers are already using, whether it is behavioral or contextual or demographic, and assembles an ad on the fly based on that information.

“It’s reporting back to the advertiser and agency saying, ‘Guess what? The soccer mom in Indiana likes background three, which was pink, likes image four, which was the S.U.V., and likes marketing message 12, about room, safety and comfort,” said Calvin Lui, chief of Tumri.

Like an adaption from Tom Cruise’s Minority Report, the fact that machine could accurately anticipate what people will do sounds scary? But the marketing business would be so much easier.

Adisn and Tumri both measure the ad’s effectiveness based on parameters the advertiser sets, like how many people clicked on the ad or how many people actually bought something after clicking on it. They compare those with standard ads they run as part of a control group.

Both companies assume there is no perfect version of an ad, and instead assemble hundreds of different versions that are displayed on Web sites where their clients have bought ad space, showing versions of an ad to actual consumers as they browse the Web.

Regardless if these strategies are simplifying the complicated world or complicating the simple world, they can be an effective way to test online advertising. We should be glad that there are still innovations being created in the industry, to further enhance online advertising’s edge as a more economically viable medium.