#hirable

Here's one for you Dm's that want some hirable warriors.

1: A Bandit who will help whoever will pay the most

2: A Very Friendly Wizard who will help if there employer lets them analyze all the artifacts they find/steal

3: A Gruff Monk who will help those who will only help if the person who hired them have been doing good in the world.

4: An Absolute Disaster Of A Fighter who really wants to help when they are hired, but just seem to make everything worse

So...I went to a conference last week put on by the good folks at NRF (National Retail Federation - not NRA, much to my husband's disappointment). The Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference. Sounds like a good place for us to be since we consider ourselves to be innovative. And we have a retail client. And it was indeed a good place to be. Found out lots of cool new things, like:

-SoLoMo - Social/Location/Mobile - as in, "what's your brand's SoLoMo strategy?"

-P-comm; F-comm; M-comm - as in, Personalized commerce/Facebook commerce/Mobile commerce. The multi-channel shopper is here to stay, folks.

-Curating is the hottest trend in flash sales - as in, find some talented tastemakers and let them offer your products to your customers and call it curating.

-One-line Strategy - rather than online vs offline. Need to start thinking of things as 'one line' - that's how your customer sees them - one company - one line.

-ROI - the "R" doesn't just mean money any more - hallelujah! The return can come in some intangible forms and CMO's said that was o.k. with them! Promise?!

-Reciprocity is the thing - in social media relationships, as in, you gotta give a little something to get a little something from your fans. And again, this doesn't have to always be in the form of money - can we get an Amen on this too!

It's always nice to be recognized, especially for clients...and our holiday card...that we worked so hard for.  This year, we received five ADDY awards in Nashville and Atlanta:

Kirkland's Glee Spree Web Online Campaign (Silver)

Forgive the salesy-ness of this post, but I’m doing a little internal analysis and this just popped out. I'll be sad if you unfollow me, but I'll understand.

1. Proven system to yield the right strategy. Brandwize is redpepper’s process to find a brand’s unique marketing opportunity. We dig deep into the customer’s perspective, company’s reality, and competitive environment. Insights gained reveal a brand’s Hotspot, which becomes the baseline for branding and strategy. Most marketers want to know that a system like this is in place and will work for them.

2. Measurement tool to stay on top of marketing ROI. We have a tool called Scoville that aggregates data and provides real-time marketing feedback on a dashboard. As often as four times a day we can know exactly how our marketing is impacting any part of a business. We connect marketing tactics to business metrics. Marketers need tools like this to help make better decisions.

3. Big success stories for other brands. In 2010 we spent $1.5m for a client and yielded over $20m, plus several hundred thousand loyal followers and increased brand awareness. We can show actual results (ROI) in real situations. We have smart people who know the new world of advertising and how to make it work for brands. Being able to prove it all works is nice.

One of the most difficult things to do in marketing today is to connect your marketing to actual business results. Most of the time we settle for things like impressions, likes, visits, and views. Those are all valid ways of knowing that your marketing is getting through the noise. But is it enough? What you really want to know is if your phone or your register is ringing as a result.

redpepper is in the final stages of rolling out a new analytics tool called Scoville - named Scoville after the index used to rate the heat of peppers. The new tool - already in use with one large client – gives visibility to marketing’s impact on any metric, marketing or business, like traffic, transactions, and sales. It simply uses real-time correlation to show in dashboard form when the needle moves in relation to when advertising tactics run. Real-time, that's fast right?

So, when a campaign runs you’ll know immediately if it’s working and how well. This is huge news for CMO’s. Having feedback on results this quickly helps make decisions about specific campaigns or tactics much more enlightened. It also helps with that awkward communication between C-level executives that have little to no visibility of – or belief in – the marketing department’s efforts.