Most marketing conventions will tell you that it’s important to establish your brand and to get people familiar with your products and services. A different marketing technique is also available at your disposal and it certainly has both its strengths and its weaknesses. I’m talking about the teaser.

On television, you may have noticed some commercials that don’t seem to feature the target product at all. In fact, there may not be any explicit mention of the company behind the ad. It may be comprised of some random event or a story that begins but stops part way through. Typically, at the end of these “teaser” ads, you are either presented with a teaser statement of some kind or with a nondescript URL to a website.

With the former, the goal is to create a viral marketing campaign. They want to get people talking about that ad so that they can discuss what the ad could be all about. More people will talk about it, more interest will be generated, and people will be anxious to find out what is the true nature of that ad. It’s hard to get people interested in an ad campaign, and a “teaser” strategy just might work.

If the teaser ad ends with the prominently displaying of a URL, people may feel more inclined to visit the website compared to a conventional ad that ends with a URL. People will be motivated to go to the website to find out more about what the teaser was really trying to show. Naturally, the biggest downside to this strategy is that if the person does not go to the website, they may never be motivated enough to find out the nature of the ad and, thus, your marketing dollars may go to waste.

What’s your take on “teaser” advertising campaigns? Do they frustrate you or do they intrigue you?

When most people consider building a blog with WordPress, the default inclination is to have the homepage display a list of all the recent posts arranged in a reverse chronological order. The most recent post sits at the top, either in its entirety or as a snippet, and then each successive post appears underneath. This is the layout that you’ll find on the BlueFur blog, Beyond the Rhetoric, and Stephen Fung dot Net, for instance.

This arrangement may not be suitable for all blogs. Some corporate blogs, for example, may prefer to have a static home page as the first thing visitors see when they arrive at the home directory. The blog posts can still be there, but the home page can outline some of that critical information that the company wants all visitors to see. If this is the layout that you’d prefer, you can simply designate a page to act as the homepage.

To add even more customization to this particular layout, it is also possible to have the front page set up in a widgetized fashion, much like how you may have widgets in your blog theme’s sidebar. This allows for easy updating of certain sections and it allows for more flexibility in terms of the actual appearance itself. From this page, you can post a quick “about” blurb, highlight some important posts, and perhaps offer your contact information.

For the full tutorial and a little help on how to set up a widgetized home page, check out the original post at Rob Malon dot Com.

Last week we asked are you happy with Canada’s performance at the 2008 Summer Olympics and 59% said yes. This weeks question is…

Are you a Ruby on Rails developer? Meet with other developers in the Vancouver area. This months presentation is by Sunny Hirai, founder and CEO of MeZine Inc., a successful and profitable Internet company, will be presenting several Ruby patterns, many of which you’ve never seen before. These patterns will make your Ruby code cleaner, easier to read and more powerful. If you like discovering new ways to make your code better, you will enjoy this in depth discussion.

When is the event happening?
Monday, September 9, 2008 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Where is it happening?
The Network Hub – 3rd floor – 422 Richards Street - Vancouver

Registration
To register for this event you need to sign-up here.

Canada came home with 18 medals from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games, matching the mark for the second most medals earned at a (non-boycotted) Summer Olympics. Some people are saying that this was a very successful outing for Canada, despite going about a whole week without winning a single medal. In the end, things turned out just fine, but could Canada have done better?

The life of an amateur athlete is not an easy one and it can be very difficult to receive consistent funding to pay for training, facilities, and other items that are needed to produce a world class Olympic athlete. While it may be possible for the government to divert some funding toward amateur sport, there is a growing population in Canada that feels that corporate sponsorship is the better route. This way, tax dollars can be spent on things like health care, education, and poverty management.

It sounds like it could be a very viable solution, because everyone wins, right? On the one hand, the athletes can get the funding that they need and on the other hand, the corporations and business that provide the sponsorship dollars can get all sorts of positive exposure in the marketplace, perhaps getting more out of that marketing buck than through a conventional advertising campaign.

The trouble is we’re not sure just how corporate the Olympics can get. How would you feel about your favorite Olympic athlete wearing a uniform that is decked out with company logos. Instead of going into the event representing Canada, this athlete may appear to be representing HSBC, Pennzoil, and Coca-Cola. It’s arguable that this is good business — brand exposure is a big deal — but is this right for our country?

What’s your take? Would you be open to vastly increased corporate sponsorship of our athletes?

“WordPress would work so much better if it just had this one plugin…”

We have built several WordPress plugins either by scratch, modifying another plugin or with the help of other designers. As we have a large community of WordPress users on this blog I thought it might be interesting to create a weekly call out for WordPress Plugin Requests.

Do you have any WordPress plugin requests?

Last weeks plugin requests were…

• A summary above the content so readers can scan plugin.
• A compare 2 blogs plugins plugin.

Plugins found from requests…

• A plugin that can turn WordPress into a Pligg-style voting site.
• The ability to have a recurring post option.

Plugins still in the queue to be built…

• A single sign on between WordPress and laconica.
• A plugin to change the background of each post based on the author.

I am still working on the background for each post based on the author. If you would like to build one then leave a comment so we know you are working on it.