Never a Lack of Ideas

Coloring Outside the Lines All four-year-old children love crayons. They also love to see their own name in print (“look mom, it says, ‘David!’”). Why not combine the two? My idea is simple: Crayola should offer customers the opportunity to give its standard crayon colors unique names and then buy boxes of those specially named crayons. Just think about the look that would appear on little Billy’s face as he opens a box of eight “Billy Blue” crayons for his birthday. Or, maybe little Pauline’s favorite color is purple so her mom buys her a box of “Princess Pauline Purple” right before her first day of pre-school. Just about every kid in America is required to show up to his or her first day of school with a box of crayons. How cool would your daughter be if she had a standard box of crayons AND a box of Gina Green crayons? If Gina gave a Gina Green crayon to every one of her classmates, she’d be the most popular girl in school. But the customized color names don’t have to ...

Big-Screen TVs Digital billboards are the biggest advancement in outdoor advertising since the invention of the traditional billboard. But the advertising industry hasn’t fully realized how to best take advantage of the new technology by harnessing the immediacy of the medium. The Benefit of Digital Billboards to Marketers – Immediacy Gone are the days when a billboard goes up for a month with static content and then comes down a month later. Digital billboards offer marketers the opportunity to change up their message daily. Marketers need to embrace the available immediacy of digital billboards. Here are some examples: Jay Leno should advertise each night’s guests via digital billboard. (Lotteries have been using a form of this strategy for a long time now.) Woot.com (where there’s one deal per day) could post its daily deal on a digital billboard. Your local bar/restaurant could advertise it’s daily drink specials on a digital billboard. Old Navy , ...

Welcome Back, Cotter Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time helping to advertise my upcoming high school reunion. For those of us who went to school before Facebook was around, this can be a challenging thing to do – especially with a graduating senior class of 900 students. Information hub. Create a website with a simple URL so that it can be easily referenced in all of your communications. Include all information about the reunion on that website – it will serve as your information hub. You will only have to update information in one place if you consistently refer your classmates to this website for information. Here’s an example . Share your URL with your school. Share the URL of your website with your high school so that they can post it on their website. School marquis. Ask to have the URL of your website placed on the marquis outside of your school for a week during the summer. Not much else goes on during the summer, anyway, so your school will probably be eager to put up ...