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Marketing guru Seth Godin offers this take on how marketing is narrowing its focus. We’re preaching this to our clients — especially taking advantage of email campaigns and Variable Data Printing to speak directly to your audience.

Mass production and mass media

We invented televisions so marketers would have a way to run TV ads. We have magazines so marketers can run magazine ads.

Make no mistake: mass media exists because it permits mass marketers to do their job.

Mass production, the ability to make things cheaply, in volume, demanded that we invent mass marketing–it was the only way to sell what was being made in the quantity it was produced.

The internet, though, was not invented so marketers could run internet ads.

And, at the same time, mass production is being replaced by micro production, by the short run, by customization, by the long tail.

Just in time, mass media is going away too.

Mass marketers don’t like this and they often don’t even see it. They’re struggling to turn Snapchat and Twitter and other sites into substitutes for TV, but it’s not working, because it’s an astonishing waste of attention.

The Ed Sullivan Show existed to sell Jello to everyone. Today, there’s no everyone, and certainly no media channel that can sell everyone, cheap, to the folks who market Jello.

This is an ongoing challenge for mass marketers, and the opportunity of a generation for everyone else.

For fifty years, TV and TV-thinking was the shortcut. Make average stuff for average people (by definition = mass) and promote to every stranger within reach. It worked.

But mass is fading, fading faster than our desire to be mass marketers is fading. The shortcut doesn’t work every time now, and the expectation that success is the same as popularity is still with us.

Fifty years ago, producers and marketers got smart. They saw the miracle of mass marketing and they adopted it as their own. They amped up mass production and bet on the masses.

The smart creators today are seeing the shift and doing precisely the opposite:

Produce for a micro market.

Market to a micro market.

When someone wants to know how big you can make (your audience, your market share, your volume), it might be worth pointing out that it’s better to be important, to be in sync, to be the one that’s hard to be replaced. And the only way to be important is to be relevant, focused and specific.

 Click to see more of Seth’s posts

With a tag line of “A Fresh and Responsive Approach to Residential Real Estate” the Jackson Law firm needed a strong identity to communicate it’s message. Metro created the logo, stationery, a website and social media graphics to help the firm brand itself as fresh and responsive. High quality business cards were printed to make an impact when handed out. Metro helped the firm create a Social Media Content Management strategy to engage clients through facebook, linkedin, twitter and google plus, centered around hootsuite and their WordPress site to make it easy to manage.

An awesome project for an awesome person.

Thanks for the opportunity to help, Oie!

rra_mobile_blogTo introduce its new mobile services, Raleigh Radiology asked us to create a piece that grabbed their client’s attention and easily demonstrated the benefits of the technology. The result was a custom die-cut piece that was the exact size and shape of an I-Phone, with screen grabs and short text blocks that clearly explained the new service The piece was well-received by clients, and ended up winning the RBMA Quest Awards Gold People’s Choice Award. Winning awards is always great, but it doesn’t compare to creating a compelling piece that gets results for our clients like this project.  
RRA_Mobile_2

As we said goodbye to our amazing 8100 printer, we welcomed our newest piece of equipment – the Hasler Envelope printer. Clients have asked for short-run full color envelopes and printing addresses in colors other than black, and now we can cost-effectively handle those projects with the state-of-the-art memjet technology. The quality is amazing, and it can handle all Variable Data Projects, so each envelope can be personalized with name and message, providing better results for direct mail campaigns.

In 2014, we finally lost our HP 8100 printer. This guy had been around for 20 years, printing countless number of mockups, samples, direct mail letters and orders. You will be replaced, but you’ll never be forgotten!

It’s political season again, and as usual we are helping a number of candidates with a variety of projects from web site development to direct mail. “Woofer” Davidian threw his hat in the ring for District Court Judge. Yes, he goes by “Woofer, “ which created a great opportunity to do something special with his logo.

Woofer’s actual name is Vartan Ambar Davidian, III, and as Woofer himself said, can make some potential voters think of him as a terrorist! But he has gone by Woofer since he was a small child, so using the nickname was an easy decision. The challenge came in how to treat the nickname in the logo and subsequent branding. We embraced the nickname idea, and decided to use his actual signature as part of the logo. It adds a great personal connection in the logo. To offset the more casual nature of the signature, we used a traditional serif typeface and navy blue for his base color. The traditional last name treatment and color contrasted well with the signature in a lighter blue to create a memorable logo.

The concept for the logo translated well into Woofer’s web site. The navy background works well, and he had a great picture taken by Val Stone that reinforces the concept of professional/judge contrasted with the personal connection. Facebook is a big part of his campaign, so we designed his facebook page, and tied that into his web site, along with contribution buttons placed conspicuously throughout his site and facebook page. In a little over 2 weeks Woofer had over 300 facebook fans and donations were coming in through paypal.

The branding also worked well in printed pieces. We created a handout piece that garnered a great deal of attention, but the invitation we created and mailed for his Kick-Off event was described as the most impressive invitation one person had ever seen.

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