Tesar-Reynes

Harry Gold, of the Click Z network, shared these ten tips for negotiating with media vendors today.

I hated media in school. It just seemed too much like math to me. However, thanks to a teacher I had in my entertainment marketing program in L.A., who also happened to be the SVP of Media at Paramount for twenty years, I learned to ask an important question:

Where’s the money?

Enjoy.

I was talking to a friend of mine who ran across some good tips for presentations. He couldn’t remember where he’d seen them, but those he recalled made a lot of sense to me.

1. State your claim that you will support early in the presentation.
2. Remember, graphics trump words.
3. Drink some water 20-30 minutes before you start.
4. Use contemporary fonts; NOT TIMES NEW ROMAN.
5. Relax, you know more about your subject than the audience does.
6. Don’t hide behind the rostrum or chart; move about the stage.
7. Allow Q&A afterwards; restate every question before answering.
8. Consider taping yourself in rehearsal to fine tune emphasis points.

President-elect Obama did a magnificent job staying on message and on-temperament during the primaries and throughout the election. He established two sets of expectations with his electorate: one was results expected and the other was a belief in competence.

Any person with half a brain realizes that he can’t deliver on most of his campaign promises because of the current financial mess. His time and our money will be focused on repairing this gushing wound.

What he can do, with deference to the current President and the administration, is take a page out of FDR’s book and do a weekly fireside chat. Not just on youtube. It has to be in mass media. The world is scared. We need to hear …

It never fails. Anytime I’m in class, Facebook is always brought up. And inevitably, a teacher will advise us to watch what we post online.

This should be old news. There are countless stories of employees getting the ax for posting inappropriate work-related material on the Web.

Last week, the Economist wrote an article “Losing face: a tail of two airlines and their Facebook fiascos.” Seems the cabin crew at Virgin Airlines and British Airways didn’t get the memo. Both companies fired crewmembers for negative comments made on Facebook. The workers complained of cockroaches on planes and smelly passengers.

It’s a simple piece of advice: watch what you post online. Nothing is private anymore. After 9-11, the government made it their right to …

News of GM’s impeding collapse dominated headlines yesterday. The question for me is: Is this a failure to market or a failure to create a quality product?

My solution, from a marketing standpoint, is to focus on one thing: price. Like I wrote last week, consumers are concerned primarily with value in our stumbling economy.

While viewing a CNN piece on the state of GM, I found it interesting that during a commercial break a 30 second GM spot aired. It was typical of American car commercials: electric guitar in the background, an over-excited voice bragging about dealer financing. Do these advertisers really …

With the holidays around the corner, how will advertisers counter effects of a slumping economy in the most important shopping season of the year?

According to a Times article today, it all comes down to one word – price.

The article talks about how consumer psychology is changing. Nowadays buyers are skipping “luxury” items from Macy’s in favor of the practical buy from Wal-Mart. When you’re constantly bombarded with messages of a slumping economy, it makes you think twice about reaching for that $100 sweater from Ralph Lauren.

Consider Tim Calkins opinion, a professor of marketing at …

About every two months I get asked by one of my candidates whether it’s better to write an e-mail or a handwritten thank you note to someone after an interview. The people who ask this question tend to fall into one of three groups: they are over 40, they’re very concerned about relationships, or they came out of public relations.

I can argue the cause from either side. I personally feel that e-mail is the currency of communications today. I do think any form of IM or twitter is far too informal. On the other side of the coin, a handwritten note shows an extra sense of caring and work to produce the document.

In the final analysis, I always try and listen to the …

I’ve written about Hulu plenty on this site. As a college senior, one without cable, it’s my favorite way to catch all my shows. What started out as a joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox last year has grown into an Internet phenomenon.

Yet, I get the feeling, not many of our readers are aware of it. Hulu is a medium favored by the young and tech savvy. Older X-gen’s probably have never seen the site.

Marketers have been trying to solve the Internet advertising problem for years. Give credit to NBC and Fox for having the gumption to take a stab at it. And, according to an article from today’s Times, …

Eye contact, like the handshake, is absolutely essential to all physical communications, particularly interviews. In my rating system, you can lose just as many points by not looking at me as by having a fishy handshake.

When someone looks at me when I talk to them I feel that they are processing what I am saying. They’re trying to be committed to understanding what I’m talking about. I can also extrapolate that this person will treat other people in a like manner. Also, when someone silently looks me in the eye while I am talking, they are not talking back or interrupting. I feel that most of the processing is going to listening, and not a rebuttal or trying to act smart.

I lose interest when someone is talking to me, and …

I have a big stack of things that I’ve cut out, written down, or saved for future blog posts. When I am not inspired to write, I dive into this stack for some ideas. Thus I found a thought-provoking article in an old issue of Ad Week that I thought was worth commenting on.

The headline was “The Digital Skills Jobseekers Need to Survive Now.” The article describes five personality traits that help contribute in a digital perspective. The first is the hacker, who is capable of going into a site figuring out how it actually works. They may also contribute code to make it better.

The second is the technologically curious, a person who doesn’t write the code, but will nonetheless go into a place and rummage around to figure out how …