November 29, 2006

Well I just caught up with the news (here and here) of a few weeks ago that Riya Technology launched a new service called Like.com. For those who haven't seen the news, this is alpha technology that provides a visual search shopping engine based on its visual recognition technology. Simply choose an image of an item and Like.com compares the shape, color, and texture to other items in the database and displays the most similar results from merchants. Their monetization comes via pay-per-click and pay-per-action advertising. Simple.

Why did this catch my eye? Well, in a previous life I used to compete with Riya as part of the post-9/11-how-can-we-make-money-with-cool-technology-in-a-world-turned-upside-down [I was working with a company that designed and sold a facial recognition and visual search technologies amongst other things]. Like most in the sector, we were all trying to capitalize with that big score selling into Homeland Security or other such government groups. Meanwhile, there were constant 'dreamers' who were approaching us to use our SDK within any of a multitude of marketing schemes: facial recognition to recognize people as they walked by billboards; image recognition to identify product placements in TV spots; and yes, visual search to find me other products like this one.

I am not sure why I didn't see the simplicity of the idea at the time. However, I would guess that most likely it was because we were simply keeping our heads down, focussed on one market, one concept, and one idea. Even with hindsight, I don't know if we were unable or unwilling to think outside the box to see an obvious solution.

Why is this relevant to our blog today?

Posted by at November 29, 2006
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November 22, 2006

I had the ‘good’ fortune to attend three different events in the past two weeks: one as a tradeshow exhibitor, one as a purchaser looking for partners, and one simply as a conference attendee. I’ll give my thoughts on each in a moment, but first I have to ask the question, “In a world in which you can get specific conversion metrics at the click of a button for Web-based campaigns (be it cost-per-lead, cost-per-action, or for some: cost-per sale) what will happen to our ever-loved tradeshow?

My assumption is that as long as you can close the loop on your marketing and justify your tradeshow spend, they will persist, but I am interested to hear what you think?

Posted by at November 22, 2006
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November 13, 2006

So was it a success? It is still a little hard to tell. We managed to hand deliver approximately 50 of the cards. The initial feedback was mostly positive, though I did receive one phone call from a person who was most upset that we would attempt to do such a campaign "in times like these" where the envelope could include a "bomb threat, anthrax, or god knows what". It was unfortunate that it appears that some of our tracking data about what delivered "in person" meant (in our language it was to the person whose name was on the card, though it looks like one of the ambassadors may have thought that as long as it was handed to a living, breathing, body...that counted as well).

We did spur some people into action that we have spoken with in the past, and we do have a few followup sales demonstrations (so that is all positive). However, I guess the biggest return comes from establishing a little bit of name recognition amongst our target users.

Unfortunately as is the case with such marketing campaigns, this value is very hard to measure. I guess this is why we as a company, and marketers in general, are turning more and more towards measurable campaigns: be it a pay per action campaign, pay per lead, and still...yes... pay per click marketing is still effective (at least that sounds like the buzz coming out of Ad-Tech. This is also why most marketers spend a lot of time attempting to drive traffic back to his or her web site where at least you can use your analytics package and landing page metrics to measure campaign effectiveness. Hopefully in the months ahead, Marqui can help this more and more.

Posted by at November 13, 2006
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