NYSE's Thain To Circumvent Wall St.

NY Times ran interesting update i.e. John Thain's plan to invite institutional investors to trade directly into the NYSE--and bypass the Wall Street firms that have traditionally facilitated order execution. Not that many don't already do this via electronic trading platforms, but Thain is clearly suggesting to alter the entire landscape of the secuities industry---and cut out the middle men... wow

I said this 3 months ago! Wall Street & Casinos

Excerpt from Institutional Investor...Proud to say that I made this observation months ago...read the whole article.....No doubt fodder for George W. and wannabe's like E. Spitzer to distract everyone from real problems in society.

Led by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Fidelity, big-name financial firms have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the shares of online casinos, even though the practice is considered illegal according to U.S. law. Most of these companies trade on the London Stock Exchange and are licensed in remote locations like Malta and Antigua that are more than friendly to Internet gambling. But, most of the users are Americans. There are fees to be made, however, and that apparently trumps the other concerns.

Incentivizing Your Sales Force

Brick & Click, Brick and Mortar, B2B; B2C--its always about Sales. Always.
With that said, resident guru Jay Berkman opines " the biggest challenge every enterprise has is keeping their salespeople incentivized and inspired. The commission carrot only works so far--and if someone else is dangling a more tasty carrot in front of your sales force, you're at risk of losing a valuable foot solider."

Today's WSJ profiled Snowfly--an interesting company that provides a game-based platform to help motivate anyone whose job is based on meeting regular goals or quotas. Visit the link--but here's some advice: don't let your employees access the game platform during normal working hours--let them use it at pre-defined times (you can create the platform so that its only accessible at certain hours of the day/night)

Web 2.0 Permission-Based Marketing

Every day I talk with at least five global brand marketers; in the course of a week, I exchange emails with dozens, and in the course of a month, upwards of 300 of the most senior marketing gurus in America and their new media agency reps are telling me what their needs/goals are. This group represents a wide cross-section of industries, products and services; telecom; entertainment; financial services; media/publications.

As a result, I've become a clearinghouse of information..That's why people like to hear from me and talk with me. Everyone likes to know what their peers are thinking about or plotting.

And if you take 30 seconds to keep reading, you might think that I'm on to something..and will want to forward this to the people on your team that are overseeing Internet-related marketing/advertising.

The theme is the same; each one is looking for the 'holy grail" application---

• entertains and informs in a place and time that the recipient is most receptive
• a completely captive, but non-intrusive application
• that delivers rich media content
• incorporates a call to action that can be acted upon
• one that can deliver subliminal third-party advertising
• track-able; easy to gauge recall, performance, and ROI
• proven; other major brands have employed it, and have used it successfully. Yes, references are available--see attached.
• but most importantly--an application that the consumer has asked to receive.

On-line advertising, opt-in email newsletters, and more recently, blogs are the most favored tools that "on-line" marketers employ to drive their audience to their cash registers or info centers, whether in a real world store, or on-line.

Woo. Woo. as my 20-yr old daughter would say. Virtually all of these apps still depend on a customer drilling down to locate the specific promotion; the hot item that I'm interested in knowing about--the one that is today's most popular.

Few of those applications are customized based on demographic profile, and fewer still are delivering entertaining and informative content tailored to the recipient. Yes, many of my friends are spending tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on email-centric strategies that incorporate very sophisticated, quant-based programs that are purportedly sending tailored messages based on the customer profile. Keep laughing.

Now you can stop laughing--and think about this--an application that meets all of the criteria described above, and costs a rounding point* of what you are spending to implement and deploy:

• a 'top listing' in a Google Adwords campaign
• implementing and managing an email-marketing campaign
• direct mail
• OOH mediums (from billboards to in-store, to direct mail to the wide selection of guerilla strategies)

* Rounding point means that for those spending six, seven or eight figures annually for a dedicated Internet strategy that targets tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions---this is a barely five-figure enhancement that could prove to not only complement those efforts, but can be more effective, more durable, and more long-lasting than anything you are spending on today.

What is it?

• Its an application that automatically launches on your customer's desk top--when he/she has asked to receive it--or simply launched via a desktop icon.
• It occupies 75% of the user's screen, and can be closed by one click of a mouse.
• It can be easily customized (by you or by Synovativ's programmers) to look like a mini-website, a digital billboard, a static billboard, or a condensed newsletter. It can be multi-paneled, or single paneled. It can even incorporate a pre-downloaded video app--which means that the user doesn't have to launch the darn thing, wait for it to load, and than view on his/her PC etc.
• It can be updated with fresh content and automatically display once a day, twice a day, three times a day--whatever. However frequently you want to update content--and however frequently your user wants to see--he/she will set his timer accordingly. Or, the user can launch it via the desktop icon.
• Installing it takes 30 seconds. Your customers will appreciate that it won't impact any on the computer, and more importantly--he/she is assured that there are no cookies, no adware, no spyware--no gremlins running around in the background. They don't need to provide any personal information, email address in order to download it.
• Its as clean as a newborn baby's tushy.

On your side--its plug and play; uploading content is a cut and paste process. The admin module tracks viewership data, and performance links to your existing transactional platforms.

Licensing/Delivery: Customized to your needs. 6 or 12 month site licenses; capped flat rate, or based on per user. You can have a turnkey service, where the vendor takes care of everything--we drive the entire program, and you sit back and watch the viewers come to your cash register--you just upload the content. Full reporting module included.

Or you can have a self-administered agreement where you get the keys to the car and let your IT team own the entire platform. The user manual is less than 4 pages long.

This link http://www.addiem.com/download.html will allow you to download a demo application, just to get a feel for how it would work for your clients/customers.

I'm happy to facilitate a conversation to talk about how you would incorporate this.