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Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Darrel Rhea, Principal/CEO of Cheskin.  Darrel Rhea is a Principal and CEO of Cheskin and a passionate spokesperson for the design research industry. He has been a pioneer in incorporating market research into the brand design and product development process. Rhea is considered one of America’s leading strategic design consultants, having extensive experience managing industrial design, product development and innovation, graphic design, and brand identity creation. His qualifications for this commitment include a degree in design and psychology, many successful years in graphic design and entrepreneurial endeavors, and over 20 years with Cheskin. Rhea is a producer and leader of professional development seminars for senior executives in marketing management, market research, and corporate design management at leading corporations including Pepsi, Kraft USA, General Foods, General Mills, Clorox, 3M, Andersen Windows, Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Frito-Lay, AT&T, Motorola, HP and many others. He lectures regularly with industry organizations such as the American Marketing Association, the Design Management Institute, the Industrial Design Society of America, the American Institute of Architects and the Art Center College of Design.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Karen Jones, Vice President of Advertising, Brand and Promotions for DHL.  Karen Jones is Vice President, Advertising, Brand and Promotions for DHL and is responsible for building the DHL brand through advertising, sponsorships and brand identity. Ms. Jones’s expertise and experience lies in global brand building. She joined DHL from Hewlett Packard, where she spent 15 years developing the HP brand, working in a variety of marketing and communications capacities. She created a universally consistent brand image by transforming and unifying HP’s advertising and communications campaigns. Most recently, she served as the director of worldwide brand advertising at HP. Prior to her impressive brand building responsibilities at HP, Ms. Jones held several positions at Compaq Computer Corporation, including Director of Marketing for the iPAQ products. She has also owned her own marketing communications company, Ballast Communications.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Lance Still, Executive Vice President of National Promotions for New Line Cinema.  Still has been instrumental in expanding the company’s relationships with a number of blue chip partners. She has set up recent promotions with such national brands as Anheuser-Busch, Chrysler, Quiznos, Cadbury Schweppes, and Samsung.  Founded almost 40 years ago, New Line Cinema is the most successful independent film company in the world.  In addition to the production, marketing and distribution of theatrical motion pictures, the fully-integrated studio has divisions devoted to home entertainment, television, music, theater, merchandising and an international unit.  Still is currently developing promotions for New Line’s theatrical releases of Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, Hairspray, Snakes on a Plane and Mimzy.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Dave Balter, Founder and President of BzzAgent. Dave has over 10 years experience in marketing, previously founding and running two promotional marketing agencies, the most recent being sold in October 2001. He has also spent a number of years working for a variety of corporations, including Kessler Financial Services, where he managed direct marketing and affinity program implementations for Fortune 1000 clients, and Webb & Co., where he analyzed circulation and fulfillment operations, and performed statistical modeling for consumer catalogs. Dave was named to the "40 under 40" by the Advertising Specialty Institute in 2001, and "Top 7 individuals changing the face of beauty" by Women's Wear Daily in 2004. Dave holds a provisional patent in the process and systems of Word-of-Mouth marketing and research. He is also a founding member of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), co-chair of WOMMA's Ethics Council, and a frequent speaker to corporations and universities on the subject of Word-of-Mouth and non-traditional media.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Susanne Lyons, CMO of Visa USA. Susanne is responsible for all aspects of brand, advertising and marketing services for one of the world’s most successful payments companies, and serves on the company’s Executive Management Committee as Chief Marketing Officer. She has held senior marketing and general management roles at some of the largest financial services companies in America. She also served as Chief Marketing Officer for Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. In her ten year career at Schwab, she held various marketing and general management positions, including Enterprise President of Retail Client Services, where she was responsible for 4000 customer service employees.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Asian branding expert, Jonathan Holburt - CEO of Holburt Consulting.  Jonathan has spent 21 years in advertising after a career start as an English teacher in Tokyo. He has worked on such major accounts as Procter & Gamble, AT&T, Kraft, Hewlett-Packard and Pepsi Foods while at Saatchi & Saatchi, Young & Rubicam and DDB. A native Californian who graduated from UCLA, Jonathan has spent 19 years in Asia, having lived in Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. He started his marketing consulting company, Holburt Consulting, in June 2005 and has clients in Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. He has written a novel (which is in the process of being “optioned” for the movies) and numerous articles for the Asian Wall Street Journal.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interview Brian Steinberg, the advertising columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to being appointed to his current position in 2003, Mr. Steinberg was a special writer and the media business reporter for Dow Jones Newswires, the Company's realtime, electronic news division. As Newswires' lead media reporter, he covered many subjects and companies and edited "The Pitch," a weekly marketing column, which he originated with another reporter in September 1999. Mr. Steinberg joined Newswires in 1997 as a reporter covering the telecommunications industry. Mr. Steinberg was a business reporter and columnist for the Capital in Annapolis, Md., before joining Dow Jones. He has also worked as a news assistant in the Washington bureau of the New York Times and as an editorial assistant for Spy magazine. His freelance articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Weekend, Entrepreneur and Entertainment Weekly.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Jeff Diskin, Senior Vice President of Brand Performance for Hilton Hotels.  In his position, Diskin is responsible for providing strategic brand direction for the Hilton full service brand, targeting market share growth, meeting revenue targets, overall brand positioning, brand marketing, and establishing and maintaining brand standards. Prior to his appointment as Senior Vice President, Diskin served as President, Chief Operating Officer – Hilton HHonors Worldwide, and was responsible for the worldwide marketing and operations of the award-winning Hilton HHonors hotel guest loyalty program. He joined Hilton Hotels Corporation in 1989 as Manager of Business Programs, and later was promoted to Director of Business Programs for the company. Prior to joining Hilton, Diskin held a variety of account service, customer service, and creative management positions at Marketing Performance & Innovation (MPI), a subsidiary of United Airlines.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

It seems everyone is jumping into the "traffic domain name" game - either purchasing them for their own use or purchasing traffic from others who own these domains. For those that don't know, a traffic domain is one that has either expired and still receiving traffic, or one that is being typed into the browser url location (type-in traffic) by users looking for a particular website. These are hot little properties but often abused as some register typos of an existing popular domain - such as Google for example. Yes, Virginia, there is a lot of traffic in those typos.

I own a number of expired and type-in traffic domains and have overall had good results. The worst one gets about 10-15 visitors a day but manages to earn anywhere from $5-$20 in revenue through a pay-per-lead program I use. Combined, all my traffic domains pump out a nice chunk of change without me even having to host them, look at them or even think about them.

On the other side of expired domain and type-in traffic is services which allow you to purchase traffic from domain names which they control and manage. Now you would think this sounds pretty good after what I reported about my own traffic domains, but the sad truth is that the majority of these services are complete scams.

Oh yes, they'll deliver the "targeted" 5,000 or 10,000 "hits" you purchased, but the reality is that the actual traffic from their domains either doesn't exist at all (generated by software to create an illusion of unique visitors) or comes from sources like auto-surf sites. And it's not like you can really monitor and evaluate this traffic to know if it's real or not, and you certainly have no way of knowing if it's targeted or just junk hits. You're basically putting all your trust in the site offering the service and since none offer any guarantee that the traffic will bring you sales, they're off the hook.

Look at it this way - let's say a service is offering 100,000 premium targeted visitors for the very low price of just $49.95. Think about it. If you had 100,000 targeted real visitors at your disposable, would you sell them off for essentially pocket change? Of course not. If you were selling a product for $29.95 and only 1% of those 100,000 visitors made a purchase - then that would be 1000 sales totalling $29,950. Can you really believe that they would let that amount of money slip through their fingers just so that they can do you a favour?

Do yourself a favour - If you're thinking of purchasing traffic from one of these services, keep your money to invest in more reliable and proven options or learn about finding and registering expired domains (an article on this topic coming soon) and register them for yourself.

About the Author

Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. Visit http://www.thenetter.com for more free articles, tips and software.

Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today...

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly....just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

Google Video, iFilm, MySpace, Current TV, YouTube and all the hundreds of similar video sites all have one thing in common - making it difficult for you to archive the movies they host on your local machine for later playback. In some cases this is by design, but mostly it’s the nature of using Flash for video playback. There have always been ways to download these movies and store them for personal use later, but…

YouTube video Flash Google Video iFilm

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