The UC Berkeley Entreprenuership Blog
As soon as any TV show goes to commercials, viewers zone out. Advertisers will do anything to get them to focus again. The old trick used to be increasing the volume on the ads so that they would be louder than regular programming and would recapture the attention of the viewer. The new trick seems to be spelling out everything that the narrator of the ad says on the screen, virtually forcing you to read it and pay attention.
I was recently speaking with my friend Andrew Warner of Mixergy, a site with dozens of great interviews with a number of entrepreneurs, many of which have been featured both here in the blog and in the entrepreneurship course I teach at UC Berkeley. We are talking about how to build a community and he pointed me to an interview he did with two of the top users of Hacker News, a tech related social bookmarking site funded by Y Combinator, about how a successful community was built.
The way auctions are set up in the United States, the buyer of the product benefits. The price goes low to high, meaning whoever wins the auction and buys the product often does not pay the full amount they were willing to pay. Instead, they pay a little more than the full amount anyone else at the auction was willing to pay.
Every day users submit links and vote on dozens of business/entrepreneurship related stories from around the web and the most popular stories are displayed on the front page. Every week, we highlight a few of the most popular links from the Wire here.
This week’s video is a collection of short tips and tricks on marketing provided by various CEOs and entrepreneurs at the Inc 5000 conference. The video is pretty short at just over two minutes long but contains a lot of valuable tidbits of marketing insight.
Want to advertise your company among Hollywood royalty? You can, for the tune of over one million dollars. That is the asking price for a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame with your company’s brand name. In an effort to raise funds to restore the landmark, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is selling “sponsored stars” to raise approximately $5 Million. It has turned to advertising after being unable to raise funds from the city in the down economy.
Want an example of how to do street advertising right? Here is one. The secret: make something related to your product which “comes to life” and stand out. A 3D effect is very efficent at doing just this as shown by the McDonalds ad shown below.
I would just like to take a moment to wish all of our readers a very Happy New Years. I hope all of you reached your goals for 2009 and have new aspirations and goals for the coming year. I want to thank you all for reading AM Beat and let all our readers know that we have dozens of great posts and features planned ahead for 2010.
Here is a list of the top trending topics according to Twitter sorted by category. It features the Top 10 mentions related to news events, people, TV shows, movies, sports, technology and hashtags.
As part of a simple, yet clever marketing tactic, Yahoo! sent employees to the two largest airports near its headquarters, the San Francisco International Airport and the San Jose International Airport, and offered to pay the baggage fees for any customers flying home this holiday season.
AM Beat is a blog written by Aditya Mahesh, a young entrepreneur and freshman at UC Berkeley who runs ZapPrep, a college admissions consulting business. This blog covers marketing, technology, and finance.
