Attention, attention, read all about it! Promotional marketing is going to new heights with advertising products.  It’s no longer the 1900s when newspaper boys shouted headlines from the street corners.  Marketing strategies have changed since then by incorporating other advertising platforms.  Stop the presses and reevaluate the marketing strategy for your business to get the most out of your advertising budget.  Not everyone has the means to pay $100 million for a celebrity endorsement or $3.8 million for a commercial to air during the Super Bowl.  Promotional merchandise provides customers a daily reminder of the business or company that they received the product from.  For now though, Extra, Extra! Read all about it! The following infographic shows what companies pay to market their business through the various advertising platforms!

I have two teenagers at home, so I can safely call myself the world’s foremost EXPERT ON TEENAGERS!!! Actually, as a parent of teenagers, I have absolutely no clue what’s going on.  But that’s a whole different blog.  What I have noticed in 2013 is that my two teenagers aren’t using Facebook at all.  A sample of two:  my 16-year-old has only 5 posts this year and my 15-year-old has 7 posts.  I know 40 year-olds that have that many posts in a day, posting anything from photos of cute cats rolling on the grass to a hilarious video of an old lady dancing to 28 photos of their 3-year-old at the zoo pointing to a Lion or commenting on “what’s a color without the letter E in it”.

Ever wondered what skills the head of a marketing department looks for when hiring or where marketing leaders turn to for the latest industry trends?

Interview with a Marketer is a featured blog series brought you by Marketing Talent Inc. to provide current and prospective marketers with career insights from passionate marketing leaders. We ask them direct questions related to their career & personal life – giving you an inside perspective to the lives of different Marketing Leaders.

On June 5th, 2013 thousands of professionals from across Canada will gather at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to discover the ideas and trends shaping the future of marketing. Building on the success of last year’s national tour, this one day conference features five bestselling authors & leaders, who will share an exciting blend of cutting edge thinking and real world experience on today’s most critical marketing issues.

Still confused about when to use there, their, or they’re – it may be hurting your chances for advancement at work. A recent study found that grammar skills can be linked to your salary. Watch this recent video from City News and see how quickly a recruiter will skip over your resume as soon as they see grammatical errors!

Delivering your message in different ways, over time, not only increases retention and impact, but it gives you the chance to describe what you're doing from several angles. In many ways, the mantra of permission conflicts with the mechanics of frequency. If people are loaning you their attention and you're delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages, your need for frequency goes way down.

I’m writing to you because I am feeling incredibly overwhelmed and it seems this has been going on for a long time. Work demands keep piling up and I feel bogged down every day without any reprieve. There used to be periods that were less busy and we could catch our breath but these days it’s go, go, go all the time and I’m feeling swamped. I’m losing my steam and feeling the stress of dealing with it all, and the stuff outside of work is becoming an issue. Help!

I've been banging that drum for well over a decade now. At first, it was heresy, then it was wishful thinking and now it is suddenly becoming a reality. You know it's a reality when traditional advertising agencies are claiming that digital is just another kind of execution when - in reality - they're watching both their budgets dwindle and the lion's share of advertising dollars shift in ways the industry hasn't seen since television became a red-hot medium. This is further being validated as two recent studies came to light that paint a very interesting picture of the marketing dollar landscape.

I’m half way old enough that I’m straddling the fence on whether agencies are as good as the old days. But it seems that there are pitches going on constantly, and yet no one is really wanting to look themselves the mirror and say “Am I part of the problem?” I’ve been brought in a few times to look at the situation.  The first thing I normally tell the Brand Leader is “you have to fire yourself first” and then see if the agency is still bad. The best clients respect the process, the agency and their own judgment. And yet, most Brand Leaders under-estimate the role the client plays in getting to great creative.  As a Brand Leader, if you knew that showing up better would get you better advertising, do you think you could?  If there are 100 steps in every advertising development stage and you show up OK at each step, how are you possibly thinking you’ll end up with a GREAT ad at the end?

I am 35 with an arts degree. I returned to Canada in 2008, after spending eight years in Japan teaching English. I returned to college for a postgraduate diploma in accounting, finishing in 2009. Since then, I have been going to career and networking events, attending company information sessions at my local university in Waterloo, Ont., and I have been telling everyone I know that I could use their help. I volunteer at my faith-based organization, counting donations and tracking related expenses to charities, but I’m still coming up with nothing.