Universal Wilde Blog

I have a confession: I love Pinterest. It's my online inspiration board for food, exercising, quotes, and so many more things. However, I've never used it for buying products - just gawking at things. Yes, Pinterest may be good for suggesting several thousand meals you could make, but would you use it for holiday shopping?

Many companies this holiday season have opted to include QR codes in their marketing efforts. Target decided this October that they would tag the Top 20 Toys of the holiday season with QR codes and have them be available via the Target smartphone app. The best part about this? If you ordered one of these toys using the QR code, they were offering free shipping. Talk about making your holiday season less stressful!

What is spam, exactly? If you asked this question to someone before the age of the internet, they’d tell you it was some concoction of ingredients – some meat, some unidentifiable things – that was put on the shelves of the supermarket. Turns out, their answer is really similar to what spam is in email form.

As marketers, we often face the challenge of keeping current, relevant, and engaging – and this problem worsens as social media becomes a source for news bites. We saw FEMA’s suggestion to use social media to let loved ones know you were okay post-Sandy, and we thought it was a fantastic way to use Twitter and Facebook in times of crises. However, a couple of brands have been using social media marketing and email marketing to attempt to make light of a gloomy situation and promote their brand a little more. The backlash was ugly – proving that not all publicity is good publicity.

Most of us know coupons as "how I got this great deal" – or, worse, from being stuck behind that person in the supermarket who has a coupon for every item they purchase. Whether you pronounce it "coo-pawn" or "cue-pon", you know what those paper clippings mean: savings for the consumer. What most of us don’t know is that September was declared National Coupon Month in 1998 by the Promotion Marketing Association (PMA). What most of us also don’t know is that 2012 is the 125^th anniversary of the coupon!

If you're like me, you have to have your coffee in the morning. I usually stop at Dunkin' Donuts on my way in to work for a medium hot, milk, no sugar. Yeah, cream and sugar are bad for you I hear. Taking the same path to work every day I stop at the same store. I usually go in too because, although I'm not sure this is a rule of the universe, the drive through line is always longer than the one inside.

Tome Andrade (Universal Wilde’s VP of Sales and Marketing) became a print salesman in 1976 — a year when ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” was number one on the charts, Gerald Ford was president, and the internet didn’t exist.   So it’s no surprise that sales and marketing have changed drastically since then as well!