Laura’s Winning Ideas

Would it help if you could have proposal images and/or audio available to the customer at their convenience?

Below, you can watch a PowerPoint presentation I created for an SMPS meeting several years ago. I can restrict access to the folks whose email addresses I provide, or leave the file open to the public.

The service I’m using here is authorSTREAM. The service is free, so its a good thing to tuck away in your bookmarks.

Sometimes you have to wonder just what these executives are thinking when they cook up stupid stunts like this. . .

Adidas won a Trademark suit this week as covered in The Wall Street Journal here. (available for 7 days from this post, thereafter you’ll have to register in order to access the story)

It seems that Payless Shoe Stores purchased Adidas shoes, sent them to a Chinese manufacturer with instructions to copy but change the three strips to either two or four stripes. They sold approximately $400 million of these knock-offs.

The jury agreed with Adidas, that Payless had infringed the trademark of Adidas with the intention to benefit from knocking off the Adidas shoes. The award of $305 million drove down the stock price by over 16% with the news.

The formula for the award was as follows:

Actual damages = $31 million
Disgorged profits because the jury found willfulness in the defendant’s actions = $135 million
Punitive damages (equal to the disgorged profits) = $135 million
TOTAL VERDICT = $305 million (figures above were all approximate and added up to $305 million)

Payless says they plan to appeal, but they might want to rethink this strategy. The attorney for Adidas acknowledged that the verdict might be reduced on appeal, but it is possible it could be increased because the judge could add plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and may also triple the actual damages portion of the verdict. Add the plunge in stock price to the mix, and this was a very expensive stunt to pull.

Food for Thought

Copyrights and Trademarks are protected property. Next time someone delivers a nifty photo they found on the internet for a proposal, you might want to ask a few more questions before inserting it into your document. And don’t think a quick photoshop “editing” of an image makes it your own, it is merely proof of “willfulness” and expensive when discovered.

If you’ve heard me speak on the topic you know that photographs are exceptionally well protected by copyright law, so don’t think you’ll even get as much grace as the music industry has extended to folks caught downloading music files illegally. (which ain’t much grace if you’ve followed the news.)

Laura Ewing just showed me a new site to research federal contracts.

http://www.usaspending.gov

Very nice interface. I’ve played around with it a few minutes and easily found contracts for clients and their competitors, as well as which agencies are contracting.

Tuck this one in your bookmarks and backup your bookmarks!

Technorati Tags: proposal database,contracts database,competitor data

I read a white paper at Marketing Sherpa last month about testing your web site on mobile devices.

Some estimate that as much as 40% of the initial contacts to your web site will be via mobile devices within 5 years. Humm.

I was skeptical, until I caught myself. I sat in an SMPS meeting, listening to 3 speakers from various companies. As the panel got warmed up, I surfed to each of their web sites on my iPhone. The two medium sized firms had reasonable web sites. Nothing fancy, but I got an overview of what they do and who their market is.

However, the third firm is very large. In fact, they are one of the oldest privately held firms in the U.S. However they have a web site that is probably fancy because it would not render on my phone. (Let me go check from my desktop… Oh yeah. very nice dancing baloney on every landing page.)

I didn’t think it was important when I read about testing your web site for mobile devices, but now I’m convinced.

Check your own web site here: www.iPhonetester.com

Imagine your client sitting in a meeting reviewing proposals for THAT BIG JOB, and they pull out their mobile device and surf to your web site to check some detail. What do they get?

Notice that I didn’t bother to visit the big company web site once I returned to my office. It wasn’t a high enough priority for me. If I haven’t had this post to write, I would have moved on without a second thought about that company.

Which company would you rather be?

One more datapoint. This week, Forbes Magazine cited another study estimating that at least 50% of first visits to web sites are coming from mobile devices. Run fast.

Technorati Tags: mobile device,surfing,iphone,website,Marketing Sherpa,Forbes