Art Print Issues by Barney Davey

Can Art & Marketing co-exist?

In addition to my blogging here, I am honored to be frequent guest blogger on the Absolute Arts Web site. It is one of the Internet's most heavily trafficked sites. Since most other regular bloggers there are artists, I add a different perspective. You can read my most recent post, Art vs. Marketing - Making Hazel Dooney Cringe on Absolute Arts now.

I don't wish to reiterate the post here. In a nutshell, it discusses how all art is creative expression. And, expression is not complete without those to be impressed. In other words, artists seek to further their vision by expressing themselves through their art. And, in the end, it becomes a business to make that happen and the business end of putting art and collectors together is marketing. Read the post to find out how and why I made Australian artist Hazel Dooney cringe.

I'm not seeking to pick a fight with her, but merely to say, despite her apparent angst in even considering giving free downloads of images as marketing, that no matter your noble intentions, you can't dismiss marketing is part of the equation.

Fast and Cheap Banner Testing With Google AdWords

By Alexis Siemon

If you're like most business owners just starting out with a brand-new website, you want to know the fastest and cheapest way to drive targeted traffic to it. Worried ETR (Early to Rise) readers frequently write to us with this concern. "I need traffic and sales now!" they say. "Help!"

One method I've recommended in the past is to launch a PPC (pay-per-click) search campaign on Google AdWords. But you can also use Google to test online media buys on other sites with banner ads and other creative formats. There are a couple of reasons why banner testing through Google is a great way to generate fast and cheap traffic and sales.

Bypassing Standard Rate Card Fees

At a recent in-house marketing meeting, ETR's media buyer mentioned a new banner campaign she was preparing to launch on a well-known financial website.

Usually, a website will charge you a fee for the number of "impressions" your banner serves - how many times your banner will be displayed to visitors to that site. This fee is expressed as CPM (cost per thousand impressions), and is listed on the "rate card" page of the website, along with the prices of all the other advertising options the site offers. Kind of like the sticker price on a vehicle at the dealership, experienced media buyers know that the rate card price is a number to begin negotiating from.

When you're setting up your banner on a site, they will either lock you in to X amount of impressions or will keep your banner running for Y days. Sometimes, this is a perfectly reasonable agreement. But it can be too expensive to be worthwhile for a test. (And, as you know, testing is critical when it comes to your marketing efforts.)

In this case, our media buyer lamented that the financial website's ad representative refused to go lower than the rate card price of $18 CPM for her banner test. I recognized the website's name and knew that they were part of Google's Content Network - the network of sites that display Google ads. So I suggested we use Google AdWords to serve our banners on the site... for a fraction of their rate card price.

Not only can you get banner space much cheaper through Google AdWords, you can also get your campaign up and running much faster and with much more flexibility than you can when dealing directly with the publisher. Plus, you aren't locked in to a set number of impressions or amount of time. If the campaign isn't performing well, you can stop it whenever you want. (More on that later.)

This leads me to the next reason for launching a banner test campaign through Google AdWords...
 
Expanding a Small Niche

Let's say you're a believer in the ability of a PPC search campaign on Google AdWords to drive traffic and sales to your website. But maybe your business is in a very specialized niche that not many people know about. The keyword research you did for your product resulted in few keywords with even fewer searches. You know there are people interested in what you're selling, but they might not know how to search for you. How do you quickly reach this niche market?

With a fast and cheap banner test on Google's Content Network, of course. You can target your campaign by demographic, by site, or by category to find the perfect space for your banner and launch your test on your terms with your desired budget. Here are the steps to take:

• Open a Google AdWords account. Couldn't be easier. Type "Google AdWords" into the Google search box, and follow directions.

• Create a Placement Targeted campaign. This is different from a Keyword Targeted campaign, but many of the same settings apply that let you target your banner ads in more specific ways than you might be able to do with a traditional banner buy. For example, using geo-targeting to specify what areas of the country or world will see your ad. You will also have AdGroups, like you do with a Keyword Targeted campaign, and you can use your AdGroups to organize your campaign by product, banner type, or any other way you choose.

• Research placements. This is the where the fun starts. Once you create your campaign and AdGroups, you can access Google's easy-to-use interface to research and pick the websites on which you want to run your ad.

There are several ways to search for sites. You can browse by category. You can search by topic or keyword. If you know the particular sites where you'd like to advertise, you can simply enter their URLs - and then Google will even list several other sites similar to the ones you've chosen. Lastly, you can select the demographic that you'd like to target, choosing by age, gender, household income, ethnicity, and whether there are children in the home.

After you enter your criteria, Google will list all of the matching sites, along with the ad formats they accept (text ad, banner ad, video ad), and the number of impressions each site receives per day. (Very helpful if you are looking for volume.)

• Bidding and budgeting. Next, you'll be able to bid on the CPM that you'd like to pay. And when you realize how low you can go, you're going to start to get giddy. Keep in mind, however, that you are competing with other advertisers for that banner ad space - and the higher your CPM bid, the more impressions you'll likely receive. It'll take some tweaking to find a balance between the amount you want to spend and the volume of impressions you need in order to run a good test.

I've found that you can run a good test with anywhere between a $1-$3 CPM - which is a heck of a lot better than a rate card price of $18! After you set your bid, you'll want to determine a daily budget, giving yourself enough wiggle room to get the number of impressions you need on a daily basis.

• Uploading your banners. Determine the banner sizes your sites accept and upload them to your campaign. Each banner should link to a landing page you've set up, complete with sales copy for the product you're selling. You can assign a different landing page URL for each banner, or you can point them all to the same one if you like. There is a short review process for each new banner you upload to your campaign, but once they are approved you'll be up and running!

The flexibility you get by running a banner campaign through Google AdWords really kicks in when your campaign is live and you can monitor your results. If you see that you're not receiving enough impressions, you can immediately adjust your bidding. If you are getting great traffic and conversion rates, you can immediately increase your budget. If you see that a particular site isn't performing, you can remove it from your campaign in seconds. The same goes for your banner headline, graphics, and layout. Changes can be made on the fly without waiting for an ad rep or account manager to make them for you.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

Understanding Creative Commons

Amidst the angst over the Orphan Works Act 2008, there is another movement among creatives meant to share their work under varying acceptable circumstances. It is known as Creative Commons. I've had a link to it on my blog nearly since its inception. You can see it on the left column. It looks like this:  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I found the presentation below to give an excellent easy-to-comprehend understanding of how Creative Commons works. It uses free Slideshare software previously recommended here.

Creative Commons : Spectrum of Rights

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cartoon rights)

Six Degrees of You

The parlor game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, spawned all manner of conversational tidbits and even a humorous television commercial for the Visa check card. This entertaining YouTube clip explains how it works. I recommend you put the power of it to work for you!

I gave a talk to a packed house in Atlanta last week. The presentation was titled Making Art and Money in the Digital World. It was graciously promoted and hosted by Atlanta's premier giclée printing operation, Digital Arts Studio.  I'm guessing I could easily make blog posts of half the 70+ slides in my the PowerPoint presentation.

Those who can help you are closer to you than you think

One slide from my talk is the subject of today's missive. Six Degrees of You. It's been part of my presentation for this topic for more than a year. Essentially, I have been conjecturing you are only six contacts away from anyone in the world. I was using a form of Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking intuition to make that assumption. Just last week, it hit the news that Microsoft researchers had proven I was wrong... but not by much. The MS researchers found the average to be 6.6 degrees of separation.

My point has been there are people who can greatly help you, some just for the asking. Others may require some schmoozing to get what you want, and some will snub you and you will never know why. As a art marketer, one of your top priorities ought to be compiling a list of those people who are in the best position to help you advance your career. The second part of that task is to use Six Degrees of You to seek them out.

You Miss 100% of the shots you don't take. - hockey great, Wayne Gretzsky

The final part is to know exactly what you want from them, how to succinctly ask them for it, and to eloquently provide the Features, Advantages and Benefits of why they should help you. It's no different than making a pitch to a private investor. Just know what you want and why and what's in it for the ohter guy. In the case of those you ask, it might be nothing than noblesse oblige, or it could be to return a favor, or it might be a way to demonstrate and exercise their personal power. Their motivation only matters insofar as it  might help you how to best present your suggetion for help.

If this sounds like a lot of work and bother, you are right. But when it comes to ROI (Return on Investment), only well done publicity comes close to offering you a similar rich payoff as does using the personal power of influential people.

If you are focused, ambitious and believe in yourself, nothing can stop you

If I am anything, I am a realist. I know suggestions like this are much more complicated to put to use than to say or think about them. Still, when you think about how just one, two or three powerful people can make an enormous difference in your career, what reason do you have to not professionally pursue them? Compared to how much effort and expense you put into preparing for a consumer or trade show, or into an advertising campaign, it is really not that daunting. The hardest part for some may be convincing themselves they are worthy of the desired attention. If that rings true for you, try reading my previous post, The Power of Believing in Yourself.

To help you with the elevator speech you should have memorized so you can easily and glibly respond to, "What do you do?" and "What do you want?", try the 15 Second Pitch site. It's free! There is real value in being able to quickly pointedly tell others about yourself. You will need to be able to elaborate, but this is a good start.

If you haven't started using the Personal Brain mind mapping tool, the project of identifying and connecting those who can help you would be a great way to get started.

Now, you've got ideas and tools. Just add your own ambition and go for it! Don't forget to write me from the top!

Art Scammers Beware - You Will Be Exposed

To read this post go here

Sony Music Selling Rock n' Roll Digital Prints

The Sony BMG music division has launched a retail digital art business titled, Icon Collectibles. Given technological advancements have dropped the floor from under the industry's former staple of CD sales, who can blame the company for trying to leverage whatever intellectual property they own.

The Wired magazine's Listening Post blog posted this item, Would You Pay $1,700 for a Digital Print of Dylan? It is informative to read the comments from its geek-oriented readers and their attitude about prints and limited editions.

Some of the limited editions are printed as fine art photograph in the platinum palladium print process. It is not clear from the Web site whether the open edition and lower priced prints are giclees. The term is not used anywhere on the site.

The priciest piece on the site is a $5,000 hand-signed, by Billy Joel, limited-edition set of 25 platinum palladium prints. It is a reproduction of the contact sheet for his best selling album cover, The Stranger, shot by photographer Jim Haughton in 1977.

Undoubtedly, the images appeal more to rock n' roll memorabilia collectors than art collectors, but it will nevertheless be interesting to see what success Sony BMG will capture with its foray into the print market.