Nick Ezzo

This week, I fired up Adobe® After Effects® CS3 and cranked out a couple of videos.

The first one is a 30-second commercial for Volunteer-o-matic™, an Apple iPhone App created by Bjorn Austraat and selling for 99¢ on the App Store.

Then, while I had the application (and my skills) warmed up, I put together a 2-minute mock interview in which I respond to two specific questions about marketing.  It’s pretty wacky, but it was fun to do.

Update: Several people have asked about the songs in the videos, so here they are.

• The Volunteer-o-matic commecical features “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie” (also known as the App Store song) by The Submarines.
• The mock interview features “Black Star” by Radiohead and “Standing In The Shower… Thinking” by Jane’s Addiction.

Enjoy!

Tags: interview, iPhone App, video commercial, Volunteer-o-matic

Extreme Web Personalization (a How-To)

While I was at TuVox, I created quite a few one-of a kind marketing programs.

One really cool idea was personalizing www.tuvox.com based on the domain name the web visitor is coming from.  That is, the website “morphs” depending on whether the visitor is a (1) prospect, (2) partner, or  (3) competitor.

NOTE: If you are seeing a little box to the upper right that says “Nick Ezzo welcomes visitors from XYZ”, then you are experiencing basic personalization.  If you see your company logo, you are experiencing targeted personalization.

At TuVox I took it even further, since I had a library of 350+ demo audio recordings created for our prospects.  In addition to the logo, these visitors get a little audio player that demonstrates what their system would sound like with TuVox.  That is what I refer to as extreme personalization.

All of this is done without the visitor giving up any information or filling out a form.

The reaction I get from most people is “how the heck did you do that?”

How it’s done

This level of personalization is accomplished using a database that resolves a visitor’s IP address to their domain name, which is typically their company name.  The database I use actually has the company name, like this:

192.168.10.10 –> xyzcompany.com –> XYZ Enterprises, Inc.

Then the company name is used to pull information out of a home-grown MySQL database.

The fields in the table control things like which type of page to show (prospect.html, partner.html, competitor.html) and whether a company logo or audio file should be used.

The results

When web personalization is done well, most people have a positive reaction.  It makes the website more memorable, and enables work to get done faster.  The responses I received were overwhelmingly positive.

To be fair, I was contacted by two companies that asked me to take their logo off my site.  I don’t think they grasped that only visitors from their domain would see that page.  Two out of 350 isn’t bad, right?

So let’s hear it for Big Brother.

By the way, if you are reading this article, I have already received an email telling me that you are on my site.

- Nick