Website Administration
Business name: Rowdy Marketing Group
Country: USA
Website URL: http://www.rowdygroup.com
Website e-mail: info@rowdygroup.com

Work Flow & Process
Rowdy Marketing Group primarily accepts and delivers content in digital format, but exceptions are made when necessary.  Acceptable imagery must be a minimum of 300 dpi (dots per inch) and a maximum of 600 dpi (due to server spatial constraints) and have actual dimensions comparable to printed product.

Rowdy Marketing Group will not design anything that is illegal.

50% non-refundable down payment is required with the remaining 50% due Net15 (within 15 days after the initial proof is submitted). Full payment is due before final print files are delivered or print orders are placed.

Proof Carefully. Submitted and delivered proofs will print exactly as is, unless you request corrections. If the final product matches the approved proof, Rowdy Marketing Group is not responsible for any errors. Colors may vary from screen to screen. What you see on your monitor may not be an accurate representation of printed product. Always ask your chosen printer for a printed sample or press proof to be sure you are satisfied with the colors.

Deadlines
Allow ample time (according to project size) for proof to be completed after both the initial request and your alterations/corrections have been submitted. Depending on our work load, this time may vary without prior notice. Any due dates must be disclosed before project commences.

Rowdy Marketing Group must be notified at least two weeks in advance of any deadlines for the project. If any design is needed within two weeks (including weekends), a rush cost may incur. Rowdy Marketing Group is not responsible for work that is delayed due to slow response on the part of the client or late due to a lack of deadline specification.

Estimate Conditions
Estimates provided by Rowdy Marketing Group apply to the initial proof only and minor corrections or changes. “Minor” refers to any corrections or changes that involve less than 15% of the total project time required to produce the initial proof. Additional corrections or changes will be billed at the hourly rate of $60. The estimate does not include stock photos, templates or any other project expenses not itemized in the estimate. There will be a 1.5 percent monthly finance charge on accounts not paid in full according to these terms.

Contract Term & Usage (For Retainer Clients)
You will communicate with us using the provided project management system, for which you will be assigned a unique user name and password. This information should be emailed to you within twenty-four (24) business hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST) from the date of purchase.

Services included in work package are outlined on the following web page: http://www.rowdygroup.com/services and are subject to change without notice. Rowdy Marketing Group reserves the right to refuse a project’s inclusion in the selected work package if it is outside average requirements and scope of work normally performed. “Graphic Design” work included in the work packages are defined by us as any electronic, 2d art form. (.jpeg, .psd. etc.) and includes textual work (content writing, editing, etc.).

By purchasing a monthly retainer package, you are engaging in a legally binding contract with Rowdy Marketing Group to perform the services requested for a six (6) month term. Your PayPal account or credit/debit card will be charged every thirty (30) days at the price of your selected work package. If hours are not used within thirty (30) days of purchase, they are not redeemable. Payment is required in full before work begins.

If additional time (beyond the hours purchased in your selected work package) is required to complete projects or begin a new project, more hours must be purchased separately at the hourly price determined by your selected work package before work continues or begins. No discounts may be applied to promotional advertised pricing.

If you require a time limit on your project, it is your responsibility to specify the logged work time allotted for delivery of initial proof. Your requested time limit must not be less than a minimum of one (1) hour for any new project (per planary page). A maximum of two and one-half (2.5) hours work is allowed on the initial design proof (per planary page) without your prior approval. Because of the risk involved in fixed-time projects (i.e., the chance for in-process changes adding to the time committed to the project), time can not be constrained after the initial proof is delivered.

Project Expenses
Expenses are estimated at 15% of the thirty (30) day retainer or project estimate, and are billed out at 20% above actual cost at the 1st of each month, due by the 15th of the same month. Expenses at or below 15% (for Fed-X, stock photography, etc.) do not require itemization nor do they require prior client approval; expenses above 15% are itemized, approved in advance and receipts are available for review.

You hereby agree to the iStockphoto Content License Agreement for stock imagery contained on the following web page: http://www.istockphoto.com/license.php

Material Rights
Rowdy Marketing Group retains the rights to all graphic and web design materials produced by Rowdy Marketing Group and its affiliates during work for the company (Rowdy Marketing Group). Distribution of materials containing content produced by Rowdy Marketing Group is limited and this content may not be reproduced in excess of 500,000 times. Any use of these items other than those approved, developed or produced by Rowdy Marketing Group may incur additional fees. Additional material rights and source files may be purchased for a negotiated amount.

Taxes
The client is responsible for any applicable sales or use taxes, even if they are calculated after the fact (for example, during a subsequent audit of the company’s tax returns).

Notification of Changes
We may decide to change our terms of service at any time, and we will post those changes to this terms of service page: http://www.rowdygroup.com/terms-of-service

Conflict Resolution
We are committed to resolving disputes within 24-48 hours. You may contact us at info@rowdygroup.com

The information we collect is never shared with other organizations for commercial purposes.

This site collects cookies.

We require information from the user on our order form, which is processed through www.Click2Sell.eu. A user must provide contact information (such as name, email, and shipping address) and financial information (such as credit card number, expiration date). If we have trouble processing an order, we use the information to contact the user. This information is used for shipping and billing purposes, to fill customers’ orders and necessary notices.

We always use industry-standard encryption technologies when transferring and receiving consumer data exchanged with our site. When we transfer and receive certain types of sensitive information such as financial information, we redirect visitors to a secure server. We have appropriate security measures in place in our physical facilities to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of information that we have collected from you at our site.

We publish an e-newsletter (distributed via email) and operate online surveys, and we never sell or share our subscribers’ email addresses.

Information Collected Automatically
We collect information about the user’s visit to our sites, including what pages the user views, the number of bytes transferred, the links the user clicks, the materials the user accesses, and other actions taken within Rowdy Marketing Group’s sites.

Website Administration
Business name: Rowdy Marketing Group
Country: USA
Website URL: http://www.rowdygroup.com
Website e-mail: info@rowdygroup.com

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Project Not Listed? Just Ask!

By Rob Sullivan

Sometimes you see promotions come along and you wonder – did they just do that? The current MSN promotion – msnsearchandwin is a prime example of this. Not only do they use “black hat” or at least “questionable” tactics on the site, but the messaging is inconsistent. In this article I look at the new MSN promotion and ask the question: Why bother?

By now you’ve probably heard about the new MSN promotion where you can win prizes simply by using MSN search. They did do something right by registering a domain name that implies that message. If you go to http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/ you will see the familiar MSN search box.

Wait a minute…Why is this search box blue? Didn’t MSN just rebrand with a nicer, cleaner silver grey look?

That, my friends, is mistake number one. It’s as if the technical team and the marketing team didn’t get together to discuss this program.

I mean, when you go through something as complex and massive as a rebranding, you should make sure the messaging is consistent across the various media. Especially when the promotion and the rebranding launch within days of each other.

This is eerily similar to the article I wrote about Superbowl Ads: http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blogs/comments/329_0_1_0_C/. In that article I talked about how advertisers spend millions on a 30 second or 1 minute TV commercial yet they fail to carry that messaging over onto their website effectively if at all.

And here we have MSN – probably one of the most recognized brands on the web and subsidiary to the company with one of the most effective and ruthless marketing arms in the world – and it can’t seem to communicate it’s message that MSN is rebranding.

I mean, how hard would it have been for someone in Tech to phone up someone in Marketing and say, “By the way, you know that search and win promotion you are doing? Be sure that the colors match the new look of MSN that’s launching in a few days.”

But wait, it gets better.

First spotted by http://www.kerrydean.com/blog/, if you view source of the msnsearchandwin home page what do you see?

That’s right, about a million keywords stuffed into the keywords tag. (OK maybe not a million but there are 256 keywords in the meta keywords tag).

It gets worse. Immediately below the overstuffed keywords tag you will see a bunch of keywords stuffed into a comments tag. Again the same 256 words used in the meta keywords tag.

So tell me, is it OK for a search engine to spam itself?

Perhaps we could all learn a little something from MSN’s marketing mistake: Keep it consistent!

Making a character out of the advertiser brings the message alive. Maxwell Sackheim is most famous for inventing the Book-of-the-Month Club. But before that, he invented some dramatic, and dramatically successful, advertising.

One of his patented techniques was to make a character out of the advertiser, writing ads as if the clients themselves were actually talking. One Sackheim client was Frank E. Davis, “The Gloucester Fisherman”. This is how Sackheim wrote for him:

“There is no use trying. I’ve tried and tried to tell people about my fish, but I wasn’t rigged out to be an ad writer and I can’t do it. I can close-haul a sail with the best of them. I know how to pick out the best fish of the catch… But I’ll never learn the knack of writing an ad that will tell people why my kind of fish—fresh caught, with the deep sea tang still in it—is lots better than the ordinary store kind.

“At least you can taste the difference. So you won’t mind, will you, if I ship some of my fish direct to your home? It won’t cost you anything unless you feel like keeping it. All I ask is that you try some of my fish at my expense and judge for yourself whether it isn’t exactly what you have always wanted.”

This copy sold tens of thousands of tubs of fish right across the country. The authentic character of the Gloucester Fisherman brought life, and customers, to the product.

You’re thinking, “Great then, but now? Come on.” Maybe you’ve heard of a couple multi-millionaires named Harry and David? Ever wonder how they got started? Years after Sackheim, a copywriter called G. Lynn Sumner wrote an ad for a pair of pear growers. The ad set off with the headline: “Imagine Harry and Me Advertising Our Pears in Fortune!”

Here’s a snippet of Sumner’s copy: “Out here on the ranch we don’t pretend to know much about advertising, and maybe we’re foolish spending the price of a tractor for this space; but my brother and I got an idea the other night, and we believe you folks who read Fortune are the kind of folks who’d like to know about it. So here’s our story…”

Years later again, in the ‘70s, Frank Schulz took a Joe Sugarman seminar. Joe suggested the character formula. Frank wrote a headline: “A Fluke of Nature.” He told of the accidental invention of the “ruby red” grapefruit, and about how picky they are in picking the fruit. The rest is marketing history.

One variation on the character gambit is the open letter. Norman Cousins resigned from The Saturday Review to launch his own World Review Magazine. Showing one heck of a lot of character, he put up $15,711 for three insertions in The New York Times. They were headed, “An Open Letter to the Readers of The New York Times.” He told them what was wrong with the journalism of the day and what they’d get from the World Review. That first round of advertising netted Cousins $54,923.00 in subscriptions.

Every viable enterprise has a character behind it somewhere. When you find it, then you know what’s unique about the company—and that’s at least halfway to great advertising!

As a marketing consultant and copywriter, I see horrible marketing everyday. The most common mistake I see is what I call, “me too marketing.”

“Me too marketing” is when a business creates a marketing piece (advertisement, brochure, sales letter, website, etc.) that looks and reads like an exact copy of their competition’s marketing. Instead of demonstrating why their product or service is unique and offers outstanding benefits, they say exactly what their competition says.

For proof of “me too marketing”, go to your phone book and look at advertising in almost any category. You can basically exchange the company names in the ads and the ads are identical. Nearly everybody is using the same dull clichés such as, “Our customers are #1″, “Serving your needs for xx years”, “Family owned”, “Best Service”, “Friendly Service”, “Great Selection”, etc. This kind of advertising is SO BORING and overused. That is why it produces such horrible results. If you want to have marketing that generates a lot of quality leads and puts you ahead of your competition, you need to be different and prove why your product or services offers the best benefits to your customer.

To make your marketing great so it consistently generates high quality leads, here is a list of the differences between great marketing and terrible marketing:

1. Great marketing includes an attention-grabbing headline that calls out to the target market and makes a benefit-based promise. Bad marketing does not include a headline and hopes that the reader will find the graphics interesting enough to read the marketing piece. Big mistake!

2. Great Marketing focuses on a powerful benefits-based sales message and promise. Bad marketing focuses on aesthetic graphic design and being “cute and creative” and using as little sales text as possible. A great sales message is a message that promises a specific result. For example, “If our skin care product does not make your face look 10 years younger in 30-days or less, we’ll give you a 110% refund!”

3. Great marketing offers quantitative proof of why a product or service is better than the competition. Bad marketing just says, “we are the best.” For examples of how to show proof that your product is better than the competition, your marketing should make statements that you can prove such as, your widget lasts 3.7 times longer, it costs 27% less, our company offers a 90-day 100% money-back guarantee while our competitors offer no guarantee, our widget is guaranteed to last 5 years or we will replace it for free, while our competition only offers a 6-month replacement guarantee, etc. You need to make your marketing promise so strong that people would have to be a fool to do business with anybody but you.

4. Great marketing uses customer testimonials to give social proof of the quality of a product or service. Bad marketing does not. How many times have you purchased something because you read a lot of customer testimonials praising the quality of the product? I know I sure have. Testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use, so take advantage of them and use them in ALL of your marketing. You will instantly generate more sales.

5. Great marketing asks the customer to purchase by a specific date and explains step-by-step how to place an order. Bad marketing does NOT ask the customer to buy and does not have a time-limit for the offer. To make your marketing great, you must ask for the order and give a specific time-limit for taking advantage of the offer. For example, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get an instant 10% off”, or, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get a second widget at half price”. You may think this is a cliché but it works over and over. That is why you see it used so often on TV, particularly in infomercials and other direct-response advertising. I promise you that these companies would not be making these offers if it was not leading to a lot of sales and profits.

If you apply these simple strategies in your marketing, I guarantee you will see an increase in sales. Remember, fortune favors the bold.