Advertising is always a difficult activity for a company to justify. It's not cheap, for one thing, and it's not an instantaneous return-on-investment expenditure–not too many people see one ad and break their legs rushing to a store in order to buy the promoted product.
Well, unless we're talking about the complete second season of Deadwood, because speaking personally I just can't get enough of Calamity Jane. I'd share my favorite Jane quote with you, but this is a family-friendly blog.
Anyway: advertising. We don't typically do web advertising, in part because we have this browser we develop that helps you avoid web ads, but we did decide to buy some space in a couple Mac magazines and see how that went.
We've been advertising in Macworld and MacAddict for a while now, and I thought I'd share the upcoming June artwork for those who are interested (and even those who aren't, I guess, in which case I apologize for today's ho-hum content and direct you to this fine link instead).
(This is the same ad we ran last month, but we've had a number of different ones. Maybe I'll post an Omni “ad gallery” so you can see them all.)
I can't really tell you how definitively successful (or not) the print campaign has been–there's that elusive ROI thing again–but we have heard from a few folks who may not have known about Omni otherwise. That seems good.
We chose to try advertising because we're a small software company with a limited number of resources trying to get our name out there. It doesn't seem like it would be such a challenge in a fairly finite Mac OS X world; after all, a couple of our applications are bundled on a LOT of Apple hardware these days. And yet a not-uncommon description of Omni is “the best software you've never heard of”.
So, talk to us, folks. How do you typically find out about software? Magazines, news sites, blogs, the shelf of a retail store, word of mouth–what's most useful to you?
