Please comment on the discussion board comment below: The board initial question was: Cite two different company examples of the internet being used as an international marketing tool. What are the advantages in each case? Are there any disadvantages?
"Ripl & Promo Collapse Ten years ago having a marketable idea was half the battle, getting noticed was the other half. Today marketing tools like Ripl and Promo allow small businesses to create effective marketing materials for little to no cost. Promo is a web based application that allows users to navigate a video library of stock footage, pair it to music and then customize the text content and logo displayed over the video content. Ripl is a phone application that provides a very similar service but it uses still images rather than video, and the user must provide that image content themselves. Although both of these companies are still in their formative years, their service is empowering businesses and young political candidates like myself to get tangible traction with little to no investment. Mitigating critical start up costs for any endeavor is a high impact advantage for both of these services. However, due to their early status they lack versatility. I've submitted feedback to both services with hopes to see implementation as quickly as possible. Promo has been much more responsive to my feedback, where Ripl seems to have absorbed my message into the e-mail abyss. Nonetheless, these tools empower media distribution platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to better serve their users."