The Sonic Commercial
Now everyone I know seems to have seen a Sonic commercial at least once in their life. But how many of those people have actually seen a Sonic Restaurant? Chances are you have seen a Sonic commercial and live no where near a Sonic. Now I’m not the media planner for Sonic and I don’t know who is, or why exactly they buy so much advertising in the Northeast, even though they don’t have any locations here, but I’m going to attempt to breakdown the Sonic Commercial and what its doing on my TV.
On hypothesis I have is that Sonic is using this as marketing hype. It gets people talking. “Man do I want to go to Sonic, just to try it!” I’ve heard this after seeing a Sonic ad, and it has a good point. Its positive spin, its an interesting angle. But is that really their plan?
It could be but I don’t believe so. I believe that Sonic is a victim of mass media, a lack of targeting and a 20th century mentality of media buying.
This post is inspired by this post from Darren Herman, and from a question my mother asked me - “Are you going to have those dancing mortgage commercials on your websites now?” No Mom, websites with those commercials are dumb. And I didn’t mean dumb as in bad or in a colloquial manner, I meant they are not thinking about their audience and what people want to look at.
In our most recent meeting with investors I used this line to focus a slide in my presentation:
Targeted Visitors are more Valuable to our Advertisers
This is a key focus of our business, the level of targeting we are able to provide to our advertisers. And its not just an ability to determine who is on a given page at a given time with some fancy algorithm, its just that the vast majority of our traffic comes through a search for the information on our page. Combined with very low bounce rates on our landing pages, our content keeps our visitors online and adds value to our advertisers. People come to our site searching for our advertisers - we just connect them. Its not rocket science, but it seems to be missing elsewhere.
Give people what they want, and they will respond positively to ads relating to what they want. Thats my motto online, and thats what we’ve been seeing happen.
* For more on the Sonic commercials see these links (don’t miss the comments)
