Category — advertising

And why its actually useless.

Last week my (never met him before or interacted with in anyway whatsoever, but read so much of what he thinks that I usually think to myself “what would Seth Godin say about this” whenever I do anything) friend Seth Godin wrote a valuable post about “Grand Openings” and how they are not so grand. I laughed when I read it because I was scheduled to attend the Grand Opening party of an old restaurant that had closed and re-opened under a new owner/management that evening.

It was Saturday when I realized the value of the Hype, the artificial pumping up of events, products and companies. I was at the Belmont, in hopes of witnessing history in the form of the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years.

You had to live in a cave to not know about this event. The trainer was everywhere, the horse was everywhere, a big dollar investment was made and a multinational company purchased a first of its kind endorsement. Big Brown came around the final turn and stopped running. The most heavily favored horse to go off at Belmont Stakes in decades, the sure shot, became the first Triple Crown contender to finish dead last.

More than twice as many people watched the stakes on television this year over last year and over 100k people braved the heat to watch in person. People were excited, then they were disappointed. Massively disappointed.

When things don’t live up to the hype, people remember the bad, the letdown or they don’t remember it at all. Eitherway, all the press, all the hype that was put into the event was a waste of many and probably will hurt the brand/event/promoter in the long term.

Don’t try to live up to the hype, let the hype try to live up to you. Make the hype follow the event, let people talk about how great it was, because if something was really worth all the hype, you won’t need to put all that hype into it before hand.

At 5 o’clock vendors were selling Big Brown tshirts for $20. At 6:30 they were selling those same shirts 3 for $5. Of course, if he had won, those shirts might have been selling for $40. Perhaps the Belmont Stakes is not the best example, but it made me think about what we do in order to hype things up and get people to pay attention. As Mr. Godin commonly puts it, make something remarkable - worth talking about, and people will talk about it.

Speak softly and carry a big stick. Just Do It. Walk the Talk. Moral of the story, instead of talking about doing it, go ahead and buckle in and do it. Because almost never was, and probably never will be.

Its late now, and I’m going to stop hyping this post.

Not necessarily you, but alot of people out there who are responsible for making decisions based around incorrect or misused information. “Well we just got our new RSS feed live so we are on the forefront of the the online game.” “Our online advertising needs are being met by our facebook page because (insert 3 random and conflicting facts about facebook here).” We just placed a large buy with the local paper’s website, so we are all set for now.”

All three of these are actual comments I’ve heard from advertising prospects in the past week. Of course we get turned down, we’re not perfect, but it is frustratingly amusing when I hear these responses. “No, we don’t need your services because we have this other program that isn’t measurable and entirely different from your program. But what is it you do again?” The beauty of the internet is that it is measurable, fixable, flexible, adaptable, etc. But just because you can measure 37 different variables on your latest campaign doesn’t mean you’ll get the data you want.

I’m digressing from my point. I sometimes feel like half of the people out there using new technologies are like 16 year olds with out their license cruising around in a Lamborghini - they don’t know what they hell they’re talking about. Sure your RSS feed is nice to have, and I’m happy to hear that you have a blog for your business, and I’m impressed that you have taken the time to build a facebook page. But your facebook page has 2 fans, and the last time your wrote on your blog was December - what is a new feed going to do for your business?

My point is, just because you have something fancy, doesn’t mean you’re using it right. Technology is not a money tree, you have to use it wisely and there isn’t just one way to do that.

Last night Ryan Seacrest was on Larry King, and was speaking on a variety of issues, including the usual useless gossip, but he also touched on his BlackBerry Addiction. Larry asked him about the several businesses he runs and how he manages to keep them all together and when he sleeps. His response was basically that he turns his BlackBerry to silent, but wakes up routinely to check it through the night. I was watching this with my girlfriend and she informed me that Ryan’ BlackBerry use sounded an awful lot like mine.

Took a fairly last minute trip to North Carolina to visit my Grandmother, and we crushed the BlackBerry on the way here. Same old stuff for me that I’ve written about before, but it emphasizes how relevant it truly is. AT&T has announced that it will subsidize the release of the 3G iPhone this summer by as much as $200. BlackBerry announced its new “Bold” device (with 3G). Overall, the market for mobile phones and web-rich devices is growing enourmously. If people are able to buy iPhones for 2 or 3 hundred dollars, imagine how many they will sell.

Once everyday people, not just the early adopters and business savvy customers, but everyday Jones is able to access rich, mobile internet - then we will see the explosive growth in mobile advertising. I’m very excited to see what happens in the 4th quarter this year…

This week I saw a few examples of how mobile is finally beginning to cross the chasm between innovators and early adopters. Large players are seeing a shift in their advertising dollars, Google announced it was making a major partnership with Sprint, and launched their international portal for iPhones, iMedia Connection came out with a great overview of mobile barcodes, and also yesterday my BlackBerry was with out data for about 4 hours and I kind of freaked out.

The combination of these events, along with specific posts from two of my favorite bloggers (David Berkowitz on privacy and Darren Herman on privacy) led me to the conclusion that we are near the tipping point of doing something great with mobile (working on a very cool new mobile tool for our company).

If you read David and Darren’s posts, you’ll see that they feel strongly about privacy and the prospect of invasion of your personal space on a cell phone. I don’t see mobile marketing being a success if its seen as an invasion; however, mobile marketing becomes a success when marketers are able to reach people as they are in transaction mode. Transaction mode being any of the following: “Lets find a hotel nearby,” “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “I really want one of those…” etc. As marketers see the value in reaching users searching for this information, and the mobile device becomes more of a “pocket” notebook computer more dollars will flow across the mobile airwaves.

As the devices transition, the dollars will transition behind them.

I was thinking about how several different brands are really able to reach a large audience, with a long term campaign and I thought I would do a little research and put together a list of the 5 best brands out there today. Based on longevity, current and past campaigns, and their ability to capture significant segments of their markets.

1. Nike: The brand that Phil Knight built out of a waffle iron in his garage now controls over 30% of the worlds athletic shoe market and does over $16 billion a year in sales. “Just Do It.” captivates audiences around the world, from Portland to Paris, from Michael Jordan to the World Cup to Tiger Woods, Nike continues to bring powerful campaigns all centered around the same slogan from the 70’s.
2. Coca-Cola: The current Coca-Cola logo was originally designed by Frank Mason Robinson in 1885. Today, over 120 years later, the logo still graces the pages, screens and stadiums of locations all across the world. In 1918, Robert Woodruff - Coke’s first President - said he wanted to “ensure that everyone on Earth drank Coca-Cola as their preferred beverage.” Now over 25% of the worlds $250 Billion soft-drink market belongs to Coke.
3. Apple: A brand doesn’t have to be centuries old to be great, but after hovering just above obsolete during the 90’s, Steve Jobs returned to bring Apple back to glory. Using an extremely simple advertising campaign, just the product, music and a little graphic design shows how “cool” their products are. The new “Mac vs PC” campaign is brilliantly simple and the iPhone commercials simply show several different features of the product. Did I mention how cool their products are - who doesn’t want an iPod? (Oh man, I forgot to mention the 1-3 connection: Nike + iPod)
4. Lexus: I don’t drive a Lexus, and probably never will (I am an Audi guy) but as a marketer I love their brand. They use simple luxury and sheer performance as the key ingredients to all of their campaigns and they always keep them simple. The Pursuit of Perfection (Cadillac recently ripped this right off..). Of course, Toyota is no slouch either.
5. Sony: HDNA. My first stereo had to be a Sony. The Sony Walkman, and then the Discman were the iPods of their day. The Bravia TV’s are in most everyone’s top 3 sets. When I was in Video Production in high school, almost everything we used was a Sony product, the cameras, the monitors, the VCRs, the speakers,  the mixers, etc. Their current HDNA campaign (with your favorite “all sell anything” football star spokesman Peyton Manning) is brilliant - it gives you many compelling reasons why you should use their products to facilitate your HD experiences. Granted I think Sony should have seen the  MP3 craze perhaps a little better than they did considering their dominance in mobile music prior, but they have transitioned through 5 generations of technology and as we begin to transition into a new one, I see Sony having a large presence in what ever future markets develop.

These were just a few of my thoughts on some of the best brands, based on their historical prevalence, current advertising campaigns and over all brand management. I’d love to hear some other brands grabbing your attention.

My take on the Yahoo/Microsoft deal remains the same. It was a very good deal for Microsoft, and I believe ultimately would have been a good thing for consumers. Microsoft needs to come up with some new technologies to keep their brand relevant in the long term, and purchasing all of Yahoo’s was an easy way to do that.

What I am afraid of now is a Google/Yahoo relationship. If Yahoo hands Google the reins to the second largest search engine, then what happens? Microsoft online becomes irrelevant (live.com might as well be now), and as a marketer I know have little choice where to spend my search marketing dollars. If Google is controlling Yahoo’s search budget, that essentially makes them irrelevant as well. So now Google essentially controls the entire search market and they can do whatever they want.

I don’t really know what this means, but it doesn’t sound good to me. Now Jerry Yang says Yahoo wants to focus on display ads. Did he forget that Google just completed its integration with DoubleClick and Tim Armstrong wants “to have advertisers load their entire ad budgets into Google’s system, which would allocate spending across media whether online or offline.” Judging by how well Google has dominated the search market and stolen millions of users from yahoo.com to gmail.com, I would be concerned if I was Yahoo.

Google already controls enough of the internet, and if they control Yahoo’s search advertising they will essentially be drinking Yahoo’s milkshake.

Today’s Fast Company Big Idea is:

“Anyone who says early adopters don’t matter needs to go back to business school. Facebook and Twitter are beginning to impact business just as much as advertising ”

I follow these daily thought provokers from Fast Company because they are usually fairly interesting. I think this one is excellent. I don’t consider myself to be an innovator, but a late moving early adopter, I am becoming more early in the adoption cycle, but still I’m typically a little behind (particularly in the larger technology space, which I am still new to).

But the importance of early adopters has never left my thoughts. The early adopters are the business owners we seek out first when entering a new market, and they are precisely not the end users that we seek to reach on our website. They are the people who determine whether new technologies fail or succeed and build momentum for those that do. So I wait for the early adopters to try things out see if they fail. Early adopters are the front line in end user technology, and they need to be taken seriously.

A few days ago, I mentioned Lewis Black (ok, I’ve been a little harsh on Lewis, but I’m actually a huge fan) and his mocking of internet addicts - essentially early adopters. Again, a prime example of the lack of understanding most people have of how new technologies can help us do things better and faster, or sometimes just have more fun doing them. MySpace, turned into Facebook, then Twitter became the next hot thing.

Many of my clients are now “working” on a Facebook page, and already have a MySpace page. Do these pages help them at all? Not measurably, but the point is that even these late adopters and slow moving businesses now see that they “really should” be on Facebook. Do a quick google of “Facebook Marketing” (an auto suggestion in firefox!) and you can see that people are making entire businesses out of advertising consulting for Facebook.

But now, the innovators are moving elsewhere, which means the early adopters will be soon to follow. Where will they go, and what will be that next cool technology that will be affecting the way people to business? I would say mobile, but the iPhone already happened and the flurry of 3G phones coming out this summer will blow that away. Its not a new social network, because I believe people are getting fatigued. Semantic Web 3 dot 0, fancy buzz words? I think we are a year or two away from anything drastic coming across the radar.

Any thoughts…

IAC reported its first quarter earnings today, with revenue up 22% and income up 15%, you could say that they had a very good quarter considering the gloomy shadow over the economy in that period. Most of this is due to their Media & Advertising division which saw a 192% increase in income. The Media & Advertising division consists of ask.com, CitySearch and Evite along with their other online properties (exluding Match.com). This substantial growth can be contributed to a few things, but most notably I would point out this shows that the online advertising space is positioned to grow very nicely, particularly in the current economic climate.

The fiasco resulting from comScore’s under reporting of Google’s clicks was a good representation of how the internet is still new to many big players. ComScore, regarded as the primo player in online measurement published a report that tanked Google stock, sent online agencies and publishers into a panic and threw a shroud of false gloom over the entire industry.

While our company has seen a cutback in spending from some of our advertisers, and hesitancy from new clients to invest their marketing in a new space, for the most part we have seen healthy earnings growth, an expanding customer base and a large increase in traffic. A good friend of mine running a leading e-tailer of health products and services saw revenues up 38% yr/yr in Q1 of ‘08. Our company doubled revenues over first quarter 2007. Online is up and its good.

Today the US economy reported a modest .6% growth. “NOT TECHNICALLY A RECESSION”, “THE US ECONOMY SLUMPS THROUGH 1ST QUARTER”, “INVESTORS SEE RECESSION, WALL STREET DEPRESSION” - those were the various headlines across the internet. I did a quick search and found that every major news outlet had some sort of dreary publishing of this not so bad news. The Dow is up .9%, the NASDAQ is up .4% but everyone is running around declaring the bad news.

People are smarter than this (some people anyway) but its hard to ignore the warnings. I see people making smart decisions with their marketing money, which is basically me saying “I see people spending their marketing money online.” The yellow pages are dead, and even the YPs are building their online presence. Google’s huge numbers are back in peoples mind and small businesses want to be a part of that success. Money is being spent, and thus money is being made - online. Thats where the people are going and thats where the budgets are beginning to gravitate.

I saw a segment from Lewis Black last night where he was mocking the younger generations for spending hours online each day. I like Lewis Black, but he went on a rant that just was not funny to me. He sounded like someone from the Prohibition era talking about how young people spend all their time in bars, drinking. Well Lewis, its not just young people, and we aren’t just making fake friends on MySpace. We (meaning people who use the internet) are finding information, researching purchasing decisions, exploring entertainment (music, video, even TV) and building our network of contacts. I find it ironic that you can watch Lewis Black on YouTube, talking about how people waste their time on YouTube. Hey Lewis, how would you feel if I told you that 30% of the people who watch you speak, are watching you online??

Lewis Black has nothing to do with what I’m talking about, but everything. The online economy is heating up, profits are up, more people are online and more transactions are being made and researched online then ever before. The majority of these companies are seeing great profits and surging business opportunities. The old market is not what it used to be - The World is Flat and we can’t just keep measuring things they way we used to, otherwise everything will look all messed up.

Kind of like when the economy shows a better than expected growth rate, and thats a bad thing… what if we excluded all these online and new media companies from that number - how bad would it be then?

I came across a few new interesting things this weekend. Here’s a quick overview as I’ve got a busy day and I’m stealing time right now…

Outside.in (http://outside.in/) Outside.in is an interesting example of aggregating local news and information. I discovered some new things happening in Providence, that I wasn’t aware of. It does a pretty good job of collecting different stories from different perspectives and on a variety topics, all focused around local. It does not, however, do a particularly good job facilitating an experience in Providence beyond the discussions being had on their page. Again, their revenue model seems to be based on supplying relevant content and serving your standard skyscraper ads from national brands (that don’t seem to be well targeted).

They claim to have discussions on 11,860 towns and neighborhoods on their site, but most of them seem to be large towns/cities in the Northeast / West Coast. (nothing new there). Anyway, an interesting take on local and I’m intrigued to see where they take it or what I can learn from it.

NY Times Mobile Real Estate: I noticed this ad on the back page of the Business section this morning as I was reading with my coffee. It basically allows you to text the number of a listing in the NYT to their number and it sends you back more details and a link to that listing’s mobile site. I tried it out, but the first listing I sent returned “We’re sorry but that listing is not available in NYT Mobile,” I tried it again and voila! it sent me the name of the property, the location of the property, the price, the listing agent and a link to the mobile site for that listing. The link took me a mobile site about the listing, and had every little detail I could want about the property (photos, taxes, schools, etc).

I think its a somewhat cool implementation of mobile for the NYT, however its not very out of the box. I am still tied to looking up these listing numbers either in print or on their website. A better and perhaps more useful application would be to incorporate location based services into this app and have it feed you back listings in your area. I walk to Chelsea and say, “I want to live here” and the NYT (or anyone else) tells me what is available literally in this area.

Those are my thoughts for the morning, what do you think?…

Today’s post comes after a hectic week, many miles of travel and a post by Seth Godin (Silly Traffic).

His post talks about a 75% bounce rate and the value of doing the best you can with the other 25% of the people who actually stay on your site. While I agree that maximizing conversions with the bulk of your traffic is important, a believe that in this day of niche and segmentation you shouldn’t be operating (and probably won’t be for long) a website that turns away 3 quarters of your potential traffic.

We run online city guides. Naturally we target our SEO and our paid links to reach people searching for what our content is all about. For the keyword “Restaurants in Providence, RI” our bounce rate for organic clicks is 8.3% (according to Google Analytics) and our PPC bounce rate for that keyword is even lower - 4.4%. I know those are really good numbers, and we do have entry keywords that bounce 40-50% of potential traffic (sitewide the bounce rate is 38%), but our top 20 keywords all have bounce rates under 12%.

My explanation of this is targeting. While some websites might have hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of products - tons of information, our sites have specific, segmented content that is designed to reach people searching for exactly what we offer. I don’t think any lightbulbs are going off in anyone’s head here, and I’m certainly not the first person/website to target specific traffic, but what are people doing with a website that turns away 75% of your traffic?!?

If you have a site about golden retrievers, and you target your SEO keywords and placement towards anyone searching for dogs, you are missing out on your core audience - golden retriever lovers. I feel like this is right up Seth’s alley, and was I very surprised to read his last post. He brings up excellent points in the second half of his post, but he seemed to contradict himself a bit.

75% of all unfocused visitors leave within 3 seconds.

He then says that “unfocused” could mean a digg link or even a Google search, but that 75% is ok.

The beautiful thing I’ve found about the internet is that you can get people to your site, targeted, focused people, by optimizing your site for certain keywords - in other words, focused traffic. Well I’m quite sure that more than 75% of people searching for “Siberian Buddhist Colonies” would bounce if they came across my site, but why would they come across my site looking for that.

They most likely wouldn’t and if our team is doing our job, they won’t. We want targeted traffic on our sites. People searching for the information our advertisers are paying to have found. So perhaps Godin’s point is overall correct, that you need focused traffic to succeed, but suggesting that it is wise not to worry about a 75% bounce rate is contradicting the whole point of search engines - to find what we are looking for.

We have succeed by building targeted and focused traffic on our sites, and by keeping our visitors on our site longer to maximize potential exposure to our advertisers. Ultimately in our space (my thoughts), you need to build a website that gets focused traffic, maintains a low bounce rate (<20%) and retains these visitors for an extended visit session with quality related content.

Our advertisers’ success is driven around our ability to provide them with targeted leads, and focused traffic. But if 75% of our traffic left in 3 seconds, our advertisers would not be far behind.