Guerilla marketing tactics

March 21, 2008

Advertising can be so boring sometimes. It’s far more engaging to create an advert that makes your prospective customers stop and stare while they try to figure out what it is you’re trying to market to them. Then the moment of realisation kicks in when they figure out what your product or service is and that’s when it gets stuck in their minds and advertising recall pays off.

Here’s some great examples on these two pages (link 1 and link 2).

My favourite I think has to be this one advertising a casino in an airport:

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, marketing
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Widget spend to grow

March 19, 2008

Widgets are gaining some serious traction! U.S. companies have spent approx $15m on widget based campaigns in 2007 and that is projected to grow to $40m in 2008.

That spend reflects only 2.5% of the total amount that is projected to be spent on social network advertising in the next year. Now that’s quite low, I believe this is because so many widget campaigns have been so poorly executed in the past year and corporates are having difficulty seeing the potential ROI in comparison to traditional banner advertising and more brand led efforts (such as sponsored pages and profiles).

I stick by my earlier prediction that 2008 will be the year of the widget; if portability, engagement and usefulness are all kept in mind then a widget campaign can serve both branding and conversion. For more on my thoughts on widgets see this post.

For more on widget spend visit eMarketer.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, banner, social network, widget
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Phorm; good or bad form?

March 17, 2008

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has come out as against the planned Phorm advert and tracking network today (more here from the BBC).

It was announced a couple of weeks ago that leading ISP’s were planning to use Phorm as a platform to serve up targeted adverts to ISP registrants. It’s been touted as a great way to provide more relevant ads to users and all the initial talk seemed like PR spin designed to mask any potential privacy issues.

Now at last the privacy issues are getting a good airing!

Personally I’m against my ISP using the data of my surfing habits for advertising purposes. I use my ISP for access to the internet, I do not expect them to share my data on surfing habits with anyone (unless asked to by the authorities…).

Other blogs are asking what the fuss is about this and comparing Phorm to behavioral targeting technologies in use on retail websites. I disagree with this completely as this is going to collect data at the ISP level and share it with any websites which serve adverts through Phorm, this makes it far more pervasive.

An interesting question has to be asked though; how does this differ to Google / Doubleclick? If Google starts to share behavioral search data with Doubleclicks ad serving platform isn’t that going to be similarly invasive to users privacy? Potentially; although at least we expect that from Google as an ad revenue based business…

Interestingly, the BBC has just published a story that states that the Foundation for Information Policy Research has claimed that Phorm could well be illegal. They believe Phorm contravenes the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), which protects users from unlawful interception of information.

This has the potential to get very interesting and could open up other networks and ad serving technologies to scrutiny.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, doubleclick, Google, phorm, privacy
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A widgets masterclass

March 3, 2008

Here’s an interesting series of articles and audio/video from Business Week on the subject of widgets. The series is designed to help influence CEO’s as to whether it’s worth dipping your toes in the waters of widgets (I’m a believer so I’d say yes, go for it).

Building a brand with widgets gives a good overview as to why it may be important to your brand to embrace new technologies and distribution channels such as widgets in order to promote your brand and discusses the viral aspects that can make brands fly online.

Widgets: The future of online ads is a piece singing the praises of widgets and all they stand for. On the flip side Why widgets don’t work is a counterpoint playing devils advocate.

A widget mogul in between classes is about the up and coming Facebook app developer Ankur Nagpal who’s made six figures at the age of 19 creating apps for Facebook.

When Facebook ads flop introduces us to some of the many unused Facebook applications and gives reasons for their failure. What’s good about this piece is the fact that most of the apps are from large companies with mature marketing strategies and yet they’ve still got it wrong, should be a warning to us all.

The CEO guide to widgets is a podcast talking about the use of widgets for advertising on social networks.

Finally, Making money from widgets is a video interview with VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez discussing how to go about monetising the widget world.

Great series of articles, definitely recommend sending this to your CEO (or manager…) if they really don’t seem to get it yet!

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, application, brand, facebook, marketing, widget
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Google losing some favour?

February 26, 2008

ComScore have released some data showing that clicks on ads on Google were down 7% in January compared to December and flat year-on-year (actually down 12% qtr-on-qtr).

This is pretty astounding news after the growth Google has seen in ad clicks over the last few years. The thought is that this isn’t anything fundamentally to do with Google or any competitor taking market share away, rather analysts seem to think this is a sign of the economic uncertainty we are currently seeing. Times are hard so people click less on ads….

What would be interesting is to see the search volume data alongside this click data to see whether searches have declined or stayed the same.

Needless to say Google’s shares have taken a bit of a battering today because of this.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, economy, Google, paid search, pay per click, ppc
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Every click counts!

February 25, 2008

As we’ve all known for a long time measuring the success of online ad campaigns based on the last-click is not really representative of how engaging your advert or link is to users.

Finally Microsoft have announced a solution that may be the beginning of the end for these old advertising techniques.

Engagement Mapping will allow campaigns to be attributed to every click in the journey of a user, one suspects that means they will attribute percentages of sales to each click to end up with a weighted user journey.

This is good news and great progress but what is needed now is a tracking tool that will allow conversions to be tracked in this way across channels such as affiliates, paid search and banners and attribute sales correctly. Only then will online marketers really understand the ROI each channel is delivering.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, affilate, banner, microsoft, paid search, tracking
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Google not quite the biggest ad revenue platform in the UK

February 19, 2008

But nearly…

Google has come in for the year at £1.3B of ad revenue from the UK alone. Estimates say that the TV channel ITV1 will come in at around £1.32B plus some £100M in sponsorship.

This is still pretty awesome from Google and they should take the lead next year as mobile expands and advertising moves to other platforms (and if they ever get DoubleClick properly into the fold).

More from the Guardian.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, doubleclick, Google, itv, tv
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Top online marketers rate SEO and behavioural ads

February 15, 2008

Marketing Sherpa has quizzed 420 top digital marketing experts about what they feel are the most effective methods for advertising online and which give the best ROI.

Search engine optimisation came top, this is not surprising as the ROI is incredible. Some changes take such little effort and can return such amazing gains that SEO will always be the top in a survey like this.

Second came behavioural targeting for adverts, slightly more surprising this one as I wasn’t aware the technology was quite there yet to get a better ROI than other ways of advertising such as paid search.

Paid search (or PPC) showed quite a drop in confidence in delivering ROI, however marketers said that the biggest increase in budgets would be in the paid search arena.

And the biggest trend in measurement for this year was voted to be the integration of search and email analytics with your standard onsite analytics thus completing the tracking of the customer journey. Integrating offline and online campaign tracking came second here, now that’s a holy grail and I don’t believe will be truly possible for a year or so longer.

Interesting study; more available here.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, banner, behavioural, marketing, paid search, ppc, search engine optimisation
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Yet another reason banners don’t work quite as well as marketers think

February 13, 2008

A study by ComScore, Tacoda (behavioural ad network) and Starcom has turned up some not wholly unexpected results regarding the profile of users who are frequent ad clickers in the U.S. online population.

It turns out that measuring your banner campaigns performance on click through rates may not actually signify brand engagement to the level that you’ve been expecting.

There is a small group of consumers out there who account for the vast majority of all banner click throughs. These heavy handed individuals make up just 6% of the online population in the U.S. and yet they account for 50% of all display ad clicks. Worse still, this small group is not fully representative of the public at large, rather it is made up on predominantly users between the ages 25-44 and with a household income of less than $40k. These people spend a lot more time online than the rest of the internet population but at the same time their spending online does not proportionately reflect this heavy usage.

What does this mean for marketers? Well, it could suggest that good click through rates do not correlate strongly with good brand awareness for the ads subject.

Time to diversify! Banners have their place, best used as a response mechanism to attempt to acquire or convert users, and that means best measured for effectiveness using other metrics than click throughs. Conversion rate and acquisition numbers are a far more accurate measure of success. A brand specific measure may prove to be engagement and their are now ways to measure engagement with banners and online adverts. Diversifying your online spend into other mediums is key, making sure you are represented well in search, more viral types of advertising and offline will have a better overall effect on your brand equity.

It’s up to web people to educate your marketing departments, many of you will have understood or suspected this for a long time!

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, banner, click through, marketing, online
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U.S. internet advertising grew by 27% in 2007

February 12, 2008

The IDC have announced that the market for U.S. internet advertising grew by a massive 27% in 2007.

Interestingly though, while Google grew by 40% year on year in Q4 that was down on their growth a year earlier. That made their market share slip by 0.5%, but they do still own over 23% of the market. Something to do with the coming saturation of search marketing perhaps?

IDC says a merged Microsoft-Yahoo would command 17% of the U.S. online ad market, so still not enough to topple Google from the top spot.

One wonders if the figures for Google include DoubleClick yet??

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, doubleclick, Google, internet, microsoft, online, yahoo
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