My ClickZ.com column for this week takes a close look at how events in the world, Weather changes, natural disasters and special events and holidays) can be useful guides for positioning ads and campaign so that they truly do reach the right people “at the right time”.
To help support the column, I wanted to share with you some good examples of ads that have been created specifically to take advantage of some of these events. A special tip of the chapeau to my friend Anna Reischl for doing all the hard work and pulling together this excellent group of examples:
This example from Dunkin’ Donuts is specifically positioned to help consumers ‘beat the heat’. By letting a summer heatwave set the mood, the ad is ready for a high motivated audience.
Likewise, this duo from Starbucks has you covered at both ends of the temperature spectrum…
Positioning of messages for selling seasons (i.e, bathing suits in the summer, boots in the winter) is a long standing strategy. However, this ad for Columbia was actually positioned as the result of a large snowstorm due during the next day.
This ad, while poorly defined, was positioned specifically as the result of an incoming hurricane. You can see the original page here:
This recent ad was driven by the keywords “swine flu”.
Special and annual events can also be used to drive interest and timely traffic. Here, Apple gets ready for their ‘Black Friday’ sales event.
The significance of a day depends on who you are. Here, Canon positions an ad for dads (or those buying for dads) as a way to celebrate Father’s Day.
Is there any day more personally relevant than your birthday? Here Adidas takes advantage of previous data collecting activities to offer the consumer a special offer for their special day.
Positioning ads against events is often based on common sense or sheer luck but marketers who are willing to pay attention to what motivates their target audiences can really benefit for some early planning and then waiting for an opportunity to take advantage of perfect timing.
Not only are media planners tasked with getting the right message in front of the right consumer at the right time, but they also need to do this with a number of blind spots — such as far-flung ad networks and a range of content diverse sites — that can get in the way of making a direct connection with consumers.
As a result, the periodic mismatch between page content and ad content can be truly cringe worthy or utterly hysterical, depending on your personal sensibilities.
During the past few years, I’ve taken to collecting these examples as a way of illustrating the flaws in the system as well as offering my students a good chuckle at the expense of advertisers who just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As it says on one of my favorite de-motivational posters from the folks at Despair.com, “It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.”
That said, like any process, hopefully we can learn from our mistakes and move on from there.
Submitted for your approval…
Protecting you brand is important. So is figuring out beforehand that there are plenty of ways that you can drag your own brand through the mud if not careful. I don’t feel so well. I wonder if it was something I ate…
Look, ‘Shark’ is a fine word but probably not something you want associated with your brand. It’s not as if any news story is going to have a headline line ” Retiring Philanthropist Shark Sets up Scholarship Fund to Educate Deserving Children”. Instead, you’re most likely going to end up dealing with more sensationalist headlines that get a little closer to the true nature of these lawyer wannabees.
No, Really…And a shiny dime to anybody who can explain the goal of the South Africa ad on this page. “It’s Possible” you’ll be devoured by a Great White? I’ll pass.
I’m guessing that some brand categories are a little harder to wrangle than others, that said, I think this can be improved on.
Cringe worthy at its finest…Can you say “Ewwwwww”?
“Hey Mom, I got my picture posted on the Web!”. Lucky you…
Once again, some keywords just aren’t needed. Just imagine what Iomega paid to have their brand associated thusly…
These are a few of my favorites but certainly not all of them. I’ll post another group soon.
When I started working with online advertising in 1998, the world was a slightly different place. Back then, online display ads were still growing in popularity and campaign results still yielded a 2-3% click through rate on average.
But even then, when click through rates seemed to have become the de facto approach for measuring online display ad campaign effectiveness, I still had strong doubts about the overall efficacy of click through models as a way to determine advertising success.
For starters, the idea of click-through always makes me ponder the age-old philosophical question ‘If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it does it make a sound?’ Sure, it’s a nonsensical question but its significance is one of being able if an event happens even if nobody is able to directly prove it. With click-through rates the question had generally come down to:
1) What is the value of a click-through and
2) how can advertisers use this metric to better understand the marketing and branding abilities of their campaigns.
The real weakness with the click-through metric, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t tell much of a story. What does a click-through really represent? For example, if an ad is able to garner enough interest in order to get itself clicked on does that mean the offer is appealing or that the ad is appealing?
We’ve known for years that ads that contain good call to action ‘power words’ like FREE generally have higher response rates but is that because they cater to the desires of consumers or because they pique curiosity? And what does that higher CTR mean from an acquisition or conversion standpoint?
Over the years I have come to the conclusion that click-through tells such a limited story that it is nearly useless. Certainly we want to be able to drive traffic to web sites and landing pages and display ads can help that happen, but putting all of our eggs in the click-through basket tends to push advertisers toward believing that getting attention is the same thing as effective branding or a good rate of conversion.
For example, if you were to open a new store on a street corner, which would be of greater value to you as a proprietor?
1) 1000 weekly visitors who walk into your store, look around and then leave without buying anything or
2) Only 1 store visitor comes in all week but makes a purchase
Now, it depends on what your marketing goals are. If making money through direct action of some sort is your goal then the metric you want to track is how much money you made. However, if the goal is branding then more exposure is good exposure.
Bottom line for me has always been, what was the campaign’s goal and how was that being measured? If it is merely click-through then there generally isn’t enough information to make a clear judgment as to the campaigns efficacy.
That said, what should we be measuring and how? Is there a unifying metric that ties everything together so we can understand immediately if a campaign is successful for not?
Ah, lots of questions but not a lot of answers. The future still has plenty to reveal.
As a college professor and corporate trainer, a good percentage of my time is spent standing in front of groups of people and sharing with them best practices, insights and theories surrounding a number of different topics.
A September gets underway I find myself reviewing my digital marketing curriculum for upcoming classes and realizing (again) that while I took the summer off the realm of digital marketing continued to evolve. That’s not to say the changes have been earth shattering, but at times I opine that it didn’t find the same fascination with history than I do with marketing because if nothing else, it would keep the curriculum updates to a minimum.
In truth, I love this industry partly because it is always moving and changing. I try not to kid myself that my efforts are somehow going to save humanity, make the world better place and finally figure out how to make a cold fusion generator. I’m in marketing, or as I like to think of it, “Digital Communications”.
That said, I’m also an educator and in taking a look at the cosmic karma tally sheet, I’m hopeful that my dedication to share what I know with others has took my account into the black just a little.
The bottom line for me is that the excitement and fascination that I have with digital and interactive communication (and we can call it marketing and advertising if you wish) is the fact that it is still so uninformed that we can constantly reinvent the future.
During the next few months I get back to sharing my ideas to this blog about how these changes can affect us positively as communicators, educators and marketers.
My wife and I often wonder if we may have missed our true careers in life — that of being psychotherapists. I doubt we’re the only ones, but it seems that we often find ourselves in situations where total strangers feel a need to share with us the sordid and decidedly private portions of their lives.
Just this morning, while waiting at a garage for my car to get inspected, a woman in the waiting room managed to fill me in on the details of her failed marriage and how her ex-husband is still stressing her out nine years after the fact. This wasn’t information I needed, but I was able to share some empathetic nods and to listen to her story and offer suggestions of support. Like I said, this type of thing is fairly common for me. I have heard more than my share of horror stories of messed up marriages, dysfunctional children, drug and alcohol abuse stories, sexual proclivity, and other aspects of the human psyche that generally serve as a reminder that my life is going pretty well. I guess I should be happy I have one of those faces that look friendly and approachable.
I’ve known for many years people need to have other people to talk to in order to process the things that overwhelm them personally. The growth of the field of psychology has provided a number of professional outlets for being able to deal with personal trauma but the reality of our social lives as humans is that we will often turn to the nearest person in order to share our pain and effort to find solace and understanding.
We’re also seeing a similar type of “over sharing” in the social media space. I’m often surprised (and sometimes amused) with the types of things that my Facebook and twitter friends decide to share with the world. While I’ve never considered myself an overly private guy, I have a pretty good sense of what I feel is just too personal to share with a list of friends and acquaintances.
However, from a behavioral monitoring standpoint, social media tools are a fascinating collection of the human psyche in action. Whether the comments are appropriate, inappropriate, vapid, spot on, or just plain weird, they help to paint a picture of not only the individuals involved but of human beings in general.
Consistent throughout all the messages populating my Facebook and Twitter streams is the visceral need many of us have to be able to share what we think is important and meaningful with others.
We all have people in our lives who served as our touchstones. These are the people who we call when good and bad things happen to us — our parents, best friends, spouses, etc.
However, very few of us have people we can turn to when really tragic things are happening to us. For example, discussing marital difficulties with even close friends is often a nonstarter because most people us don’t want their friends to choose sides and end up hating their significant others, they generally just want to vent for a moment. On the other hand, a total stranger is sometimes the perfect venue for discussing something so private because they can only remain objective if they don’t know you or your spouse.
Sometimes it’s the anonymity of social media settings and the opportunity to express our fears and our hopes that makes it work. I think it’s also important to remember that in spite of how we present ourselves in public, most of us have a fragile side that also needs recognition from time to time. Sometimes, the solution people want most of all is just to have someone else hear them.
I’ve been recently working on a project for a client which required me to create a fake Facebook account for the purposes of demoing a process. Since the subject of the demo was a woman named Susan who is setting up a fan page, I found a suitable clipart shot of a competent looking woman, wrote up a very brief and very bogus biography, and started a new Facebook account on her behalf.
The purpose of the account was primarily to serve as an entry point to Facebook and show how to create fan pages. What I didn’t count on was that within a few hours of “Susan’s birth” she would have potential suitors already lining up for her attention.
Because I thought it would look more realistic for this new Facebook user to actually have some friends I accepted all comers.
It seems a bit odd to me — and perhaps it’s because I’m a guy, but the number of guys (and only guys) who have sent Susan Facebook friend requests in the past few weeks is just a little bit creepy.
I guess my question would be just who are these guys and why did they want to be Susan’s friend anyway? My second question would be, ‘is this the kind of thing that real women have to put up with all the time?’ (followed by a shudder).
Unfortunately, Susan’s ‘appeal’ to totally strange man also resulted in one of them trying to engage her in conversation. Try as hard as I might, I was unable to get this particular potential suitor to understand that Susan was not real as he started text messaging her repeatedly while I was doing screen captures:
George: hi Susan, nice to meet you
Me: Susan isn’t a real person. She is a test file
George: what does that mean?
Me: that she isn’t a human. She is a computer simulation. For a video project covering Facebook.
George: never. Do determine wot. So if your not real shud I delete u?
Me: please do. You’re messing up my screen captures.
George: Funny
Me: Not very
George: How can a computer respond like that?
Me: Please stop messaging
George: You delete me
Me: I’m not a computer. I’m human. Susan is a bogus account I set up so I can record a Facebook simulation. Got it?
George: no. I don’t understand at all. R U female?
Me: no
George: so if ur male y pik a girls name?
At this point I decided that my conversation with George was not to get any more enlightening and deleted his friendship.
Now, chances are that George is just some lonely dude looking to reach out. On the other hand, acquiring a few social skills will probably make the process easier for him in the future. Either way I’m have a new found sympathy for the kind of creepy advances that some women have to put up with. All I can say in response is an empathetic “Eeeeeeeewwwwww!”
As history has shown us time and time again, there are times when a society gets sick and tired of being sick and tired. During these times of revolution (like storming the Bastille on this day in 1789) the status quo gets turned on its ear and change is created – for better or worse is up to constant debate.
While I doubt that US citizens are on the verge if staging a revolt, I can say that personally after 8 years of wars, a seriously slumping economy and the fears (some valid some not) surrounding a terrorism protectionist culture, that I have had all the bad news I can stand and can’t wait to move on toward something more positive.
I mention this because as I picked up my mail today, I received two magazines, both of which heralded in their headlines, futuristic themes (Fortune and Wired for those of you keeping score at home.) I find this significant, not that magazines are thinking about the future, but that more and more onus for great technological, social and financial breakthroughs seem to be off a ways in this place we call the future. If you look around, there is a lot of news recently regarding future events – exciting, positive and life changing. The problem is that none of them seem to be happening now. In fact, just about every news story I read about the present seems so focused on what we don’t have and can’t do now that it seems counterproductive to read them.
While I’m hoping that 2010 will be more comfortable that 2009 has been so far, I also have to acknowledge that I don’t live in the future-yet. Instead, I need to be part of the solution that makes that future become the panacea that we’re all hoping for.
While I have no evidence that this is the answer, I’ve decided that my path to the future is going to be based on avoiding the negativity that threatens to kill my bliss almost daily and instead to find great examples of what’s going right, what‘s new and exciting, who I really like to spend my time with and how we can all work together to make the future even better than what the pundits are projecting.
In short, the future doesn’t give a rat’s ass if I’m personally happy or successful. That’s my job. If I can envision this outcome then I can make it true (although the odds are good that I won’t do it by myself) by focusing on what I can do to make the world a nicer place. But I can’t wait for the future; I’m getting started now. Feel free to come along.
As a marketer, a big part of my job is finding new and interesting ways to communicate with consumers. However, as a consumer I am often discouraged by many of the poorly planned and targeted advertising campaigns there are out there.
I’m a huge fan of relevant message targeting. While I also believe that more traditional reach and frequency metrics have their place in certain branding campaigns, the idea of trying to reach “everybody” with a single campaign seems antiquated and very wasteful.
Because we have computers and because we have an online marketing infrastructure to help lead us, were no longer beholden to hoping that our campaigns are working but can instead measure results to see if it is true or not. During the last few years, advances in behavioral targeting have given advertisers new tools to allow them to better refine the audiences they want to reach instead of having to default to getting the same message to everybody.
I bring this up because well meaning members of the U.S. House of Representatives have decided that behavioral targeting is an invasive science that needs additional regulation. The proposed legislation focuses on giving consumers the right and ability to opt out of being targeted using behavioral technologies. While on the surface it sounds a fair option, the reality is that the bill like this can severely stifle the ability for behavioral targeting to do its job. As a result, advertisers would still be the default to reaching everybody if they can’t target specific audiences.
As a huge proponent of consumer privacy I have no argument with most of the thoughts behind the pending legislation. However, in my experience with behavioral targeting (and having written a book on the topic I have some unique insights) the vast majority of behavioral targeting solutions are fully anonymous and cannot personally identify the consumers they are reaching. By comparison, direct marketers not only have your name, but in most cases, your home address. Try opting out of those lists.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming weeks and months. I am hopeful that the lawmakers won’t decide to throw the baby out with the bathwater and will instead focus on guidelines to prevent the transfer of personally identifiable data between marketers. By the way, an IP address does not count as personally identifiable data.
When a colleague of mine died early this spring he left behind many friends, a young family and his Facebook page. Recently, I saw his picture come up in rotation as one of my Facebook friends. Figuring that his account had gone quiet, I was surprised and rather touched to find that during the months since his passing, several friends and his children had posted messages to him expressing their missing of him and keeping him up-to-date on events that were taking place in their lives.
I found the action very poignant and started to wonder if this wasn’t a natural way to grieve the passing of people that we love. To me, it seems to be the modern equivalent of standing in the cemetery and talking to a grave marker but also allows those thoughts to be shared with other friends and family.
As a social media tool, communicating with dead loved ones will probably never be a killer app but it’s nice to see that these tools still allow us to express our humanness and to help us feel less alone during those times when we most need to be together.
I think it was Roseanne Arnold who once said “it’s true; you do see the same people on the way down that you saw the way up”.
It seems that one of the national pastimes of this country is watching celebrities, large companies and anybody else who seems to pull ahead of the pack, to fall from grace. During the past few months Twitter has emerged as a ‘cutting edge social media’ tool. During this time, Twitter has been hyped, been part of major news stories, and has entered the consciousness of millions of people. The main challenge for Twitter has been to live up to all that hype.
Recently, news has been emerging that Twitter has a huge churn rate. While the rate of sign-ups may be impressively high (over 2000% in the past year) it’s starting to appear that the majority of those who sign up for Twitter poke around for a few days and then disappear. This news is also often followed by gloom and doom prognosticators who claim that this is indicative of Twitter’s inability to be an effective marketing tool.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that much of what establishes any growth in any industry is based upon two factors: 1) a perceived need for that product or service in the market, and 2) curiosity on the part of consumers to learn more about those products and services. In the case of Twitter, with so much hype surrounding its use (largely brought on by people like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher) many people just wanted to check it out to see what it was. This is all perfectly acceptable.
However, just because you check something out doesn’t mean that it’s something you want or need. We’ve all watched the random infomercial for a product that we never bought. It may have engaged us and even held our attention for a full half-hour and made us think of ourselves “wow, if I bought that product I can have washboard abs!” But there’s a difference between those things that pique our interest, and those that motivate us to take action. In the case of Twitter, just because you logged in and looked around doesn’t mean it’s something you need.
For years I have been a fan of master carpenter Norm Abrams and his show “The New Yankee Workshop“. I sometimes watch with fascination at the ease in which he creates these complex pieces of furniture. But I also realize that if I were to try to create the same project, odds are good that it will look like it was put together by vandals. The bottom line is that even if I went out and bought all of these great tools, that doesn’t make me a master carpenter. That moniker comes with a good understanding of how to use those tools to accomplish my goals.
I feel the same holds true for Twitter. To claim that Twitter can’t live up to its promise to be good marketing tool has nothing to do with Twitter itself, but with how it is used. Anybody who believes that the path to marketing success when using Twitter is simply throwing up a random tweet once in a while is using pretty much the same logic as a person who believes that buying a hammer and saw will magically turn them into a craftsman.
It’s not a question of whether Twitter can be used effectively as a marketing tool. There are way too many cases of people who’ve used it as an effective way of communicating with other people who really want to hear what they have to say. But like any mode of communication, it is not a magic bullet that will suddenly grab the attention of everybody and bring them to your doorstep. Instead, it is only a tool that can allow marketers and other people to create a targeted list of other people who might be interested in what they have to share. And that itself is pretty damn impressive.
