Tag Archives: advertising

The best way to target your ads is to ask the viewer.

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I decided to plan a trip to Yosemite last night (excited!). After picking out new gear from REI I happened to pull up VEVO to scan the music video community. Ironically almost every pre-roll spot I had was Carnival Cruises’s “Land vs Sea” series which shows a middle aged couple fussing around trying to camp and then a vacation later, relaxing on a cruise ship.  If you saw the purchases I made that night you’d get why I said it was ironic — my goal is to be exactly the opposite of what the ads were showing: I go outdoors to practically get lost, a pool day and easy dinner is great at times, but not an alternative to what I had booked.

This brings us to how advertising currently works.

First off I had switched devices using a service with no login so there was almost no way Carnival could have known I was looking at camping gear to either target towards me or away from me.

Second in their buy the frequency cap was obviously high enough that I kept seeing their spots. Since the creative changed frequently I’ll assume this was intended but it upped the effect.

Third advertising has become so network driven that companies often have no idea where their spot even is. I’m not entirely sure Carnival ever intended to target hard rock and pop video audiences with this ad or at all.

The big point here is that my preferences had no opportunity to make it to Carnival. Carnival does a good job engaging in social platforms but advertising (not just theirs) remains almost entirely one way and let’s face it, VEVO does not (and should not) put my camping affinity as the #1 insight to understand.

Privacy has always been cited as the block for getting smart with ads but that’s because we want everything to be done behind the scenes in a stealthy, “we tracked you and you didn’t know it” way.

One ad in to my viewing I would have gladly told Carnival to reach someone else just as I do all the time on Facebook ads with the little [x]. It’s not that they were dead wrong in reaching me, that’s going to happen, it’s that it kept happening. The same is true with TV. How many ads do you see that are totally irrelevant ans yet repetitive (and I’m not talking getting that blanket awareness effect for Coke Zero, I’m talking vocational schools when you have a PhD)? Lots and your chance to tell them? Zero. What’s the mighty “ROI” for those advertisers? Probably also near zero.

I’ve been to Brazil and the Bahamas in the last 12 months, much as we want our message to be a hit on the first impression and to figure out exactly who to reach to get the best response that’s not always possible — sometimes we don’t know who we’re reaching and sometimes who we’re reaching is not who wants our service right now.

But once we do show up the feedback loop works to tell us what to do next yet it’s not being used. We’ve got 3 variations of TVs on the market, a new type of media player every day but where’s the remote with the “no thanks” button? It’s time to build a dialogue into advertising, not to share the ad, not buy from the ad, but to make sure it’s the right ad.

Are you attracting a Fan or a Like? The mistaken rush to buy social visibility

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As the buzz around social becomes stronger, many corporations coming from the era of tv and print just finished struggling through online advertising and are now finding themselves facing something completely transformative that pushes aside the principles decades of marketing experience has taught them. This has caused a reactionary response where marketers have been tasked with hitting metrics to claim victory to the stock holders, the board or just the executive team. The buying of a like has become a quick fix.

You can’t claim engagement if you’re buying it

Whether it’s a flier in a newspaper with a Facebook coupon, a tv spot with a Twitter url for a contest or an outright offer to buy fandom with a deep discount (see “Did This National Restaurant Chain Put Too Much Love Into the Like?” by Jay Baer) the result a purchase of a like rather than a connection with a customer. As this sort of buying becomes more common place, it’s not surprising that even as brands talk about wonderful ideas like engaging and building community, research from the Get Satisfaction blog shows that 43.5% of consumers are following brands for offers — and why not, that’s what they’re being told they’ll get.

Already missing the mark on relevancy, social sites penalize poor relevancy

With hundreds of connections per user noise has become so high that systems like Facebook’s EdgeRank now exist to tune down what a user, their friends, and even the overall “like” audience see from a brand page. Even on systems like Twitter that don’t have scoring of responses, the mere amount of information makes the less than relevant disappear into the bottom of a long stream. Thus the more a brand buys it’s following, the less each follower sees, or cares to pay attention to the brand. This becomes a cold reality when you discover that some brands are suppressed to over 80% of their audience.

This doesn’t mean abandoning growth goals, but rather settingt expectations about what they lead too

A brand that decides “I’m going to go out and advertise my page to build up” is wrong to use the word engage to refer to that program. Conversation is gone and while the activity is on a social channel, it is as much broadcast marketing as an email list or a weekly mailer… Even worse with virtually no segmentation offered by social networks, the existing loyal fan base is lumped in with the prospecting effort. Everyone becomes one jumbled mess.

On the other hand, a brand that says let’s insert a flier with orders to share a comment, or posts a sign inside our stores with a mention that you’ll find expert product insights, company updates and occasional offers on their social pages is building the expectation of dialogue and is attracting loyalty and certainly customers. A discount may be associated but the qualification is that you want to be an insider, a participant first, and get a little something in return for it in access and savings.

Bigger counts do not actually mean bigger reach or results

It’s a critical realization and once you step down the paid like road it’s very difficult to get back up the relevancy ladder.

Social Media ROI does not end at new sales… Measuring the big picture

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If we’re starting a brand new company and tomorrow you kicked off a TV campaign promoting the business you’d expect some immediate sales to walk in the door, you’d expect to hear about the efforts, but chances are you’d be downright surprised if you broke even on new sales. After decades and decades of advertising we’ve come to accept the value of building brand perception to grow business over the long haul. So why is it that so many companies’ measure social media only by the short term sales bump?

Just because you have data doesn’t mean you know the full story

Since the banner first hit the web marketers have been stuck in the same paradigm – the data is there so measure it. And why not, with data coming in seconds rather than days or even weeks, the temptation to assume it’s all right there is great. Yet we’ve started to learn that people are using multiple ads, are narrowing in with many searches over time and conversions are taking longer and longer as the web becomes a corner stone of shopping. Single metrics are dangerous.

The opportunity cost of using social media only to acquire

Instead digital marketing, and even more so social media, must be looked at as holistic program that is as much a necessity as creating brand awareness and consideration is.

Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase, according to an October 2008 survey by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates

One could look at driving user reviews as an acquisition effort. There’s an audience to target, an expense to drive, host and promote reviews and a lift associated with a product that has them over one that does not. But it’s deeper than that.

When the majority of your customers are seeking reviews it’s not just about what you can increment, it’s about what you stand to lose. If you opted not to push for reviews because you couldn’t justify the cost on new sales, you risk all sales, not just new ones as people turn to other sites or product lines that offer the support they’ve come to expect. That’s not captured in lift metrics.

There are no longer channels, even tactics outside of marketing, must complement to earn a sale

Your investments into all forms of media drive people back to you or your partner’s digital properties for research.  Just like with reviews, if someone who uses Twitter sends a message for pre-sales questions and gets nothing… not a customer support message, not a suggestion of a peer to peer area, just silence. That speaks volumes about what your brand will be like after they buy.

This extends to all channels… after being intrigued by a radio spot and going a company’s website a user who discovers a blog about the culture and expertise becomes a great choice, even a premium value, while the other company that just promotes their tradeshow booth feels empty, or “salesy”. Customers don’t care which channel gets attribution for the sale, they simply look for validation – a good buy or a bad one.

Let’s not forget the brand awareness opportunity either

This isn’t just about tactics that support a product purchase on the front end either. Just like TV is run on a negative upfront ROI basis to produce over the long haul, a social campaign can have the same value.

750 million people on Facebook outrank major sports events, dramas or reality tv, and they’re around just about every day. So if a customer goes knocking on your Facebook page and it isn’t there, or isn’t doing a good job of holding their attention when they “fan” up, that’s a wasted opportunity. But with social this isn’t just prospective awareness, this is true engagement opportunity where a good program can have that person showing affinity and even spreading it. How does that factor in to upfront sales?

Measure but measure the right picture

By no means do I advocate stopping or backing off on measuring your campaigns but instead it’s about making sure you understand their full impact and measure that. The problem with data is that we tend to focus on what we have easily available, and that’s new customers who come in directly or old ones who stay attached… but engagement, validation, cross-channel sales, and many of the other components of social are not easily studied and thus they are skipped and that not only short changes your programs but opens the door to cutting something that’s far more important than you may realize.