There was a lot of talk this week concerning the Pay Per Click Campaign that iCrossing ran for Ann Summers with apparent strong feeling on both sides. The BA air strike is an emotive issue but I don’t want to linger on the morals of using it as a marketing technique (others have done that already), I am more interested in the technique itself.
The campaign revolved around the British Airways strike by cabin staff, and was executed so that anyone looking for keywords about the strike was greeted with a Google ad that. The PPC campaign made statements such as “Your plane may be grounded but you can still take off with our toys”. According to the picture below showing the google results it performed quite well and was rewarded with a top position.
I would be interested to learn exactly how this performed in a case study. The power of PPC is that it gives you an ad for what you want at the time you are looking for it. So is the rationale here, “I am interested in finding out about the British airways strike, Oh look I nearly forgot I need to buy a dildo, some anal beads and a tube of lube?” Did the ad produce significant click through or was the intention to use a direct response media for brand building purposes and not expect to produce click through? How do you measure that? Was it measured?
It’s certainly a cheeky and inventive creative idea but is it one that we can simply look at and say it was cheeky and inventive or did it actually work and produce sales for the client? Anyone care to comment? My feeling is that unless you take that traffic and do something with it then it is wasted traffic
As I seem to have been afflicted by the brutality of a vodka bottle hitting me on the head last night during a pleasant evening out with some of the Centaur Publishing crew (or at least that’s what it feels like) it would seem to be an ideal time to sum up this year’s festivities. It was our office party on Friday when clients, partners friends and prospects all got together for an evening of merry making here at our Kings Cross base.
Mince pies and all manner of seasonal savouries were consumed, wine was mulled, cider was spiced, carols were sung around the Christmas tree, the Wii was set up on the big screen and everyone got very very very drunk. From this little blowout we then proceeded to the nearby (and quite fabulous) Bree Louise pub with its selection of mighty pies and extremely fine real ales and then on to the Elixir bar in Camden where the remaining hard core danced the night away.
As our first Christmas party and coming hot on the heels of our first birthday it was a lovely way to celebrate the Christmas season and to reflect on a year of hard work. Naturally we chose to do this with some close friends from Fosbury marketing and WDMP and meandered our way through several Soho venues in search of the perfect Mojito
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We are now looking forward to the next twelve months which we hope will be full of even more wonderful things and fantastic clients to work with.
On a side note our offices will be closed from 24th December until 4th January
This morning whilst enjoying my cup of tea and hangover curing sausage sandwich I flicked the television on and say what seemed to be a hastily put together piece on BBC Breakfast Time.
In it several people were discussing the Procter and Gamble ad for Olay. The ad is for the well known anti wrinkle treatment but the (still amazingly stunning) Twiggy had been airbrushed to hide her own wrinkles. The ad has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Procter & Gamble were apparently (according to the piece I saw) unaware of the level of photo retouching that had been applied and were quoted as saying that the level of airbrushing was inconsistent with their own policies.
The ad received two complaints via Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson’s anti airbrushing campaign which has now received over 700 complaints in total referring to a number of ads.
The fact that this story which I would normally only expect to read through my industry bulletin emails has made the nations news service is certainly indicative of the strength of feeling on this subject.
A few years ago Dove created the Evolution ad which won a host of awards at the time and is widely believed to be one of the finest Ads of the decade
This seems wholly out of step with the news today, I mean Twiggy is a national treasure and gorgeous, she doesn’t need any help persuading people how gorgeous she is.
It also underpins what we have been saying for ages
1) Consumers don’t believe what you tell them
2) Consumers don’t believe what you show them
3) They will believe what an acquaintance says no matter how little they actually know them
The Olay ad is a fine example as to why this attitude exists. It’s a wrinkle cream, and you showed someone with their wrinkles airbrushed out. What bit of that made sense and how silly do you feel about doing it? Naturally P&G didn’t authorise or suggest it, but somewhere in the chain someone decided that Twiggy without a touch up wasn’t enough, and that was a huge mistake.
The digital marketing world in which we inhabit forges relationships between consumers and brands and is centred on the customer. This ‘old advertising’ example is a megaphone shouting out the big idea (buy our product and you will look like Twiggy). I don’t think I can highlight any clearer the difference between the two approaches.
We think that this form of advertising not only doesn’t work, but is actually harmful to a brand, after all who wants to be branded as a liar?
Its the season for top tens and predictions for next year. Never to be one for missing out on a trend we include our predictions for 2010 below:
1) Digital marketing will come of age and stop focusing on tactical disciplines. Leading on from this the value of strategic marketing will become better understood by digital marketers and welcomed by clients
2) Publishing will experience an extremely turbulent year and many publications could potentially be put up for sale discontinued or merged together
3) Google will stop being viewed as the enemy of publishers and acknowledged as a valued partner
4) Online broadcast of TV content will become a huge issue for TV companies and lead to similar scenes as we have seen this year for news publishers
5) The concept of a mobile wallet will become a common thing for consumers
6) The world wide web and mobile web will converge as mobile browsers become as common as laptops
7) Wifi in the city streets for everyone
8) Display advertising will enjoy a short renaissance followed by a larger debate about banner ads use and effectiveness
9) Offline and integrated marketers will face a huge task as they move from a broadcast media model to one that is customer led. Not everyone will be able to adapt.
10) A pure digital agency will secure lead agency status by a times 100 company
Oh and one more for luck
Arsenal will win the FA cup!
What are your predictions and what do you think of ours?
As much as I think any improvement for display advertising is a good thing, I can’t help feeling that geographical targeting is a bit of a waste of time. On the one hand you have media that makes time and place irrelevant and then on the other you try and segment the audience based on the things that by nature of the media don’t matter. It’s something that intrinsically feels wrong to me. Surely it would be better to serve up ads based on site usage, so that if I started to look at online content about financial products then the online ads would be based on financial products, and if I started to look at geographic content then the ads would be relevant to that area.
Essentially I don’t think that display ads are direct response because they are intrusive. I’m not saying they are a bad thing because they do have a significant brand awareness role to play as part of an overall media multiplier but in and of themselves I cant help but feel that their role is to establish an ambience of brand around the content rather than demanding a click through.
Does this sound strange to anyone or is that how you view banner ads as well?
I saw a quote this morning that proclaimed twitter and social media is like a bunch of teenagers experimenting with sex. Try as I might I can’t help but agree wholeheartedly with this. Every generation thinks they invented sex and cannot conceive of a time when anyone other than themselves were having sex. No amount of tales of copulation in the street at the end of the first world war or clandestine couplings in Green Park during the Second World war blackout will ever persuade the current generation that anything happened between couples for any other purpose except procreation before they worked out that they had genitals. Not even tales of the swinging sixties or pre aids 80s can do anything to dispel this view amongst the young that the multiple orgasm is something they invented.
(Yes I know I am going too far, but you get the point?)
So it is with social media. A generation of digital natives has come along and is now telling the fuddy duddy directors of companies that they do not know what they are doing and need to change the way they do business into some kind of hippy social media love in. I think the analogy stands up with everyone sitting around and talking about things they do not fully understand and have limited experience of but with a dogma that is born of idealism and against a backdrop of an uncertain world.
I could just as easily be writing about my own experiences of early adulthood in the 80s or my mother’s in the fifties or my grandfather’s in the 30s as I could be writing about the world of business today and in every example whilst the younger generation has something to say you wouldn’t take every word as gospel would you?
Marketing activity of any kind and specifically digital marketing needs to be part of an overall marketing strategy and needs to produce a return on investment. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
The season of good will is upon us and everyone in agency land is preparing for the annual assault upon the liver that goes along with client entertainment and a myriad of agency/client/industry parties. So far this year the highlight of our social calendar has got to be the lovely party that Stella McCartney threw a few weeks ago in Mayfair which we went to with Atiiva Diamonds.
It’s well known in the industry that a certain amount of drunkenness can ensue from Christmas Party time and it is not unusual for an account handler or receptionist to wake up the following morning with a few things to explain to their signifficant other, but below is a cautionary tale for how to guage when you have had enough. Thanks to Gavin Wheeler over at WDMP for sending it over and for bringing back a few memories of nights out we have had together. (We still on for next week Gav?)
I see t all over the place online, and particularly on commercialised blogs. People have content articles which you start to read when suddenly a hover ad in a style sheet dims the article you are reading and demands that you interact with it, or close the article. Well guess what, I close the article and I suspect everyone else does as well.
Some of them do at least have a close option on them but others are so badly written (or so determined to get a click and a bit of commission at any cost) that the rest of the site becomes useless and pointless for the visitor.
This kind of advertising isn’t a million miles away from the shop assistant who immediately accosts you and pesters you from the moment you walk into their shop until the moment you get fed up and storm out vowing never to go back.
In both cases there is absolutely no engagement, and the only thing in their eyes is dollar signs. It is also an attitude that is more likely to actually prevent a sale from happening than pretty much anything else
Any sale is completed by consent from both sides. These types of site are not destined to produce any real revenue for the owner because the vast majority of visitors will close down and go somewhere else. As a result any useful content that the site has amassed is completely wasted.
We know that Google’s Adwords work because they give you exactly what you are interested in at exactly the time you are looking for information on it. Compare that to an Ad that isn’t targeted and won’t go away and interrupts you whilst you are researching something else. How likely is that ad to succeed?
As a professional I am incredulous that people persist with these tactics and would urge everyone to sit and think about what they were doing. There is a way to market, advertise and promote yourself online and it works. Why would you want to pick techniques that didn’t work?
There is a lot in the press at the moment regaling the story that is gradually unfolding regarding Print news media and Online Search. It has even reached prime coverage on BBC Newsnight.
On the one hand Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp states that Search engines index their content and make it available free and on the other hand Google states that they deliver many millions of reader s every day to News Corp websites and if they cant figure out how to make money from that audience then it isn’t their fault.
If the scenario continues to play out as it has been then it is completely conceivable that News Corp and other print media owners will remove their content from Google’s index.
Search engines rank their content based on a series of criteria and one of those criteria concerns backlinks. The goal for any site owner is to get relevant backlinks from sites which have e high authority, and the highest authority has often been from journalist sites such as the ones that News Corp and the other print media owners.
If News Corp actually manages this and (along with otter print media news owners) removes their content completely then a lot of index listings are suddenly going to have the corresponding backlinks removed. This could have some serious repercussions for Google. Their calculations will not have the print titles to count links from and so a new ranking will be produced. Will it look anything like the old one? It could also mean that social media backlinks from Blogs and social bookmarkeing sites could take on even higher importance than they currently do.
Can we expect Google to make significant changes to the way that it indexes sites if this all comes to light?
Our SEO techniques use social media a lot and these techniques could become very important if thing play out as they have been. Google has implemented the 5 clicks for free rule but is that going to convince the media owners to stay with Google and keep their backlinks available? I am not sure, but am absolutely fascinated to see how this is going to play out.
Over the last year, whatever trade show or marketing conference you went to most of the noise was concerning video (apart from people often getting social media wrong of course). YouTube was the obvious sacrament that was held up to the awe struck masses and the commandment was given go forth and record a marketing video.
I actually remember something like that being said a year ago tomorrow when I went along to the Business Startup show. Now its not that I am not a visual person. I have indeed seen some highly informative videos on YouTube, (most of which have been giving advice on how to fix various parts of a bicycle), and I have seen some pretty swish video presentations either from conferences or filmed in the office that had some quite high production values. I have viewed the mobile phone thirty second wonders which give you low production values but enough information so that it doesn’t grate on you so much, but there are also a lot of people who have tried to make videos, as commanded from the speaker’s podium and I don’t know about you but I don’t think the vast majority of them work at all.
There are exceptions like the wonderful anecdotes of yesteryear usually given by someone in their seventies or eighties on a Youtube Channel, but the reason I think they work is because there is a calm honesty to these short presentations, and it shows. They are very different from what I am talking about and I think it can be summed up with the view that audiences value authenticity over perfection, and also an understanding that the camera doesn’t love everyone.
I know that MLM and alleged business coaches get a bad rap on this blog but they do highlight exactly what I am talking about, which is where the content takes second place to the ego. Back when I first started designing websites we used to have a saying that if company owners started spending too much time chasing fame on the television (we were new and interesting creatures that TV shows seemed to want to talk to), then it was a sure sign that their business was in trouble and the ego was now driving the business into the ground. More often than not this proved itself to be correct but there does seem to be something about digital marketing that unleashes a frustrated need to address the world and achieve as close to celebrity status as possible as you give your own version of Gordon Gecko’s ‘greed is good’ speech to your assembled online audience.
I’ve been trained in camera technique and so I know how difficult it is and all too often tense, unfocused eyes stare into a camera lens and deliver a performance that is more worthy of a travelling freak show than an Oscar. It really is like watching the very worst early auditions from X factor. It might amuse but it won’t get the person delivering it taken seriously. Nor will it make their dreams a reality.
Whether it is a close up in an office or set against a backdrop of the Hollywood hills, all too often there is a complete lack of sincerity in the delivery and no benefit that I can perceive.
Video is a powerful tool, but video demands respect and should not be attempted without preparation.
