Make Digital Marketing Work

The decade is barely a few days old and already the marketing industry is in full swing.  I read yesterday that display advertising is promoting itself with a series of ads designed to court controversy and prove its ability to cut through.

The ads feature controversial slogans such as “Working women make bad mothers”.  Aside from the fact that my own mother was a working woman and still managed to be the best mother in the world ever (and I am prepared to commit an act of violence on anyone who tries to argue with me on this), I can’t help feeling that the campaign isn’t so much proving how display advertising can cut through and provoke discussion as proving that nothing cuts through quite like controversy in any medium.  This was after all the corner stone that tabloid journalism was founded on and the Daily Mail has proved itself to be highly effective for over 100 years.

Advertising has been known to court controversy as well and achieve enormous cut through.  I am reminded of the print ads and window displays used for Benetton in the 80s and 90s and the absolute storm that the All the colours of the World campaign caused in South Africa whilst the company became the fourth largest in Italy.

The difference between great advertising like that and simply making a controversial statement is that Benetton had values.  There are many politicians that court controversy as well but unless they have values that others can admire the controversy tends to engulf them and damage them rather than lifting them to dizzying heights of success.

I therefore can’t help feeling that the display advertising campaign could have done with a bit more planning to actually prove its point but there again, I and many others are writing about it so maybe it has got something going for it.

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?

With all the headlines about how incredible Pay per click advertising is and the general hysteria that happens when the phrase Social media is uttered it’s easy to focus too much on individual tactics and lose sight of your overall digital marketing strategy.

The first part of the interactive Mix is about driving traffic.  Some might call it eye balls but it is about building an audience of people who may not have been aware of you but are open to the kind of offer that you have.  Affiliates can provide a readymade audience for you but are often overlooked by agencies and clients alike.

Basically speaking an affiliate is a site which provides content to build an audience.  It can be content that is produced by the affiliate themselves or by third parties.  The content builds the audience and the weight of the audience is what makes partnering with an affiliate appealing.  Rather than just selling advertising on the site though, the affiliate promotes products on behalf of partners and is rewarded in the form of commission for success.  Success could be defined in terms of traffic produced for partners but is more often than not defined in terms of actual sales that the affiliate creates from the audience.

Affiliates therefore include a series of product forms on their page which enable their audience to make purchases.  Another popular affiliate technique is to link directly to a completed shopping basket which therefore allows the customer to quickly pay for their items on the partners site after making the decision to purchase on the affiliate site.

What makes affiliates more appealing than display advertising for many partners is that affiliates are only rewarded when the defined success KPI has been achieved.  It therefore provides low risk to the partner and makes the choice of partner for the affiliate key, as they do not want to fill their site with partners whose offer is not of interest to their audience.

Some affiliates decide to keep the commission they earn from their partners but others give a portion of it back to their customers in the form of cashback.  Sites such as Rpoints, CashBackKings, GreasyPalm, Quidco  Quidco and TopCashBack operate their sites as member sites where the content they provide is made of from their partners.  As each sale is made the commission is split between the two so that members earn cashback on each purchase.  This promotes loyalty amongst the audience members to the affiliate and also provides a deal hungry audience for the partner to place their deal in front of.

Which type of affiliate is right for which client obviously hinges on the unique offer of each client and how it relates to the audience of the particular affiliate.  Demographic profiling and geographic location all play a part in the decision but the key to any affiliate relationship is that if the partner doesn’t do well out of it, then neither does the affiliate.

I spent a day at Ad Tech a few weeks ago in the company of one of my favourite New Media Age types.  We wandered around and caught presentations, discussed technologies and generally got a feel for the marketplace as it stands right now.  One of the big buzzes was about Ad Exchanges.  For those that do not know about them, you can read a good description of what an Ad Exchange is and what it does.

What it amounts to is that display ads are suddenly becoming a lot more targetable.  Ad exchanges let you target your ads based on a series of criteria such as geographical location and connection speeds.  The aim is to cut out the number of wasted impressions that are delivered, and only deliver ads to the marketplace that is geographically relevant and content which connection speeds can handle.  The claims being made are that response rates (click through) are increased by 50%.  Now colour me unimpressed but on a lot of sites I’ve seen this would increase click through from 0.02% to 0.03%.  Still not amazing.

Also I am yet to be convinced by media that still charges by the impression instead of the results it produces.  That’s the acid test and the one that I suspect will shut most Ad Exchange and media owners  up.  Are you prepared to charge on a CPC basis, and if you are how does the price you put on it compare to a Google Adword click?

Suddenly I hear silence across the void.  When the media is of suitable quality that media owners feel able to offer it on a CPC basis then we may have something to talk about.

The simple truth is that whilst this is a very good step forward by display advertising it doesn’t alter the fact that the ads themselves are invasive and distracting for users who are actually there to view the content.  The reason Google works is because it gives me an ad for the thing I am looking for at exactly the time I am looking for it.  Do display ads do that?  Are they spliced at the DNA level to the content they accompany?  Most of the time I don’t think so.  Display advertising still is yet to move beyond the realm of brand based advertising.  It isn’t direct response and despite this leap forward with Ad exchanges it isn’t likely to become direct response any time soon.  It will help your email produce better results and your eCRM campaign will love Ad Exchanges as part of a media multiplier but when it comes to getting clicks.  Our advice would be stick with Google.