Posts tagged advertising
Taking advantage of digital. Murdoch might be on to something…
Feb 12th
Given the disastrous circulation figures in the magazine industry, it’s no wonder the newspaper industry is looking to protect itself. Pay walls might actually be the way to go – just as long as they can get advertisers on board.
The debate about pay walls rages on in the media industry. Rupert Murdoch sure is determined to protect his vast empire, despite that fact his company, New Corp, continues to do well. But if the magazine ABCs are anything to go by, ‘ol Rupert might actually be on to something.
Yesterday’s ABC figures for consumer magazine sales for July to December show serious decline across the industry.
The PPA sold it like this: “In a world of ever more free content on the TV, radio and the internet, the UK public bought well over 1 billion magazines in 2009 and more than 85 per cent of UK adults continue to buy magazines.”
But figures reveal that the sector is continuing into decline consumer magazines falling by 1.3 per cent in the second half of 2009.
Yes we can attribute that to tough trading conditions, but it’s not like the economy is showing any signs of a full recovery anytime soon.
In the past couple of years, as advertisers have fallen away from magazines and favored other avenues such as sponsorship, magazine titles have looked to ramp up their digital activities.
However, magazine websites often only provide the reader with bitesize information and teasers, requiring the reader to then go buy the magazine that has ‘just hit newsstands’.
With the take-up of Kindle’s and the iPhone, consumers no longer need the physical magazine in their hands and are lacking in the time to actually sit and read them cover to cover.
But people do still read online. That we know. So perhaps if magazines offered online subscriptions they would increase their lunch-time reading audiences and advertisers would likely follow.
The advantage of the pay wall, as Murdoch sees it, is that readers can read both the online and printed version for one price. So if you have a subscription to, say the New York Times, and never read it in the printed version, the revenues from the pay model online will still trickle down keeping both versions alive.
It’s the best of both worlds. Or is it? What do you think?
The magazine industry has to do something now if it wants to protect its future. But first and foremost, it has to reassure its advertisers that it at least has a plan.
Marketers still searching Facebook for that “Holy Grail”
Feb 1st
Facebook was offering up the “Holy Grail” of advertising in 2007. Two years on, what’s changed, better still, what has improved?
It’s no secret that Facebook has never been the “Holy grail” of advertising that is so promised in November 2007. Yes the site had to undergo some radical changes after the failure of Beacon, but the site still offers up some 350 million consumers. Surely advertisers can take advantage of this, but how?
I was there at the IAB Engage conference in 2007 listening to Facebook executives explain how they were launching something revolutionary in the digital marketing landscape. But despite all the fact and figures that pronounce the majority of ad budgets are going to social networking sites, why have the ads not got any better?
Alterian’s “Annual Survey 2009″ — which included 1,068 marketers, 62% North American, 36% European and 2% from the Asia-Pacific region — found that 40% of respondents were shifting more than one-fifth of their traditional direct marketing budgets toward digital and social media channels.
Overall, 66% of marketers plan to invest in social media, while 67% increasingly important or critical to success.
So where are all these ad dollars going then?
Just today, UTalkMarketing reports that Facebook is increasingly falling victim to hackers which could lead to users distrusting advertisements they see on the site. What’s a way around this for advertisers and marketers then?
The key is engagement. And to be honest, it’s probably a drum you’ve heard us bang before.
But with more and more users less likely to leave Facebook and as the number of users goes over and above 350 million worldwide, marketer would be silly to ignore the medium.
However, the key for advertisers now is to find the right way to advertise on the site.
Fifty-seven per cent of marketers plan to use their budgets to improve their websites so that they can open dialogues and increase engagement with consumers.
But how do marketers do this?
Here are some simple steps to get you started:
Step 1
Go the advertising page on the Facebook website. Click on the “Advertising” link at the bottom of the page. Click on the “Create Social Ad” button to get started.
Step 2
Insert your website. This is where users who click on your ad will be directed.
Step 3
Target your ads. On the next page you’ll have the opportunity to choose the demographics you want your ad displayed to. Choose a gender, age group, educational status, relationship status or political views or leave the options blank to create a more inclusive group. In the keywords section, put in keywords relating to the interests you would like your targeted group to have.
Step 4
Create your ad. Move to the next page to input your Facebook ad. Create a short, catchy title and a few sentences of copy to explain your website or product. To insert a photo, click “Upload Photo” from the drop down menu below.
Step 5
Choose whether you want to pay per click or per view. When you pay per click, you’ll only pay Facebook when someone clicks on your ad. When you select pay per view, you’ll pay every time your ad is displayed to a user. Then, click on the appropriate tab.
Step 6
Set a budget. Put in the amount of money you’re willing to pay every day. You may pay less than this, but this is most money you’ll pay for one day of Facebook ads.
Step 7
Bid for ad space. Facebook determines which ads to display by how much you’re willing to pay per click or per 1000 impressions. Choose the maximum amount you want to pay. The amount you actually pay depends on how much other advertisers have bid, so enter the maximum amount you’re willing to pay.
We’re still waiting for the “year of social media” and 2010 could be it. There certainly are a number of tools now available for marketers to track ROI on Facebook, but I’ll save that for another post.
How to create and tailor your next ad simply by listening in…
Nov 23rd
A number of big brand advertisers and marketers and experiment with developing ad campaigns based on what consumers are talking about on the web.
Monitoring what internet users say in their instant messages, social networks and blogs isn’t anything new, of course. There has been many a study telling us what the most popular brands discussed on the internet is (Apple’s iPhone, Vegemite, Starbucks and Microsoft just to name a few).
But now, marketers are using new technologies to scan the web for key words to find out what consumers are—and aren’t—saying about their brands, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Marketers can then incorporate those findings into their more-conventional research to create specific text and photos for their ads given what consumers seem to want – or, what they say they want, at least.
Furthermore, once the campaigns are up and running, advertisers are using the same web-scanning technologies to gauge consumer reaction to their messages, and to fine-tune them.
Marketers have long drawn on information from the web to help them design their web sites and online marketing campaigns.
Now, more of them have begun to use it to guide their marketing across a range of media, including print and TV, and in choosing the overall strategy for those campaigns.
Digital marketing and advances in the technologies available to marketers and advertisers don’t just mean more channels to advertise – they mean more channel to listen, too.
Jason Falls, a social media consultant and blogger on socialmediaexplorer.com, said that it is “imperative” that companies and brands can gauge public opinion about them by listening in to online conversations.
He added that companies could also then interject in these discussions and that while marketers may not have control over the conversations, they should at least have a participatory role in them.
Services such as Google Alerts and searches on Twitter, Google Blogs and Bing can allow companies to keep track of conversations about their company.
According to recent research from Harris Interactive and Tealeaf, more adults are turning to social media to talk about problems they have had with brands and companies.
Here are some sites to help you:
and the old favourite, Google Alerts
Google Search makes us feel all fuzzy inside
Nov 19th
Google’s search team has released these new virals to talk about its latest innovations (like music in search results).
The search engine giant said that the stories were inspired by its users. How cute.
Google said on its blog, “Because while we’re proud of the innovations we’re making in search, we’re proudest of the things people use search to accomplish. In other words, the best search results don’t show up on a webpage — they show up in somebody’s life.”
Again, how cute.
Quote from Craig Nevill-Manning, engineering director Google New York, “The Google homepage doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the millions of people who use it.”
Does digital marketing really make kids turn to booze?
Oct 27th
The Portman Group, an industry body that works with drinks producers to raise standards of alcohol marketing, has published a guide that aims to stop alcohol brands targeting underage consumers or encouraging harmful drinking through their digital marketing. This is interesting to me for a number of reasons:
Firstly, please answer this question: Have you ever been encouraged to drink alcohol based on something you saw on the internet?
While there may be some out there that say yes, I suspect the vast majority would say no.
My second point is that when you are a teenager, or indeed ‘under age’, you drink whatever you can get your hands on. Brands that have enough money in the marketing budgets to advertise are often too expensive for teenagers that live of a wage of pocket money from their parents.
But I don’t want to criticize the good deed the Portman Group is doing. It is challenging companies to be socially responsible after all.
I think however, that it is interesting how the internet has led to further concerns over underage drinking.
How CGI technology took the truth and fun out of advertising
Oct 13th
“Truth in advertising is becoming a misnomer because of the rise of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in TV commercials” says a new report out today.
This may seem like news from the ‘bleeding obvious’, but it’s actually astonishing to know how often we are fooled by technology. At least 80 to 90% of ads actually contain some CGI, especially car ads (which unfortunately means that Citroen doesn’t actually make a dancing robot car).
Computers have been used for years to create fantasy images and improve landscapes in ads, creating generic cityscapes and inserting well-known landmarks into the background. But the question on the consumer’s lips now is “why use trickery”?
Last April, it was revealed that magazines could be banned from using airbrushed photographs of celebrities that make them look slimmer over fears that they were promoting unrealistic body images.
Editors from glossy publications including Vogue, Hello! and Elle had a meeting, the Periodical Publishers Association (PPA) was there too, but what was the result? Nothing.
Perhaps the real truth hit consumers in the face when Dove revolutionised beauty advertising with its ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, showing consumers what really went on. But consumers can’t tell us now that they are actually shocked by the use of CGI?
The thing is that CGI (and those geeks that sit in dark rooms creating it for hours) has become so life-like that car manufacturers can avoid the cost of building prototypes of new models and shipping them to other countries to be filmed. Instead, entire vehicles are being rendered in 3D to create commercials where nothing is real. Nothing. Is this deceit?
CGI is not always obvious; but that is kind of the point.
Advertisers can obviously achieve more interesting effects in CGI. And let’s face it, ads that ‘wow’ us, are the ones that tend to work.
So how many ads are fully computer-generated? Up to 20% at the most, according to one expert, as CGI can be more “convenient”.
A lot of the time CGI is used to achieve “fantastic”, but more and more it’s becoming simply an easier way of working – sitting in that dark room as opposed to being on location, paying actors, cameramen etc.
And as brands continue to have more of a global reach, CGI is often used to adapt ads from elsewhere. So if you’re taking an ad from another market, you can replace the pack shot in it with the local pack shot using nothing but CGI.
But in the end, CGI won’t replace a good original idea and if you want something to be warm and emotional, CGI probably doesn’t cut it. Consumers want the truth, and it just happens to be the only way to trust.
The next ‘holy grail’ of search advertising?
Oct 9th
Micro-blogging site Twitter is in advanced talks with Google and Microsoft about licensing its data feed to the companies’ search engines!
This is very exciting news for all those brands and advertisers that currently use Twitter to release information about upcoming products and company news.
I personally think this is a brilliant idea, and if you’ve ever used Twitter Search you’ll know why – it’s a great way to follow trends, get the news straight from the horse’s mouth and find out what people are saying about you.
The ability to cull through the flood of tweets as they are posted is gaining popularity as an important new way to search the internet for up-to-the-minute information on the latest news events and happenings on.
Twitter’s discussions with Microsoft and Google are being conducted separately and would allow each company to incorporate the 140-character messages, or ‘tweets’, that Twitter is known for into their internet search results.
The AllThingsDigital blog (part of the Wall Street Journal) quoted unidentified sources as saying the companies are discussing several types of deals.
Details could include Twitter receiving a payment of several million dollars and various types of revenue-sharing agreements to allow Twitter to benefit from the ad revenue that Microsoft and Google generate from search results.
Twitter has emerged as one of the fastest-growing internet social media services due to the amount of businesses that use it to promote themselves and stay in touch in ‘real time’, however the company has yet to generate any significant revenue from its free service. Could this be the micro-blogging site’s ‘holy grail’ of revenues?
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