THINKing

Old Media Drives New Media

The average American’s Internet use has nearly doubled in the past two years, according to a MediaPost article. This means that the Internet now accounts for 1/3 of the average US consumer’s media day. So, how are you going to get those Americans to your website, hmmm? By the way, did I tell you that your website is one of about 186 million?

Email Is For Retention, Paid Search Is For Acquisition

Email – in the early days – was a great tactic for acquiring new customers. No longer. There has been too much abuse. But if you have a relationship with a customer, email is a superb tactic for customer retention.

Super Bowl: Search Me

Reprise Media reports that 70% of Super Bowl advertisers bought paid placement in search this year, up almost 20 percent from 2007. Other preliminary findings:

• only 6 percent of advertisers included a call to action, asking viewers to visit their website. (Yikes!)

Wasting Money Big Time: Super Bowl Ads

Advertisers will spend $2.7 million per 30-second spot in order to reach a mass audience during the Super Bowl, on FOX. There are 63 30-second spots available. That’s around $170 million, most of which is a waste of money.

Write Tight

My first news editor hammered one thing into my consciousness: write tight. Leave out the frills, just present the facts and move on.

Many people who think they are writers want to commit an act of literature every time they let the creative muse out of the bottle. Write tight is good advice no matter what you are writing, but especially today when you are developing search engine keyword ads.

Marketing By Mistake

Back in the old days of marketing (yes, I’m old enough to remember the analog days), careers were made and broken based on getting it right. If you were laying down $1 million or more on a media buy and TV production, you had to get it right the first time.

Search Me

A new comScore survey by Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, Yahoo! and Proctor & Gamble seems to indicate that packaged goods brands should shift much of their branding money into search engine advertising. eMarketer reports that,

Search Me – Top Search Engines

The big three search engines recently have rolled out upgrades. Yahoo! is the latest to come to market with what industry insiders refer to as “blended results.” This simply means that blog postings, images, video, and other rich media content are rolled up into a single search with other organic results. Yahoo! also has introduced a new Search Assist feature that allows you to refine your search from the outset instead of tweaking terms two to three times until the correct results appear.

Web Politics – Update

In a recent post, we discussed what’s happening on the web in terms of presidential candidate spending and site visitation. Here’s a new report from Hitwise on the topic. According to Hitwise,

Cost-Cutting Won’t Touch Online Ad Spending

The Financial Times reports that online advertising will not be slowed by any potential downturn in the economy, citing the medium’s lower costs relative to other forms of advertising and the ease of tracking online results.

Embattled mortgage lender Countrywide has increased its media mix within the online category by 34 percent over the previous 12 months.