THINKing

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 – 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.

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.

The Politics Of Web Traffic

According to MediaPost, Republicans are spending more online but Democrats are getting more web traffic.

Democratic presidential candidates are trumping Republicans in terms of visitor traffic and time spent on their Web sites, according to new Nielsen//NetRatings data for July (pdf). But the Republicans are spending more for online advertising–specifically sponsored links–with more than double the impressions of the leading Democrats combined.

Marketing Challenges Survey

I am surveying marketers about their top challenges. Please take a couple of minutes to complete our survey.

Go Local – Online Ad Spending At $2.9 Billion In 2007

More advertisers are going local with their online dollars. According to eMarketer, local online ad spending will approach $3 billion this year. Additionally, eMarketer says, online is eclipsing radio, which itself is moving into a new category: audio.

Here’s a piece I wrote last year on local online advertising. It still applies.

Top 20 One-A-Day Small Business Marketing Vitamins

Sometimes people hesitate from starting a full-blown marketing program because of the time involved to develop and implement it. I am in favor of the strategic, disciplined approach to marketing, but sometimes a business just needs to do something to kickstart its program. Here are my top 20 marketing ideas that can be implemented over the course of a month.