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!)
• 74 percent of landing pages also provided no direction to Super Bowl viewers who found their way to the advertisers’ sites
• Pepsi, GoDaddy, Cars.com, T-Mobile, Tide and CareerBuilder.com get kudos for integrating their campaigns

For more, get this pdf from Reprise Media.

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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.

But, Harry, you are asking, where else can an advertiser reach 142 million people, 45 percent of whom are women? Well, there is no other venue. But that doesn’t change the facts. Here’s why I think most of the cash will be ill-spent.

Most spots are developed by ad agencies which convince their clients that humor is the way to go. Humor is the way to go, if it supports the brand and if it translates to sales or helps improve your distribution. Typically, spots are so off-base that no one can remember who the advertiser was after the spot airs. How does that help you? And, do you know how many beers Budweiser will have to sell to recoup its production and media expenditures? Who drinks Bud anyway?

Now, it is true that CareerBuilder.com saw a 50 percent increase in brand awareness after its 2005 Super Bowl ads. And that translated to web traffic and new business. CareerBuilder had an integrated program to support the buy. They had special landing pages on the site, as well as additional online and offline media. Most advertisers this year may make some effort to integrate their programs, but their big ad agencies won’t know how to do it.

There is a deal between Fox and MySpace (both News Corp. companies) that places commercials from in-game Super Bowl advertisers on a special Super Bowl site on MySpace. Fox will promote the MySpace site during the game. So, this will help give the ad buy more legs.

More advertisers report that this year they will support their buys with search engine programs. Again, I think this is a waste of money. This is a chance for the big brands to jump full-force into social media and social networks. I could do a hell of a lot with $2.7 million spent in PR and social media efforts.

Here are some bonus Super Bowl links:

Super Bowl Ads

Google Super Bowl Trends

Super Bowl Ads Recent News

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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.

Here’s why. The typical Google ad headline has a 25 character count maximum. Description lines one and two cannot exceed 35 characters each. Tolstoy and Faulkner would be in trouble. Let’s review some best practices for writing text, or pay-per-click ads.

Preparation Is Paramount. As in all marketing, the prep work is crucial in writing text ads. Carefully define your audience. Who are they from a demographic, psychographic and geographic perspective? Are they 16-year-olds whose raging hormones are blocking their ability to reason, or time-stressed 50-year-old IT executives? Get inside their heads. Determine what keywords they would search out. Once you have a few keywords identified, use one of the free keyword research tools to beef up your list.

Generate Action. Major companies may have the money to place “brand” ads for the purpose of generating impressions. This is not the purpose of a text ad. Its purpose is to create clicks. Think about what call-to-action phrases would make your target audience respond. For the 16-year-old it may be “get your ringtones now.” For the IT executive it may be “download our whitepaper.” Do you have a service that will solve a problem? Then, say something like “Do the job in half the time”, or “Improve your sex life.”

Less Is More. High concepts and the complex have no place in text ads. Twenty word headlines tend to force the marketer to be simple. Plays on words and attempts at humor usually fall flat in this genre. Simply tell the consumer what your offer is and don’t play games to try to get the consumer to click. You want only those consumers who will have some interest in your offer to come to your website. Tricks for clicks is a waste of money.

Make An Offer. If you have an attractive offer, use it. Offering a lower price? Say so: “10% Off”. Free is still the most powerful word in advertising. If that’s your offer, feel free to say “Free.” Just not in all caps, OK?

Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” This won’t wash in writing text ads. Take your time. Get it right. Write tight.

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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.

The digital world has changed that. Now, you are free to experiment, free to make mistakes and make changes mid-stream. Paid search ads not working? Change them.

Old-line companies and marketers don’t embrace this kind of change easily.

Today, you can have a conversation with your customers, learn what they want and provide it to them.  It is incumbent upon you to listen to your customers, watch what they do and respond.

That, my friend, is what marketing has always been seeking. Now that we’ve found it, let’s do something worthwhile with it.

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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.

Microsoft also recently debuted an improved Live, its search engine. In June, Google launched its updated Personalized Search. Google now commands more than a 56% share of all search traffic, with Yahoo! coming in a distant second with a 23% share in the US market.

The top three search engines can be found here: Yahoo!, Live & Google. I happen to like Dogpile and Webcrawler, which search the top search engines simultaneously.

Here is what some other bloggers are saying about recent search engine improvements.

Matt Hester about Live.com.

CNET onYahoo!

Learn about the Top 100 alternative search engines from AltSearch engines.

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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.

Does this mark the official end of the Dot Bomb as well?

According to Sanford Bernstein:

“The greater robustness of online advertising, the prevalence of paid search as the primary ad format and great geographical diversity of revenues of the large players make a repeat of the 2001-2004 bubble scenario unlikely,”

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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.

Sen. Barack Obama led both the Democrat and Republican packs when it came to traffic, with some 717,000 unique visitors to BarackObama.com last month. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards took second and third place with 437,000 and 348,000 uniques, respectively.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse says that the keyword “Fred Thompson”, the unannounced Republican candidate for President, has been rising in the days leading up to his expected announcement.

Listen to this post as an mp3.

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Marketing Challenges Survey

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

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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.

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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.

1. Consider starting a monthly e-newsletter. They are a great way to communicate with existing customers, and to remind them of other services you provide.

2. Call a customer at random just to thank him for the business he has given you.

3. Develop a signature for inclusion on every email and ensure that all employees are using it. Here’s mine:

We Make You Look Good
My Creative Team, Inc.
Harry Hoover
harry@My-CreativeTeam.com
tel: +1 (704) 953-3406
fax: +1 (704) 896-2760
http://www.my-creativeteam.com

4. Send hand-written thank you notes to customers or other people who have helped your business.

5. Call a former customer to find out why she left you.

6. If well educated business professionals are your target, consider becoming a sponsor on your local public radio station.

7. Give a speech. If you need help with public speaking, sign up for Zipline, the e-newsletter I do for Ty Boyd, one of America’s top presentation coaches. Even better, take one of his courses.

8. Read a marketing book.

9. Write and place articles in ezines.

10. Ask a customer what you can do to help his business.

11. Distribute releases about newsworthy events.

12. Set up a marketing and advisory group consisting of people from outside your industry.

13. Consider setting up a local online web search advertising campaign. Check out ReachLocal.

14. Gather competitors’ ads and literature to see what they are promoting, and how they are approaching their target market.

15. Offer free samples of your product or service.

16. Call some current clients and ask them why they hired you and how you could expand your business with them.

17. Get a college student who is in a communications program to do a summer internship for you. UNC-Chapel Hill has a very good internship program.

18. Join - and get involved in - a professional or civic group.

19. Write a letter to the editor or an Op-Ed piece to establish your expertise in an issue.

20. This is self-serving, but after all it is my list: hire My Creative Team.

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