Boing Boing Gadgets Outs a Motorola Viral Marketer
November 25, 2008
Big companies frequently hire ad agencies to do grassroots marketing. Employees pose as members of online communities and promote products with seemingly spontanious testimonials. If done correctly it can be a really powerful tool but it can also backfire if it isn’t genuine and/or well-done. Here’s an entertaining example with Joel Johnson at the popular blog Boing Boing Gadgets calling out a character named M. Goode for pontificating the wonders of Motorola’s new Krave phone:
Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments?
Video: Empower MediaMarketing President Brian McHale talks about the Future of the Advertising on Public Television
June 14, 2008
Here’s a 9 1/2 minute public television video of Brian McHale (president of Cincinnati’s Empower MediaMarketing) talking about the future of the advertising business and the current state of Cincinnati’s economy.
Design Coding by Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper)
March 28, 2008
Leon Atkinson sent me a link to the video for the song Design Coding by Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper AKA Chuck from Pop Labs). It’s an awesome rap song explaining how to code your web pages to obey web standards and increase search engine optimization.
I loved the lyrics:
…Your Photoshop functions then slice that design
Do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
Please don’t use tables even though they work fine
When it come to indexing they give searches a hard time…
Poetic Prophet has a bunch of other videos including Conversion Closing Rap, Paid Search 101 Rap, Social Media Addiction Rap and Link Building 101 Rap. It’s entertaining stuff with solid explanations of online media concepts.
Japanese Advertisers are Abandoning MURLs
March 25, 2008
Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently returned from a trip to Japan and wrote a blog post about the disappearance of printed URLs in Japanese advertising.
In the United States we always stick Marketing URLs (MURLs) in TV and print ads. The idea is that people will see addresses like http://www.widgetco.com/billboard-offer and http://www.widgetco-tv-offer.com on TV or on billboards, remember them, type them in when they get to the computer and advertisers will be able to serve up a custom landing page and track the effectiveness of the off-line advertising campaign. This is usually a waste of time, because most regular people who actually care about the offering are just going to Google whatever information they remember from the ads, bypassing whatever special tracking and landing page the advertisers have set up. It appears that advertisers in Japan are accepting this behavior and starting to put pictures of search boxes with suggested search terms in their ads in place of MURLs. Advertisers can still put technologies in place to serve up a custom landing page and tracking based on the search terms that got them there but it does require your page to have excellent search engine optimization. Otherwise you might be sending people from your off-line ads to a competitor’s web site. This lack of control might make American companies drag their feet on this shift away from MURLs, but I am starting to see it more and more. One of the most memorable examples was this 2006 Leo Burnett, Google “Pontiac” ad.
It’s probably safe to bet that General Motor’s spent a decent amount of money on Google Ad Words and pages about Lyle Lovett’s 1987 album weren’t seeing a lot of search traffic while that TV spot was running .
via BoingBoing
quadrantONE – New Online Advertising Company Brings Together 4 Giant Newspaper Groups
February 22, 2008
The Tribune Company, Gannett Company, Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company are announced that they are combining portions of their various online advertising businesses to form a new 17 person, Chicago based company called quadrantONE. quadrantONE’s plan is to offer large advertisers consolidated access to place ads on the web sites of local newspapers. I feel like this is definitely a move by the papers to position themselves better against online advertising giants Google and Yahoo, who are increasingly moving into hyper-localized content and advertising. Will it work? Who knows. I feel like Google and Yahoo’s strategy of hyper-localized advertising focuses more on content matching. Users see ads related to the content they are reading rather than the geographic area they are coming from. For large national advertisers, I feel like this method of user self-identification is much more sophisticated for determining demographic information and delivering targeted advertising. Heavy handed matching based on location alone can be very effect for smaller, highly location-oriented businesses like car dealerships and pizza delivery but national brands and smaller companies with broad reaches need to focus relating to people as they see themselves in the internet community not just their physical communities. For example, I know a lot of people who firmly identify with the New York Times though they have never been to their in their lives. Actually NYT is a bad example because the quadrantONE alliance considers it a national paper (along with USA Today) and it specifically will not be included in the deal. Hopefully will combine it’s strong location-based assets and a strong content matching technology to Google and Yahoo a run for their money.
