The Power of Advertising - Ripley's Believe It or Not Style

So I spent this last weekend in Branson, Missouri with my younger brother. We tooled around town, saw some GREAT shows (Liverpool Legends were fantastic, and the Dixie Stampede was the dinner show to end all dinner shows - if you are ever in Branson, see BOTH of these!), and met some really amazing people along the way.

And of course, the following exhibit in the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum about the power of advertising caught my eye:

It's true the old "cure-all" and patent medicines had no basis in fact (or even in reality, I mean, a blood, liver, and stomach renovator? What does that even mean??), but they definitely knew how to advertise.

Here are a few funny ads for patent medicines. Don't be fooled!

Final Score - Revolution 0, Fire 0....Cranberries Win!

Saturday night I was at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA for a soccer game with my Mom and brother. (Go Revs!)

Anywho, the game ended in a scoreless tie but there were some interesting marketing opportunities that caught my eye, similar to the ones I'd mentioned in a previous post about the Red Sox sponsors...

As we entered the stadium, we were greeted by a number of people in Ocean Spray cranberry grower overalls (you know, like the ones from the TV commercials) handing out samples of various products. Along with that there was a simulated bog of the wonderberries:

Following our close encounter of the cranberry kind, we made a pit stop at the restroom, where we noticed the hand-dryers had been updated:

If you can't read the small print under DO SOMETHING PATRIOTIC, it says "INSTALL PATRIOTS HIGH-SPEED ENERGY-EFFICIENT XELERATOR HAND-DRYERS IN YOUR RESTROOMS."

Side Note: Maybe I'm totally missing it, but go to Patriots.com and try to find anything, anything at all, on purchasing Xelerator hand-dryers. I dare you.

And then, of course, American Airlines wanted to get in on the act. And since they are a sponsor of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and it's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, there were signs distributed that were pink on one side and said "GOAL for the cure!" which everyone was supposed to hold up when the Revs scored a goal. (It was a scoreless tie, so there was no opportunity for that to happen, but a solid idea). The other side that faced all of us in the stands reinforced the sponsor's logo:

I guess the moral of the story is that marketing is everywhere, even in the bathroom, so you really can't escape even if you try. I mean, we knew that already, but it's fascinating all the same.

Report: Top Keyword Price Nears $100 Per Click

The highest-priced keyword in the United States last month sold on Google for $99.44 per click, according to the AdGooroo Search Engine Advertising Update: Q309.

And before I tell you what it is, why don't you think about it for a minute and take a guess...

Used Cars? Not even close.

Debt management? Nope.

Auto Insurance? Getting up there, but still not the correct answer.

Give up?

It's Mesothelioma. Yes, really.

The report released Wednesday pegs Mesothelioma as the highest-selling keyword in September. The same word sold on Yahoo in the No. 1 spot for $60.68 per click. The phrase "auto insurance comparison" took top honors on Bing, bringing in $55.20 per click.

Well, that's certainly news to me. I've seen the TV commercials for the class-action lawsuits - "if you or someone you love has been diagnosed with mesothelioma due to negligence, etc..." - but wouldn't have guessed it would pull $100 per click as a keyword. You learn something new every day!

(Courtesy of MediaPost)

SEO & SEM - Can't we all just get along?

Here's what you need to know about these two acronyms:

SEO = Search Engine Optimization
SEO is simply optimizing the keywords and links to your site and improving other aspects of your site to maximize your search engine rankings, resulting in an increase in traffic. Potential customers are already searching for your products and services, and by positioning your business at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) they will find you! SEO increases your organic (non-paid) search results.

SEM = Search Engine Marketing
SEM places your text ads to appear as sponsored listings on the SERPs (top and right-hand side of the page). It allows you to put your business in front of potential customers at the precise moment they're searching for what you sell. SEM makes it easy to test different ad copy, target local areas or the entire nation, and control your budget through spending limits and campaign optimization. Because your keywords are tailored to your business, you reach only those people interested who are interested, and only pay for your ad when it's clicked on! SEM increases your paid search results.

With the basics out of the way, you're probably wondering now why you'd pay for search results with SEM when you can get the organic results for free with SEO.

Think of it this way, if you've put the time and effort into creating, maintaining, and optimizing an SEM campaign to drive traffic to your website, you need your website to be set up correctly to give them what they came to find. If you can bring someone to your site but they can't find what they want immediately, your SEM is a waste.

From Raise My Rank SEO Services:

You only have a few seconds to convince them that your site can deliver what they want. Will your visitors, failing to find what they're looking for, click their browser's back button and try another site?

Your site has to be ready for your visitors. It needs to be written, structured, and coded in such a way that the information is clearly laid out and easy to find. If it isn't, your site will either be immediately forgotten by visitors, or worse, it will be remembered as one that fails to deliver.

On the other hand, SEO can take 6 months to fully optimize, which can be a long time to wait if you need to see results sooner or if you have a limited-time offer.

Gareth O Neill, a Microsoft Media Specialist, says:

If you do SEO properly then you will get clicks for free but if you have a fresh offer your site will take time to get spidered and start showing up in the organic listings.

This is where SEM will deliver better results. You can create the campaign straight away [...] and have your ads appearing in the paid listings.

For example, if you have an entertainment site and big news has come out from Hollywood or you have a computer games site and the latest game has just hit the shops, then there is nothing as quick as PPC to provide you with visibility.

So now what? Well, the bottom line is that your SEO and SEM should be working together. Here's just one great reason why your SEO and SEM should suck it up and be friends, from AllthingsSEM.com:

Recently Google made public some changes to their AdSense program. These changes include the addition of a quality score that is used when determining the cost of an ad. This quality score will mean that two exact ads will have different costs depending on the quality of the destination page. Although there are many factors that will be used to measure the quality of the destination page, most of these factors can be influenced by SEO. In fact, improving the quality of a web page as perceived by the search engines is pretty much what all SEO is about. So if you use SEO to increase the quality of your site, you will end up reducing the cost per click of your ads.

And now you know (and knowing is half the battle).



(Courtesy of Microsoft Advertising Community, All Things SEM, and Raise My Rank)

Times Square Owners Create Ad Network

Sept 24, 2009

- Katy Bachman

NEW YORK A newly formed group of media companies controlling some of the biggest digital signs in Times Square will make it easier for brands to simultaneously put their names in lights across multiple venues.

Called Times Square Domination, the networking effort offers marketers a one-stop shop for creating an unprecedented campaign in the nation’s largest out-of-home arena, visited by 565,000 people each day.

The network will be able to sync marketers' messages across many of Times Square’s most captivating video billboards, including Clear Channel’s Spectacolor HD sign, ABC SuperSign, the Nasdaq monitor and News Corp.’s Astrovision sign. As part of the package, TSD offers accompanying marketing and event services such as sampling and the use of street teams to create brand immersion.

“Sometimes, the benefits of coming together as an industry for customers are so compelling that even strong rivals see the value,” said Harry Coghlan, president of Clear Channel Spectacolor, one of the companies participating in the network along with ABC Regional Sports & Entertainment Sales, Nasdaq, News Corp. and Reuters.

TSD will also include the Times Square Network, a fully integrated platform created around Clear Channel’s Spectacolor HD sign at 47th Street at Duffy Square. When it launches next year, Clear Channel is hoping to turn the sign into a new entertainment source, complete with original programming broadcast from a Times Square studio and streamed on a companion Web site. Short segments will focus on popular interests, including major product launches or interviews with people on the street. Sponsored advertising will air in pre-determined slots and be combined with live-event marketing, mobile messaging, polling and contests.

“When we build SpecHD, we knew this attraction could also support a new model,” said Coghlan. “We knew that we could enable true interaction with the audience, going beyond traditional one-way broadcasts to create true two-way conversations.”


(Courtesy of AdWeek.com)

Natural Born Clickers - Follow Up

Following up on a previous post regarding click-through rates, Starcom has released a new report on measuring online ad success.

The number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, and only 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks, according to the most recent "Natural Born Clickers" study from ComScore and media agency Starcom. As the pool of people who click on banner ads rapidly decreases, it begs the question: Is the long-used click-through rate now officially useless?

Useless? Probably not. Outdated? Absolutely.

"The click has always been of dubious value," said Joshua Spanier, director of communication strategy at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. "But clicks are easy to understand and easy to measure. We still know that display advertising has unequivocal value; your search performance improves as well. Together, search and display are much stronger than apart."

So how do we now measure the success of an online campaign if we can't use the click-through rates? Here are some tips:

1. Goodby's Mr. Spaniers points out that it's important for marketers to ask their agencies how display ads fit into the larger marketing plan. "With the media mix, how do you set up overall metrics?" he said. "It's unrealistic to look at one element of one media for success. Since online media is so trackable, it's is held to a higher standard. The reality is no one looks at print advertising like that. You can't measure print that way or TV because they don't have built-in capacity. It's a little unfair that display becomes the whipping boy."

2. In the digital space, look at how elements like display and search coalesce, Mr. Spanier said. How do people end up at a website to make a purchase? Look at sales of a product on-site with consumers' exposure to ads. "There is no way display advertising is wasting money," he said, "even if people don't click."

3. Clicks are a direct-response measurement. For display campaigns, look at brand-awareness studies, purchase-intent lifts and engagement rates. "Users might work with an ad, but not click on it," said Paul Gunning, CEO of Tribal DDB Worldwide.

4. Look at display view-through rates. "CTRs have a value, there is still a hand being raised, but view-through is more important," Mr. Gunning said. "How many people actually end up where you wanted them to? How much time are they spending?"

5. Look at the creative. While consumer attitudes online have undoubtedly changed, think about how messaging does or doesn't demand clicks. If you want to measure success against click-throughs, include strong calls for action. Or, if you have a rich-media experience, other metrics such as engagement time are probably more telling. And that may be the case as more banners include innovations such as embedded video and rich media, said Atmosphere BBDO's Warren Griffiths, group account director for Visa, Emirates Airlines, Hertz and Starwood. "More banners have become the destination. I don't believe that would account for a 50% drop in clicks, but this may have had some impact."

Read the full article here.


(Courtesy of adage.com)

'Glee' banks on risky strategy

By Lisa Respers France

(CNN) -- When Fox aired a sneak-peek episode of its new series "Glee" four months before the show actually premiered, it took a big chance that the audience would still care.

To help maintain the buzz, it delved into social networking, maintained a strong online presence, dispatched the show's actors to malls across the country and held a fan contest.

In an era when episodic television is battling for ratings against reality television and broadcast TV faces the loss of audience to cable networks, those familiar with the industry said, such innovation may have to become the norm.

"Particularly for those networks that skew younger such as Fox, CW and ABC to an extent, they are going to have to really promote all of their shows all year long and find new ways to keep them in front of their viewers and remind them that they are there," said Ed Martin, a television critic who writes for JackMyers.com. "What Fox did last spring was something totally new that had never been done before."

In a week when most prime time shows are debuting with the hopes of attracting an audience, "Glee" seems to have already found its niche. On Monday, Fox announced that it had ordered a full season of the show.

"Glee" follows the exploits of a group of underdogs who are members of a high school show choir.

The hour-long musical comedy, co-created by "Nip/Tuck" producer Ryan Murphy, created high anticipation after its first airing in May, following an episode of the wildly popular "American Idol."

The pilot was re-aired with a special director's cut prior to the premier of the actual season with Fox counting the pilot as episode one. Episode four debuts on Wednesday.

Bill Gorman, editor and co-founder of the site TV By the Numbers, said he would put the level of interest in "Glee" on his site "as pretty strong for a new show."

Gorman said the show -- whose premiere numbers may or may not have been helped by the fact it was one of the few airing during President Obama's health care address -- is initially faring well among the coveted 18- to 49-year-old viewer demographic.

According to the Nielsen Ratings, the "Glee" premiere garnered 7.44 million viewers, placing it in 19th place in the top 20.

"The 'Glee' premiere this fall did better than what Fox is calling the preview after 'American Idol,' " Gorman said.

To maintain interest over the summer, the show embarked on an ambitious marketing scheme. Joe Earley, executive vice president of marketing and communications for Fox, said the show was screened at summer camps, stars engaged in a 10-city tour, street teams handed out "Glee"-related items, and trailers were shown in front of the latest "Harry Potter" film.

Online, characters had Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, the pilot was available for streaming, and the show's stars took handheld cameras to events to gather behind-the-scenes content. The director's cut of the pilot was followed by a "Tweet-peat" where the stars and the fans took to Twitter to discuss the episode.

Martin said he was present when Fox screened an episode at the geekiest of all events: Comic-Con in San Diego, California.

"It was a standing-room-only crowd of several thousands of people," Martin said. "The cheering and yelling and screaming was ear-splitting. The crowd almost blew the roof off the place with their enthusiasm for the episode."

Visibility seemed to be key for the quirky show that some have referred to as " 'High School Musical' on steroids."

Earley said one challenge came in that the many facets that have given "Glee" its distinction -- it's a black comedy, it's a musical, it's a drama, it's about high school, it's about adults -- also made it difficult to market.

Still, airing the pilot four months before its regular run could have easily backfired, he said.
"If people didn't like it, it would have been four months of negative buzz," he said. "We could have been killing a show before it even began."

The result has been an strong fan base with a deep engagement who are taking to social networking to spread the message and buying the songs on iTunes, Earley said.

"What we have is this core of really passionate, very savvy fans, and they are definitely ambassadors for the show," said Earley, who added that executives have been pleased with the ratings.

Chicago Tribune TV critic Maureen Ryan said executives seem to have totally committed to a show that from the onset was a risk.

"You either love this show, or you really don't care," she said. "There's not really a huge amount of in-between."

Ryan said that, in her opinion, the show is far from perfect (she points to the unlovable character of teacher Will Schuester's wife as a weakness) but says it has an opportunity to do well commercially.

"The terrific thing about 'Glee' is not only that it has this interesting concept going for it, but it has a ton on money-making potential," she said. "They've been selling the DVD of the pilot at Walmart, and they sent out a press release saying five of the top 200 songs on iTunes are songs from the show, and they are releasing a soundtrack soon."

Critic Martin said, given its mix of music and satire, the "Glee" strategy may not work for every show -- say a medical drama -- but if the network strikes gold with the new series, he imagines that it may serve as a blueprint for others.

"It would not surprise me at all if Fox had another promising new show in their development plan for next fall and decided to give it the same treatment as 'Glee,' " Martin said.



(Courtesy of CNN.com)

Facebook is taking over the world...

Or at least the United States. The big news today is that Facebook has reached the 300 million user mark, which is quite the feat considering I remember when I signed up about 5 years ago and it was only available to college students.

The bigger thing to note here is that the population of the U.S. is at about 307 million people right now, and it looks like Facebook will soon have more users than the United States has people.

Sort of makes me feel like a proud mama - Facebook is all grown up!

It also marks the first time that they've actually seen some profits, here's the deal:

As Facebook has grown, it also has drawn criticism from privacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which says people on Facebook unwillingly give up personal information to advertisers and Facebook application developers.

In a video interview with Fortune, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook gives its users robust privacy controls.

She also told Fortune that a new approach to online advertising has helped Facebook's revenue grow throughout the recession.

"Our advertisements are very much part of the user experience," she said. "So the same way you can RSVP for an event on Facebook -- you know, a party your friend might throw -- you can RSVP for a movie premiere. And that's really a movie advertisement saying, 'Our movie is opening this weekend. Do you want to go?' "

Read the rest of the article here.



(Courtesy of CNN.com)

Proofreading: The Lost Art

Without further ado, your Tuesday afternoon silliness...

These are headlines that probably should have been proofread before they were published:

Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over
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Miners Refuse to Work after Death
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Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
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War Dims Hope for Peace
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If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
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Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
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Enfield (London) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
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Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
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Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
And the winner is....
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Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead

Number 9...Number 9...

In honor of 09/09/09 - a day I've been counting down to for 6 months - here's a short film for The Beatles Rock Band game that was released yesterday. (I saw it when watching John Lennon's film Imagine on Palladia last night.)

Even though it looks waaaaay better in HD, it is 100% worth watching:



(Courtesy of YouTube)