Ads that don’t get out of the way

Today I came across another ad that simply keeps spreading the thinking of  interruption marketing on the web. Besides the fact that the website below as a lot of ads, the one in the middle is just annoying, and one of those banners that as you scroll up or down it follows, covering the text that indeed you’re looking forward to read.

So the point when mentioning again the awareness vs engagement, is that you can get a lot of awareness here – buy ads, buy more ads, buy more and more ads, and people will notice your brand! Great, but will they buy it? Will they get out of their own way to click, read, spend time learning more, send an email asking for more information, pick up the phone and call your company asking about your service, schedule a meeting and eventually convince others or themselves to close a deal with you? just because you interrupted them when they were reading something that they were interested in and the ad didn’t went out of their way so easily?

What attracts companies to keep working like this is that if you buy a lot of ads, spend a lot of money, get a lot of impressions and eventually some clicks – Yes.. Eventually someone will buy it! But the percentage of that “someone” compared with the money spent or impressions, i.e. conversions, will be probably not relevant, not worthy, insignificant within lower budget opportunities. You can build high awareness, but low CTR’s, in the same way you interrupt people to make them buy your products, but you don’t engage them to build your brand and eventually buy your products in a sustainable way.

Key thing here is to stop interrupting people and start thinking on how you could engage and spread the word about your brand, make a better product, make a better marketing campaign that doesn’t annoy a lot of people, build interaction, fun, curiosity, help people solve their problems, communicate how you can help people solve their problems, integrate different channels, innovate, create something new, something worth to talk about, talk with people, change the way you handle the service, use the web to connect people on achieving something good, it can be free, or you can use ads to reinforce your message, not to interrupt people, use them to make people participate in something, not to try to find the “close this window” link. Want an example? Find them, create them! Below you can find two already.

www.twix.com

www.willitblend.com

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How to build compelling marketing stories?

Yesterday a friend reminded me about the dream job a couple of months ago was on the hype in the media. How to build a compelling and powerful marketing campaign is one question we can answer with some examples behind, though, the example of Tourism Queensland was quite amazing as the buzz generated millions of conversations throughout the world.

There was several clever thinking going on in Australia. The first and foremost is that the TQ as a great reason for people to visit them – the great barrier reef, no doubt about that, still, Malaysia, Indonesia, Maldives, Seychelles, Fiji and others nearby also have great reefs, great sea life, amazing beaches, and many other features of a paradisiacal tropical environment. So the key thing here was to think on how to differentiate when facing similar offerings.

If you see a couple of advertising campaigns from different countries is easy to recognize that besides each specific country heritage they all tell the same story: something like visit me and fly back in time or be in paradise. That’s a compelling story for sure if you have great cultural, historical heritage and nature, still it is not a breakthrough today as everyone does it. The buzz generated by the Tourism Queensland campaign was a breakthrough. They told us a different story, not the common story “come here”, but a story about one person getting a dream job, therefore, in a dream place. A story about living in such an extraordinary place, surrounded by amazing nature, taking care of an island and discover its beauty to tell others about it.

The integrated branding campaign asked for a 150,000 dollars job as caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef’s Hamilton Island. Created by CumminsNitro, the Best Job in the World campaign attracted more than 34,000 applicants from over 200 countries. The website had over 200,000 new visitors on the very first day of the campaign, and more than 2.5 million people viewing the campaign website so far, while generating over 11,000 (one minute video) entries in just a few short weeks. The campaign spawned around 200,000 blogs and 43,000 news stories, and some candidates created blogs, established facebook groups to create buzz on themselves. Tourism authorities have said that the campaign, which cost just over 1 million dollars, has so far generated around 150 million dollars in global publicity.

Concerning also a growing issue facing many people today about not getting a job that is satisfying for their life’s or not getting a job at all, indirectly people were actively talking about Australia, and how this place can represent a dream to be in, whether working, living or ultimately visiting! Indirectly they are selling it to everyone at every moment they talk about the job, actively spreading the idea and the story. The campaign was cleverly planned for the future as well. People can still be following the steps of the winner of the dream job and know how is it to work in such an amazing place through his diary on the web, where job duties listed include generating publicity with web videos, blogging, and photo diaries.

This is a compelling marketing story to talk about, the dream place, and the well executed strategy behind makes it to spread and spread around the world and throughout a wide period of time. Telling stories include building compelling arguments for people to get attracted and interested by what your brand might give them, not about directly arguing the features of your product or service. Understand and explore the several benefits and dimensions your brand can achieve and give to people, create a consistent and clever story, and spread it. Storytelling is powerful.

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Branding, from recommendations to collaborative filtering

A tactic used by most of local tourism stores in a central Vietnam town, is based on targeted recommendations. As soon as a tourist stops by one store and makes any purchase, we are asked to write something in our home language about the experience or product we bought. The testimonials are then shown on sight to new tourists from the same country as it is written. Happens to be a very interesting and rather effective tool which captivates interest in the store by the country/language experience approximation.

In the web we increasingly see similar and better practices. Since early Amazon started working on collaborative filtering, the method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users (collaborating). When you trust Amazon and in relevant messages, it is very likely that you might buy something they recommend. Amazon’s recommendations might suddenly turn your 20 dollars into a 100 dollars order. Multiply that by a million and it is easy to see why collaborative filtering is so important for Amazon. The list goes on from Netflix to a dozen music websites, and so on.

Online or offline, people are increasingly looking for authenticity, real interactions, relevant recommendations. Whether using customer’s testimonials, feedback to attract others, or link the interests of many users, you can smartly bring more value by recommending relevancy. If your products or services are definitely relevant and genuine, you’ll probably get organic growth by improving the brand experience and thus word of mouth.

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Analytics and getting insights faster

Avinash Kaushik from Google says to Ad Age about Analytics:

“There is no pat answer; it really depends on what your business needs. Here are some examples: E-commerce sites should look at bounce rates, revenue, days and visits to purchase, and conversion rate. Blogs should measure RSS-feed subscribers. Newspapers (or other content sites) should monitor length and depth of visit. Facebook should consider visitor loyalty and recency.”

This is a great and simple observation that sums up the logic behind analytics and also could be applied in the offline world. The goal of any analysis is to transform information into insights. In between the process, analysts might lose themselves in a multitude of information coming from the wide range analytics or today’s huge information sources might provide us. If you scan information with a goal and purpose well settled before, you’ll come up with better conclusions faster, and most importantly, with great insights.

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Social Media phenomenon in 7 days

We have watched throughout these last years the ascending power of social media, namely the curious and frequent rising stars coming out of YouTube. Within the most watched videos on YouTube varying from user generated, entertainment shows, and brand’s viral videos, today I don’t doubt that maybe we’ve never seen such a fast rise to the stardom as with Susan Boyle. In 7 days and as I write, “Susan Boyle” hit:

• 3.120 search hits on YouTube, equivalent to hundreds of videos.
• First result page on YouTube displaying 20 videos exceeds 34 million views.
• The single most viewed video has 22 million views and 115.601 comments.
• Google returns 3.770.000 results, Yahoo 7.870.000 results.
• Facebook fan group already has 403.431 fans, new comments in seconds.
• In half an hour, the fan group grew aprox 6.9%, with more 27.753 fans.
• Twitter has already millions of tweets, went on to the trending topics.
• Flickr presents 98 results for pictures featuring Susan Boyle.
• Digg has 322 results with the most ‘Dugg’ scoring 7.326 Diggs.
• Technorati gets 1.947 results and Delicious 519 results.
• Squidoo already has about 16 lenses on Susan Boyle.

British and US TV networks are constantly broadcasting the phenomenon in each of its programs, along with many and many other networks around the world. This is an amazing phenomenon, and the core of it is that Susan Boyle was able to touch each of its viewers by her voice, presence and simplicity. The empathy created is amazingly released and amplified in social media.

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