Where did you loose 50% of your ad budget?

von | Nov. 11, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Online Advertising

Marketing.fm wants to revise a famous quote by John Wanamaker:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. -John Wanamaker, US department store merchant (1838 – 1922)

I know the quote, of course, as I suppose everyone in advertising does. But I didn’t know it was of someone as unknown as this chap. On the contrary, I was almost tempted to assign the quote to Mark Twain, purely because lately if feels like most thoughtful quotes come from Mark Twain, as if he is some sort of a quote-goat anytime people don’t know the real source.

In the same blog post, they write:

The advent of interactive media and online measurement has allowed marketers to target advertising messages much more precisely. Morover, it is possible to access comprehensive data on the viewers of your campagin: page views, geographic location, clicks, links, etc.
Is it time that we revised the 50/50 Wanamaker quote? Should it be more like 70/30 now?

I ain’t sure that the hard measurements that the web provides, should redefine investments alone. This might sound strange coming from someone working in digital marketing. But if you think about it: applying these measurements, you de-value the web to a purely interactional medium (which it is, most of the time, admittingly). However, by that you omitt all the effects of the contacts people have with your brand that cannot be exactly measured:

  • The impression an ad made with that one page view, even if the user didn’t click on it.
  • time spent interacting with the ad piece all together
  • triggered purchase consideration, fulfilled in brick&mortar store

Online Advertising can be measured and therefore it should be. Always.
But we should not forget, that there are so called key performance indicators that can help us understand the effect of advertising, and that can’t be measured by interaction, but purely by qualitative research. Asking the target audience about their perception of the brand, the channel interaction, etc.
Classical Advertising has been working with this kind of research all the time. And while it never helped to solve the puzzle of where the 50% of investments „got lost“, I think, purely relying on data measured through interaction, will not help either. It sounds more like a quick fix of Marketeers trying to answer tough questions by providing hard results – irrespectively of context.

Google’s CPG Blog

von | Nov. 9, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, SEO / SEA

German Blogger Robert Basic points me to a new blog by Google, which does not promote Google services, but instead it writes about how the CPG industry is tackling online marketing. Which makes this whole blog a service to this industry. And lets us guess about the relative importance of this industry for Google…

Our motto: all the news from Google’s ad team that fits in your fridge or pantry…and maybe a little bit more. […] Our sales teams are organized by industry so that we can focus on the distinctive qualities and business needs of our advertisers and marketers.

[..] Our goal for the blog is to communicate with you, our advertisers and agencies. We’ll talk about the ways in which CPG is tackling the changing world of online marketing and how we work with advertisers to create the best experience for their customers. We’ll also strive to keep you on top of relevant news from Google that can affect CPG.

A good idea. But will people read it? Only the long tail run can tell us.

Back on the Blog.

von | Nov. 9, 2006 | Blog

After nearly a month of silence for which I can blame nothing but laziness, I am back on the blog.

In the meantime, my personal systems admin (my brother) has migrated all my webstuff on to a completely new server, I have upgraded to WP 2.0.5. and installed new plugins, I had a week of vacation (the first this year) and I also enjoyed some sparetime in grey October…

Which means, I have a lot of catch up to do on what has been happening… Or may be I just delete all unread RSS Feeds and start new.

Try this: An exercise in futility

von | Okt. 12, 2006 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising

Joseph Jaffe is asking us to take part in his „exercise in futility“.

He asks us to leisurely watch television and then answer a few apparently easy questions:

  • how many commercials in totality do you think you watched?
  • how many commercials did you remember?
  • of these commercials, how many brands did you remember (as opposed to „the one with the bunnies“
  • of these commercials, how many do you think told you something you didn’t know, offered up something of value, made you think differently about the brand and/or made you want to buy (or consider to buy) that particular brand/product/service
  • Bonus assignment: did any one or more commercials strike you as being particularly original, progressive, innovative in terms of message, call-to-action etc.?

I can see his point. But do take into account: if there was a similar questionnaire about regular online advertising, the result would be similarly bad (or even worse). If I read his book right, then his point is more about the irrelevance of this kind of advertising. Push advertising, unasked for, without any engaging element to it…

Downsides of Participation Inequality

von | Okt. 12, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing

Jakob Nielsen has some interesting views about the downsides of the 1% rule that I blogged about. In his article
Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities he lists those „Downsides of Participation Inequality“

The problem is that the overall system is not representative of Web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from. This can cause trouble for several reasons:

  • Customer feedback. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.
  • Reviews. Similarly, if you’re a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services.
  • Politics. If a party nominates a candidate supported by the „netroots,“ it will almost certainly lose because such candidates‘ positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).
  • Search. Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what’s useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building Internet access services.
  • Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don’t have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.

    • In addition, he also lists some point on „How to Overcome Participation Inequality“.
    But the main point still is: you can’t overcome participation inequality. You can only optimise the way content is produced an sorted, trying to make it more suitable and/or relevant for the average users.