Always read the fine print in advertising

In the following billboard, the price for a car rental is marked at 129.- Euros:

And as you can see, in the fine print, it says that at airports Sixt charges an extra 19%, i.e. 153,31 Euros in total. Why not you might ask – and I agree, why not. Let them charge what they want, where they want.

But I do ask, why they put up a billboard with this fine print copy AT THE AIRPORT? Yes, I took that picture at the airport in Hamburg!

Why did they not simply put up a billboard with the „real“ price for that location?

MySpace started „MyAd“ for long tail advertising

All social networks are heavily working on finding ways to earn money through some kind of advertising or marketing.

MySpace, one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) social network is already earning close to billion dollars in revenue.

Now they launched a new self serving ad platform. Ads are served on a CPC basis and you have to design them yourself. However, they’re not text ads, they’re display ads, which you can design yourself on the myspace website

The most interesting feature, however, is the targeting options you have. As Techcrunch writes:

The key to MySpace’s ad platform is their hypertargeting technology. Facebook allows targeting as well, although it’s based on interest areas put in by users directly. So if someone says they like books, you can target ads to them based on that. What MySpace does is much different – they build out a profile of each user based on what they do on MySpace over time, with 1,200 different ways to categorize each user. So if you only want to target women who live in California between the ages of 25-30 who like motorcycles, i can. There are 2,842 of them on MySpace.

If that works properly – and if it is accepted by the community to be targeted in that way, it could well be a huge opportunity for myspace to increase advertising revenues!

Doritos lets you fill the internet with stuff you like

At the beginning of the video it says that the agency was asked to create online advertising for Doritos. Sounds like a typical briefing, but the agency instead came up with something completely contradictory: a tool that removes online advertising (and let’s you fill the space with something you like instead).
The idea behind this:

what if the internet was just like a bag of Doritos. Filled only with the stuff you like.

Great idea to achieve awareness on regular media sites without actually pushing ads in your face. Here is the case study video:

Failures and opportunities in social media marketing

On Cnet is news about a new study by Gartner with the catching headline of a 50% failure rate:

75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies are eager to get involved in social-networking initiatives for marketing or customer relations purposes, but 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures

The main problem is (oh wonder) the differing expectations about what will happen during those marketing efforts:

The quirkiest and most addictive campaigns often provide little value for the company and turn out to be fads, whereas marketing efforts on the Web often don’t go over as well with the public.

In addition, the report points out that online usage during the purchasing process of all products and services will increase:

Gartner’s research shows that by 2012 fully half of all purchases will have some online component. That could mean searching for product reviews, reading about a new product on a blog, or comparing prices even if the purchase is ultimately made in a store.

So the need to figure out win-win situations for brands and the community are ever more important.

And furthermore, a „heads up“ for online marketers for the financially difficult times ahead:

Businesses will turn to the Web to stay in touch with consumers during a difficult financial climate. “This is going to be a lifeline,” he said. “Your spirit of customers is probably the only thing you have.”

70% of print ads don’t have a URL!?

Just a quick note on a very curious fact – here is a quote of a recent finding:

I’m working on remake of I Am the Media, so I asked one of our bright and diligent researchers to do a count of the last 4 months of print campaigns on Ads of the World. And the gut feeling was confirmed. 70% of them didn’t contain any URL.

70%? This is absolutely amazing. Out of 256 print ads, only 77 Ads had a URL for more information.

Seems like the other campaigns weren’t really interested in providing further information. But why?

Stop campaining, start committing

Interesting presentation of Paul Isaakson on modern brand building.

The essence can be laid out in the two contraries:

Campaining = marketing for short term gains.
Committing = creating an evolving collection of coherent brand ideas and experiences over time.

Modern Brand Building

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: deepspace space150)

Just one sentence struck me as a bit strange:

Campaining = changing your core brand message to fit what you think people need or want to hear today so that they buy your product or service

Campaigns don’t always change core brand messages, do they? I surprised by that assumption…