New Online Advertising – Engagement Ads

Cyberspace is evolving . Facebook was the first to implement interactive ads. Digg is considering a similar ‘diggable ad’ to implement in conjunction with their campaign to attract an audience beyond the ‘geek crowd.’

Avid digg users and scoffing, they point to the ‘top diggers’ and their ability to work in groups to control the top content. This method of manipulation can be used to control the advertising. This can be why digg co-founder, Kevin Rose, is focusing on ‘real-wold relevance,’ as reported by Cnet’s Caroline McCarthy.

The new ads take Social Networking to the next level. This type of engagement advertising lets users interact by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming a fan. The interaction appears on the user’s news feeds, or the ad can move up to the ‘top pages.’

The communities are warming up to the new advertising. PPC is good for quick ‘drive by’ revenue, but engagement advertising creates long-term relationships. There is also the opportunity to increase ad efficiency. Lets say a community has 200 people who like Y-brand. Those people create a strong presence on the internet, attracting another 200 000 visitors. When these people brag about, or complain about, Y-brand then people sit up and listen.

How can this work for small business? Imagine having a testimonial page built around an ad on Facebook or Digg where your clients, friends, and associates can sing your praises. Death to the testimonial pages and guest books that rarely convinces anyone to buy a product.

Gord Hotchkiss of the Search Insider suggested that anyone who walks down 8th avenue will see 3000 bits of advertising a day. Now, imagine a group of people gathered around a particular ad. You join the group and get the inside scope. The company didn’t need to pay any money on conversions or ROI, your loyal fans will do that for you.

MySpace co-founder Brett Brewer, the chairman of international social networking ad serving network, visited Australia with a sense of foreboding as the US financial markets tumbled. Brewer Acknowledged that cyberspace will ride the storm like it did multiple times before.

”I am reminded of 1997/ 98 when companies were very reticent to advertise online and only a few like ebay and Amazon were willing to embrace the unpredictability and consequently build multi billion dollar businesses. The same thing is really happening today in 2008. The difference is that its social media that advertisers have been a reticent to engage in. But I really think that the winners that will emerge are those that embrace this, harness it for their brands and build multibillion dollar businesses while mot of the advertising public sort of waits on the sidelines.”

The new hope promised by engagement advertising is giving many small business owners reason to breath a sigh of relief and confidently continue to build their businesses while the ‘real world’ sweats the current crisis.

6 Critical Steps to a Successful Email Campaign

This outline lists several elements of a typical email marketing campaign. Each step is designed to improve the ‘conversion to buyer’ ratio of the email, and help you understand the why some email campaigns work, and others do not.

Most marketing gurus agree that an email has 3 seconds to catch the reader’s interest. However, most of us do not have the benefit of a good email marketing service, so we are left on our own wondering exactly what ‘will’ catch the reader’s attention.

There are six steps to create a successful email campaign:

• Design
• List Maintenance
• Segmentation Strategies
• Compliance to the Law
• Metrics
• Test, Review & Expand Read more

Can Television Make the Transition to the Internet?

The birth of www.hulu.com has created a stir in the media industry. Big Media has worked through youtube, iTunes, and other online venues to build an audience among online audiences. I am not referring to Halmark that brings its own brand of sweet television through an online version of TV Guide. Or other endeavors to bring individual episodes to television audiences through streaming.

Hulu has taken this one-step more. NBC, Viacom (VIA) are taking a more inward approach. They are working to distribute their content via internet. They demanded that the FCC forced broadband providers to ban pirated traffic.

Hulu offers film, TV, and video clips from a number of companies. It does limit the content to the most recent 5 episodes of a series. Read more

Spot Runner vs Google

The advertising world is about to evolve again. It has been  a year in the making, a lion and lamb battle with the lamb confident they will win.  The prize, television advertising dollars. 

After a year of rumors, Google started testing AdWord type ads on television with their Google TV Ads Beta. The test group included 50 top advertisers who are willing to pay a paltry $10 000 a month for the television exposure.  Eventually this program will go public using a Pay Per Impression schematic.

“Over the past months, our partnerships with DISH network and Astound Cable have scaled and we are pleased to expand our Google TV Ads program to more U.S. advertisers,” the company said in a statement.

Soon, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to buy a TV spot — on any one of 94 networks, including A&E Network, Bravo, CNBC, CNN, Discovery, ESPN, Fox News Channel and MTV — delivered to any of Dish Network customers’ 14 million set-top boxes, according to Multichannel News.

The lamb in this scenario is Spot Runner, an internet-based television ad agency who recently acquired Weblistic, a local online advertising company. “The acquisition of Weblistic will enable Spot Runner to correlate TV and online advertising with phone- and Web-based responses to provide tracking, analysis and results.” Spot Runner doesn’t appear to be worried about Google. And maybe they don’t need to be.

Their program differs from Google’s in many ways, namely in price and deliverable. Spot Runner places voice over and text on stock video footage. The price for ad creation is $500, with exact CPS depending on the region, demographic and air time but only a $1000 a week minimum buy, versus google’s $10,000 a month fee.

The question is, ‘Should small business trust their money to Spot Runner or Google?” The answer is subtle but found in news headlines already popping up on the net, ‘Google to Buy Spot Runner.’

Google is great at analytics, Spot Runner seems to be great at facilitating the buy, with that, you have to wonder, when google will just swallow up a company like Spot Runner?

As Henry Blodget put it on his blog a full year ago, “If Google’s M&A team is not already driving down to LA with truckloads of money to buy the company, they should.  And if they don’t, Microsoft or Yahoo should.”.

What has Spot Runner done? They reduced production cost from $500,000 to $500. Reduced the time needed to create online exposure from 12 months to 24 hours.  They take local businesses out of the Yellow pages and onto television, for roughly the same costs.

 “With tons of advertisers suddenly having the option to advertise on TV, we’ll see a lot more unprofessional ads, and some inevitable blunders by confused first-time advertisers,” Pinny Cohen, an Internet marketing consultant, wrote on his blog last month, that it  will also “dilute the special status of TV as being an ‘all-professional zone,’ which made it harder for people to miss watching it.”

Despite having a 98% reach, TV still feels the sharp competition from iTunes, Tivo and the like. Inevitably, TV media  will be seen as just another commodity, if it isn’t already. I guess its a question of  who is poised to carry it to that end?