Marketing in General•
on December 9th, 2009•
I get on my soap box from time to time, and this is one of them.
This post is about “How to screw up your Brand Power”. We have several companies here in Australia that deal in electronics, whitegoods, furniture – so they are the bare bones of retail if you will. These companies obviously push their brand heavily in the traditional media such as TV, papers and mail drops.
Now there is nothing at all wrong with this (all businesses need to push their brand in areas that give them that brand recall over a competitor), however it is the way they do it.
Let me give you an example. Harvey Norman is one of these large companies that run loads and loads of ads in prime time TV spots, I think they offset the cost in the ad placement by producing the worst ads possible . The ads they put on have to be some of the cheapest and most annoying. Now before anyone says “ah ha – but see you’re talking about them in your blog so it must be effective”…….. keep reading. Bad publicity is not always good publicity. read more
Just a quick one today.
Was reading a lead from one of our Twitter Followers about the issues facing the US newspaper industry.
I won’t go into detail, however it is an interesting read that outlines the following (quoted from The Boston.com site).
“Newspapers have been hit hard by the loss of readers and advertisers to the Internet, while the national economic slowdown has intensified the advertising slump. In recent months, the Rocky Mountain News has closed, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has significantly reduced staffing and moved entirely onto the Web, and several major newspaper companies have filed for bankruptcy protection. read more
One area that we go over a fair bit lately with our clients is the need to have a strong brand awareness strategy.
In short what this means in the online advertising world is that it is OK to embark on a strategy that just looks at promoting your business brand. Actually, it’s more than ok, it is a must.
You see the habits of off-line purchase decision making and online purchase decision making are very similar in many ways. I think we need to get out of our heads that off-line and online advertising are at 2 different ends of the spectrum. We also need to stop thinking about online advertising as clicks on ads. read more
Well we have been working around the clock (ha … who isn’t in this industry) to finish off the adserving network and can happily say ……….. almost!
We are very close. Each day we test we realise we can make the interface and ability to purchase ads easier to use.
The irony is here that the simpler we make it for the user – the more complex the back end and code needs to be. It’s all for a good cause though!
Just to recap – the one thing that has bugged us over the years is the ability to understand exactly what it is worth to advertise on any given website. Many of you will have found a great site that really targets your precise demographic, only to find that you can’t get a reply on the advertising prices, they don’t know what it is worth, don’t offer any advertising or just price themselves out of the markets (YES … $10,000 is too expensive for 10,000 impressions).
I love the saying that if something bugs you, spend 5 minutes on how to improve it. If you can come up with a way to improve it in that time then you could be onto a good thing. Well here t WSM we ahve spent 12 months on it, so you know it is going to be great.
The short of it is that we have developed a score for each website that want to participate in the ad network. Each website that want to show ads on their pages (relevant ads mind you – not the crappy bingo type * sorry bingo guys) will receive a score out of 100. This score is known as an AQR™ – advertising quality rank™.
So the higher the AQR™ the more it will cost to advertise, but at least you also know how many visitors, the stick time, page impressions ….. even a score for how well a site is designed.
These factors plus dozens more make up the AQR™ which in turn allow you to browse our network and effectively benchmark sites at a glance BEFORE throwing money at them. Obviously we will provide weekly reports on how many impressions and click throughs etc just to make sure you understand the ROI for each campaign.
You can book the ads direct through us and even organise the creation of your creatives (if you don’t have any). We would like to think that any company looking to increase their brand recognition, promote a new service or sell products can spend 15 minutes in our network and spend a percentage of their online ad budget without any guesswork.
Your right ….. this is not new – in fact the IAB has reported here that Internet advertising revenues reached $5.8 billion for the first quarter of 2008, showing that advertising online will become the norm for most businesses. What we are doing is trying to simplify things to make your adplacements as profitable and effective as possible for you organisation – transparency, that’s what we are going for here.
Stay tuned….. just a bit longer 