Agen"see"

I read an interesting commentary today from a colleague of mine explaining why most agencies still don’t succeed at interactive advertising. The gist of the argument was that poor media buying led to ineffective campaigns. Very true, but I also think this points us to look at the evolution of the “big agency” take on interactive and why this is only half the equation. Truth be told, at first the failure of big branding agencies to succeed online was because none understood the level of trackability and functionality. It was thought that you just needed to get online because your competitors were there… or weren’t there yet.

A few years later and a few campaigns wiser, most are realizing the errors of their initial efforts. But to that point, are they really “getting” interactive now? In my humble opinion, the answer is no. So what if they’re producing multi-level Flash campaigns with interactive rollover banners and integrated video? That’s aesthetically pleasing and gives the business suits the warm and fuzzies, but does it really product results?

We constantly preach good design here at Media Two, but for most agencies I think that there’s a disconnect between what’s good design and what’s functional. Good design placed in the right places still doesn’t necessarily product results, and the converse is certainly true. But when good and functional design is coupled with innovative strategy, the result is a living and breathing media plan that grows and evolves.

So where I’m going with this is that success is two-fold in nature. It begins with the design team understanding the strategy side. Whether it’s copy, images, or functionality you’re talking about, the design team must understand the context in which their work will be viewed. For example, slap the Mona Lisa on the side of a building in East Harlem and it goes unnoticed, but speak to the locals through a blended mural and suddenly an artistic genius emerges.

The second part of this equation is ensuring that the strategy team fully understands the end result the designers are striving to achieve and then using that knowledge to find innovative ways to display it. After all, pictures always look better with a nice frame, right?

In the long run, I think the ultimate demise of most interactive campaigns comes from the inability of both groups in the equation to fully understand each other. It’s the old left brain/right brain conflict at its best. Those agencies that are capable of collective thinking with both brains will be the ones that excel in this industry by driving all parties involved towards a common goal.

Search Account has “Hit its Limit”?

Some people will tell you that that can never happen…but anything is possible…and exhausting your keyword universe is definitely possible. People only use certain keywords…and only so many of them…and if you have a high enough budget to test ALL of them, you could find yourself at the end of your rope, not being able to drive anymore traffic (or should I say…relevant traffic).

If you have ever found yourself researching keywords that are as far-fetched as your budget or CPA goals can often be, here are a few initiatives you can test that will help in growing your search marketing campaigns, at the very least allowing you to increase visibility in the hopes of driving additional traffic and, in turn, conversions:

1. Create separate campaigns for content-network targeting:

This will place your ads on sites related to your product/service. You'll typically see a large increase in impressions, but as long as you use your best ads (from a CTR standpoint), you should generate an increase in traffic as well.

These campaigns should mirror your existing sponsored search campaigns and only use your top 30-50 keywords (based on conversion volume)

2. Create a separate placement-targeted campaign:

Generate a list of sites based on category, demographic, topic, etc straight from AdWords. Within this campaign, you are able to use image ads and video (depending on the site) for enhanced branding.

One campaign should target your demographic profile and the other should target sites relevant to your product “topic” or category.

3. Yahoo Search Submit Pro (aka. Paid Inclusion):

This is a cheap and relatively painless way to get your site indexed in the organic search results on Yahoo.

4. Ad Text testing:

I know this is like beating a dead horse, but if you can manage to alter your ad verbiage to garner more consumer interest, you will drive traffic and increase your spend without too much effort. Of course, there is no guarantee (as your new ads may actually turn consumers off), but it’s always worth a shot.

Wednesday April 16th- TIMA Casino Night Social

The TIMA Social was last Wednesday, the theme of this month’s meet and greet was a casino night and was located in a beautiful home/office in downtown Raleigh right next to the WRAL building. As I walked into this historic and beautiful home I couldn’t help but feel like I was in an episode of Scooby Doo, complete with bookcases full of really old books and statues with creepy staring eyes. After being accused of being a “riff raff” (jokingly) and cautioned not to touch anything I checked all the books in the bookcase for secret rotating trap door entrances… much to my disappointment they were actually books and not secret entrance levers to the pirate ghosts hideout, who actually turns out to be old man Livingston trying to scam the owners out of their amusement park…But I digress, Back to the Social, the set up was great, you were greeted at the door with 500 interactive dollars you could trade in for chips at any table, much like Vegas except it didn’t hurt as bad to lose Interactive Dollars. Every five hundred interactive dollars earned bought you a raffle ticket and an opportunity to win prizes with the grand prize being a Ipod Video… that I didn’t win… the event was well catered and the hoursdevors were excellent and well worth the admission… which was free… this was a great opportunity to mingle and network with local people in the interactive world. After losing all my fake money, drinking a few beers, and making some new interactive contacts I called it a night, and although I lost it all, I gained some new perspectives from local peers in the Raleigh interactive world.

What's The Next Silo?

For the first 8 years of Media Two’s existence, I spent 95% of my time educating clients that interactive was truly a piece of the marketing mix. So as of about 2 years ago, I came to the conclusion that everyone now “got” that – as interactive ad dollars continued to spike while traditional budgets dwindled. The only problem was – apparently we (Media Two and the IAB and the rest of the interactive community) did too good of a job selling interactive’s benefits as everyone started throwing their money into the interactive “silo” and abandoning everything else…

When this happens, it’s great for agencies like ours in the near term, but the long-term prospect for this client is a nightmare… By putting all of your money in one silo, and ignoring the fact that people interact with multiple channels is a death sentence to your marketing mix. I think people just tend to forget that old adage that there’s always going to be a worst performer. If you remove one, the 2nd worst now becomes your worst… So how about not replacing any, but maybe just reducing until you can find the magical combination that they’re all successful? Nah – probably too much work. But seriously, by putting all of your money into one silo now means your best silo is also your worst… So what happens then?

Exactly what we’re seeing… Interactive now gets divided into it’s own silo with Search being labeled the best, and traditional banner ads getting labeled the worst. So the first thing clients start doing is looking to cancel traditional ads and only run search… Now we’re sitting on millions of dollars that have been allocated to interactive, but we can only spend it on search – and best yet, search seems to be “drying” up and we can’t spend millions anymore – we can only spend thousands… Hmm… Should we silo search now and maybe hire an agency that only specializes in 3-word key phrases?

The point is – we’ve silo’d everything, and by doing that we’ve accomplished nothing. Search is driven by other interactive exposure, and interactive exposure can also be driven by offline events such as a newspaper ad, radio spot, tv, etc… Don’t drop your marketing mix – add to it and expand on it – but do it with firms that understand marketing, not just firms that are jumping on the hottest trend and soaking up the most coin.

Thoughts on Video and the Ever Expanding Universe

In my search to come up with this very blog post, I combed the many unread AAF Smartbriefs that have filled-up my inbox over the course of the past few months for inspiration. What I found were many interesting articles on both traditional and interactive advertising (huh,imagine that in an advertising newsletter), but one that really @$!* stood out. The nytimes.com article I speak of explored the presence of bleeps in both television and online ads and how they resonated with the target audience. Before I even finished the first paragraph, I thought to myself, "Bud Light swear jar." GREAT ad.

But, what the article really made me think about is how advertisers continue to push the limits to reach their target audience. The online space appears to be the ideal channel to foster this continuing surge toward risque content. With viral videos in a constant clash to gain a chunk of digital real estate, advertisers appear to be taking advantage of this less stringently regulated medium by introducing content that might not fly during prime time. I can't speak for all online users or demographics, but I have come to expect this type of off-the-wall content that makes the online space so unique. And it's exciting!

Bleeping or not, it's nice to know that the interactive space allows advertisers and designers to explore and implement a variety of creative options that can play into the media buy. Not only that, but the results are measurable, so you can tell if Tay Zonday's Cherry Chocolate Rain remix helped sell Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper (just an example). One day I'd like to tell my grand kids that I trafficked a popular internet ad like that. Yea, that sounds like the tops.

A couple questions come to mind as I reflect on what I have already wrote: What about video banners though? When will they be discussed in the same breadth as the chart-topping viral videos on youtube? Or will they at all? I'd like to think so. If anyone can do it, the collective heads at Media Two can. It will be interesting to see what lies ahead as we move at the speed of the internet!

Funnel Your Consumers

A few years ago, I ran into an online buying cycle bullseye in an online newsletter, illustrating the 3 stages that people go through in order to purchase online. The graphic resonated with me and still shapes my thoughts about how every online tactic and strategy should not be pigeon-holed into producing the same goal and results. On the contrary, each type of media placement for an advertiser should be measured and held accountable toward different KPI (Key Performance Indicators) for success.

Similarly, I had the opportunity to work with a "traditional" direct response marketing group, who's main focus was to drive customer acquisition through a conversion funnel, touching the consumer with different pieces of direct response marketing material to the end-goal.

Merging those two ideas together and utilizing them online, I believe is a strategy that can produce long-term success results for some (not all) online advertisers.

Here's an example: The goal of the advertisers is to drive sales. The average consumer buying the average product online goes through a process before actually making the purchase...

1. Information Seeking/Research - What product do I need to accomplish my mission?

Message: Brand messages - get your brand in front of the consumer so they know that you are out there and that YOUR brand exists.

• KPIs - Page Views to your site, time spent on your site learning about the product/brand, interactive/assessment tools, whitepaper downloads, brand lift/awareness, etc.
  
• Media Venues: top-tier sites, general search keywords, ad networks
  

2. Decision Making - Price comparison shopping.... i.e. where can I get my best deal?

Message: Product/Brand Differentiators - WHY you brand is better than the rest, sales, incentives, etc.

• KPIs - signing up for an account, email newsletter signups, etc.
• Media Venues- phrase/exact keywords, niche content sites, consumer review sites, shopping comparison sites

3.Time To Buy - credit card in hand and ready to tackle the shopping cart.

Message: Sales, Incentives, direct response - this is the time to "reel in the fishing line"

• KPIs - sales, leads, whatever your established ROI goal is for your online marketing
  
• Media Venues- product keywords, phrase/exact keywords, CPA networks, affiliate marketing.

The theory behind the conversion funnel is to start at the beginning of the process and establish your brand into the mind of consumer, so that by the time they are at the stage to perform your marketing goal, there is no question that your company will be the one they choose. Along the way, each stage is measured and optimized for success, using the KPI metrics.

Continually pushing people into the top of your funnel will build your marketing program and establish long-term success. The obstacle - having the patience to see it grow.

Thoughts on Media Optimization

I was glancing over one of my favorite Marketing & Advertising publications, Adrants, and I came across this article with an interesting perspective on media optimizations. The name of the article was Media Optimization Has Trumped Creative Optimization. The theme of the article spoke about how we, as online marketers, are forgetting the importance creative plays on the success of our campaigns with flaws in our campaign implementation, thus limiting our ability to gain learnings from a creative standpoint and act swiftly to optimize based on those results.

This brings up a good point, but before I give you my perspective on the subject, let's quickly define what it means to optimize an online campaign and some best practices. The definition of optimize means to "make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible". So, as direct marketers, we are responsible for driving desired actions as cost-effective as possible. We look at "Cost Per" metrics (CPA, CPC, CPM). We look at frontend and backend response rates (CTR, Conversion Rates). We also look at post click activity volume and traffic trends. As mentioned, based on these learning, we swiftly make adjustments.

Getting back to the article, technology has come so far to do some of the work for you. By setting rules within an adserver, the campaign will be delivered and optimized in real-time based on the aforementioned factors. This still does not cut out the manual aspect of going in and using your expertise to make the necessary tweaks.

In an ideal world, the online marketer can let the campaign ramp up and gain data to evaluate. Again, in an ideal world, the progression of optimizing a campaign would start on a creative level, then placement level (even certain creative on the placement level), and then if that fails, then the optimization would be done on a site level, which is another way of saying cancel the site.

Unfortunately, we may not have the luxury to follow this progression. A site is going from bad to worse, and your campaign goals are dots in your rear-view mirror as you head towards CPOutofcontrol. So, getting back to the question, Has Media Optimization Trumped Creative Optimization? Unfortunately, I think it has, and in many cases, by necessity to keep our promise to our clients. The promise as direct marketers to deliver conversions as efficiently as possible, and as a result, it requires us to skip steps one and two, and have the conversation that nobody likes to have with our new test partner. Let's face it, it's more work for us to start and cancel a campaign, then to start a successful campaign and let it run. But, if all campaigns were a success, then Media Two wouldn't need 48 hour out clauses.

Lastly, the article fails to mention two addition factors to rolling out a campaign with "10 or more versions of a creative unit" to go along with the incremental cost. Good design is time-consuming, which can easily become a bandwidth issue. The benefit of Media Two versus other shops is our ability to meet agressive deadlines, but creativity doesn't happen overnight. And once the concepting is done, getting your assets through the client's legal team is a full-time job in itself. My best advice is to plan ahead. Start concepting for Q3 now...sound crazy? Save yourself the headache and trust me.

Web 2.0... really?

I first heard of the internets when I was in college, around 1995. At first I ignored all the hype as I was just too cool to find anything “cool”. All the students I had seen in the school library were looking at professional wrestling pages, This is the south after all and it was important to know what the Nature Boy Rick Flair was planning. Thank goodness the 4 horsemen had long since retired.

Fast forward a few short years later and the dot com boom is in full effect. I started working with computers creating short animations, recording lectures and working with Real Player. I remember the hype of this new medium and the mantra was “everyone can create a web page”. While this was true for a select few, the only “people” who could really take advantage of this new format were corporations who could afford to employ the army of people to code HTML (keep in mind HTML was cutting edge technology in 1998). Dreamweaver and other HTML editors were not user friendly and you had to know how to code javascript by hand to accomplish anything “cool” like an animated .gif. Money was thrown around and given to anyone who could code a hyper link and those people spent the money on launch parties for sites that had yet to be completed. Of course, most of these sites never got completed and the industry went bust. Web 1.0 was built on a promise that was more a sales pitch then a reality of the medium. Slowly though, the web evolved and an industry matured eventually delivering on that promise.

Now, when I turn on the news or surf the net, I hear a new buzz word.. Web 2.0. This time, it’s all about social networking. But really… isn’t this just what the initial Web 1.0 promised us? Finally now, everyone CAN make a webpage and they do on MySpace and Facebook. You don’t really need to know much code and you can “pimp” your page, with a little effort, express your personal style and actually fulfill the promises of Web 1.0. Today MySpace has even beaten the original web pioneer Yahoo! in popularity, blogs have truly taken hold and everyone can easily customize a personal corner on the web to share their life experiences with friends, family and the random web surfers who might have a pregnant wife or chocolate lab mix who obsessively chases his tail. It took a little more then 10 years, but web 1.0 has arrived… finally.

So what is Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia, web 2.0 is “web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, and blogs”. Isn’t that already here? Isn’t this just what we were promised the first time around? Is Web 2.0 nothing more then an industry invented term to create a new buzz? What does the future bring for the real web 2.0 or 3.0?

The main difference I see between the realities of web 1.0 and the promises of web 2.0 is streaming video. Video is, at its core, a series of 30 images per second, just like an animated .gif. The first animated .gif, sent over the web in January 1995, sounded the opening bell of the first dot com boom and I hear those sirens singing again with video as their tune. Just like the .gif fueled web 1.0, video might drive this next online economic boom, but it’s not in the hands of the public… yet. If you look closely, most of this new content is powered by corporate America, driven by the industry and consumed by the public. This mirrors most industries in America and throughout the world, so it’s not surprising. But as the public becomes more empowered by technology and connected to one another, change is bound to happen and quicker then ever. As future generations age while being connected with each other and highly mobile (along with the popularity of the consumer camcorder, cell phone cameras and websites and blogging) little brother is watching Big Brother and that’s something no one expected, not even George Orwell. Maybe web 3.0 will usher in greater freedoms for everyone through government and corporate transparency. No longer can China squash peaceful protests with violence or American police beat suspects without us seeing. No longer can a radical preachers preach hate or a news anchor melt down without us seeing. Perhaps this is the real web 2.0… the world looking at itself truly creating a global community. Perhaps the revolution is here.

According to Wiki, Guerrilla warfare is “unconventional warfare … with which a small group of combatants use mobile tactics… to combat a larger, less mobile formal army.”

The internet is dead… long live the internet!

Putting ouselves on our calendar

At Media Two we do great work for our clients - I'm biased, I know but it's what they tell me! So it must be true...

Our media plans deliver customers who open $2M worth of new accounts in a single month for an advertising investment of five figures. Our creative work triggers interest from targeted new visitors and then guides them through simple steps converting them into new leads, new patients, new paying customers and new brand agents for our clients. Every week, the baselines get reset - the work builds upon itself.

At the end of day, we’re enthusiastically exhausted (oxymoron?) by the work day and what we delivered for our clients. The demands put upon each person on the team from our clients and from one another is intense but it’s the stuff that makes each of us get in here to do more of it the next day. We are not suffering from any lack of motivation or integrity. We are however, in desperate need of time to do some of our best work for Media Two and time for self improvement comes at a premium or just doesn’t exist most days.

We need to find the hours to dedicate resources to our site, our own collateral, our new business pitch. There’s no shortage of new business coming our way! But are these potential new partners seeing our best work at our front door? I think we all agree that they’re not – our best work is organized neatly throughout our servers under the many folders that hold the assets we've built for our clients.

It’s the symptom that many small to mid size businesses suffer – finding time to prioritize their own needs in order to get to the next level. The level we’ve grown to is all-consuming but we still know we can do more, for our current customers and for new customers and for our firm – but to get there – we need a plan and we need time. We need to make Media Two a customer.

Seth Godin, a famed agent of change in our trade wrote a post recently about managing urgencies. To paraphrase, if you fail to plan then you plan to fail. No real news there for anyone. But what he goes on to caution is that when your plan or your work is constantly interrupted by fire drills, you never really achieve your plan’s objectives. I agree in theory, but in practice, that's the demands that are put on us and we have to manage to that expectation. We expect to get interrupted and often. We manage all of the many “I need this now’s” and get our clients what they pay us for on time. We just don’t do the same for us - yet.

Fortunately, we do have a plan for this year and what we want to accomplish individually at Media Two and as a team. We’ll reconvene and mark our progress against the goals we set at the start of the New Year. And while it’s a small step it's one that sets us apart from other agencies – we should insist collectively that the work we do for ourselves should also be prioritized, it should have hard deadlines and they should be realistically set to safely absorb fire drills.
This work may not be invoiced but it will bring that ROI and growth we're after.

IAB Marketplace: Ad Network & Xchanges

I just recently got back from the IAB Marketplace: Ad Network & Xchanges conference that took place in NYC on March 31st. A co-worker and I attended the conference open minded but with the hopes that we would come away with a little more insight into the inner working of Ad Networks & Exchanges and how we might better use them for our clients campaigns. I will say that overall I was very pleased with the venue, its key note speakers, and all the attendees. I particularly liked the “speed dating” format in which the networks and exchanges presented their information. It kept everything on track; the only real draw back was that Q&A was kept to a minimum.

Most of the networks and exchanges presenting, did a good job explaining overall capabilities, and more importantly how they can be an asset to a campaign. Yes, a few networks (I won’t name drop) gave more of a sales pitch, but I guess that is to be expected. Sandwiched in between the speed dating information sessions were some great panel discussions and speakers talking about everything from your basic network pricing structures to what the future might hold. Yes, the ESPN.com decision came up several times but none of the panelists representing networks were rattled by the decision, but rather commented on the value of such a move.

So are networks and exchanges going to see a dramatic shift of publishers taking back their inventory and handling ad sales themselves? I think not. The reality of the situation is that a lot of sites just don’t have the resources to handle such a move. It requires not only an experienced sales force to sell your inventory effectively, but also adequate technology to assure your advertisers that their campaigns are going to be delivered, and delivered effectively. Networks and exchanges and the ESPN.com’s of the world each serve a unique and valuable purpose in the online advertising medium. Each just represents a separate piece to the advertising puzzle that we have to put together to try and make our campaigns successful.