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exploit digital media - The Marketer magazine

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exploit search engines

RSS feeds, Zebtab, advertising, CPM and mobile barcodes: digital marketing gets more complicated by the month. Get up to speed eith our bluffers guide, from banners through to shortcodes Talk about a tough brief. Jamie Oliver had failed. Schools minister Ruth Kelly had hit a wall of impenetrable resistance. Could nothing defeat the turkey twizzler? The Schools Food Trust knocked on the door of Brighton-based digital marketing agency Kerb asking for a digital miracle. They wanted a campaign that would persuade eight to 13-year-olds to abandon junk food. Oh, and cash was a bit tight. Would 20 grand cover the whole campaign? Kerb knew that banner ads wouldnt do it. Ten-year-olds can spot a boring health lecture a mile off. E-mail marketing wouldnt work either kids might eat spam but they wont read it. The solution? A videogame. Kerbs Snack Dash videogame, launched in 2006, was played 22 million times in its first two months, with zero marketing budget. The game was the biggest viral of the year. The Schools Food Trust engaged youngsters with their message for seven minutes at a time with the game, says Jim McNiven, managing director of Kerb. The execution was perfect. The Trust got a reach and impact way beyond what theyd have achieved through a traditional route. This is the beauty of digital marketing. The old rules based around ratecards and readership are obsolete. In cyberspace, the only thing that counts is your imagination and your grasp of technology. The basics The meat and potatoes of digital advertising is the banner, or display, advert. There are three ways of paying for your banner: per page impression, per click or per action such as a sale or brochure order. Paying by impressions is the most controversial. After all, how do you know if anyones noticed your advert? Noah Brien, creative director at digital marketing agency Naked Communications, says: Online CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) advertising is like crack. Publishers know its no good and wont last, but they are addicted and cant wean themselves off the stuff. He says marketers should avoid it for three reasons. First, most consumers are banner-blind. Eyeball tracking tests by legendary internet marketer Jakob Nielsen do indeed suggest that surfers rarely glance at banner adverts. Brien says many consumers find adverts annoying especially ones that float across the screen in a desperate bid to get noticed. Worse, the very idea of reach, he claims, is flawed. The problem is that reach is a number born out of a medium television where there was a limited spectrum. As a result, people were forced to watch one of a small number of stations. The internet doesnt live by the same rules, because the digital spectrum is infinite. As an advertiser you can extract much more value by offering a specific message to a small group, than a general message to a large one. So the real value on the internet becomes the ability to target, rather than the ability to reach massive numbers. Ricky Chopra of digital service provider Quba says CPM still has a place in the marketers repertoire. Its cheaper buying per impression than per click. And you can blitz the internet to launch a product, subliminally affecting customers. With the right targeting, you can follow your target audience across the internet. They will repeatedly see your advert and get curious about it. It all comes down to knowing where to place your banners and at what time.

"Online CPM advertising is like crack publishers know it's no good but they are addicted"

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How to... exploit digital media - The Marketer magazine

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By contrast, paying per click is readily justifiable. With tracking software, you can calculate the cost of each visitor to your site, measure how long they stay and what they order. It quickly becomes clear which adverts youre making a net profit on, says Chopra.

Emerging obstacles
Click fraud

Not all clicks on your advertisements are With cost per action, the maths is even easier. If it costs you 40p to make a genuine. Unscrupulous 20p profit sale, then you are on to a loser. With cost per action, you can see that rivals can pay human immediately, he adds. click farmers or use software to repeatedly Whatever your banner strategy, buying non-specific advertising space is best click on your adverts with delegated to specialists. With around 24 advertising networks to choose the aim of increasing between, only an expert is capable of making an informed decision. your costs. You may save 15 per cent by doing your media buying in house, says Chopra, but youve got to be confident that you are getting best value for money. A specialist buyer can make sure your advert goes at the right time on the right network, and can buy space for less too. Or you could use affiliate marketing. Partner sites will host your banners and you only pay them per sale. Gadget site Firebox.com pays affiliates 10 per cent of each sale, rising to 15 per cent for top performers. It finds new partners through two affiliate networks: AffiliateWindow and AffiliateFuture. Social sites If boring banner adverts dont float your boat, there is a smorgasbord of other delicacies at the digital marketing buffet. Social sites alone offer dozens of possibilities. The British Library promotes its new Business and Intellectual Property (IP) Centre using Facebook. The librarys publicity boss, Lawrence Christensen, says: So far our Facebook page has 327 members who are alerted to new IP Centre developments and have flagged any events we stage. For example, our next Inspiring Entrepreneurs event, The Rise and Rise of the Black British Entrepreneur, has 56 members who have said they will be attending and 58 who might attend and have registered their interest. Total campaign cost? Zero. Wikipedia is a must. More than one in 200 visits on the entire internet are to Wikipedia, so make sure your companys page is up to scratch. MySpace and Bebo are similar, but with the additional benefit of hosting video, sound and photos. When Fox launched The Simpsons Movie it posted the trailer and clips on MySpace. More than six million people have seen Homer sing Spider Pig. Cosmetics retailer Lush uses its MySpace page as a brochure and networking page, and boasts more than four and a half thousand friends, who disseminate updates. In-game adverts, mobiles, barcodes In-game advertising is one of the newest forms of digital marketing. Play Pro Evolution Soccer on your PlayStation and youll see adverts around the animated pitch for Reebok, Canon and the Daily Mirror. This is a medium on the cusp of going mainstream. In a bid to dominate the nascent industry, Microsoft bought in-game ad-broker Massive for 147m and Google snapped up Adscape Media for 11m. Mobile marketing is booming too. The Sun has added the word mobile into its strapline Paper, online, mobile and has agreed to show Premier League goal clips on its mobile site for 50p a time. Mobile ad-broker Admoda supplies five million text and animated banner adverts a day to mobile users accessing WAP sites. The adverts cost about the same as normal internet adverts, says Terry Jackson, chief executive of Admoda, and the ROI is very good. We are getting a re-book rate of 80 per cent from clients. In 2005, Yahoo settled a class action lawsuit against it by plaintiffs alleging it did not do enough to prevent click fraud. In July 2006, Google settled a similar suit for around 44m. Texas-based Click Forensics estimates that 25 per cent of all clicks on Yahoo and Google adverts are fraudulent, up from 22 per cent at the beginning of this year. Programmes such as PPC-Unleashed help marketers to identify and prevent click fraud. Adblock evil Banner adverts could be dead within a year. The killer? A tiny free add-on to Firefox, the browser used by one in every five surfers, that strips out all adverts. All surfers see is white space. This is a major problem for both marketers and websites. Even Google, which pulls in more than 99 per cent of its 5bn revenue from advertising, could be destroyed by it. Blogger Mark Evans warns that it should terrify web companies that rely on advertising, and advertisers looking to reach consumers on the web. Without

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Mobile marketing can be pretty versatile. Freebie daily thelondonpaper has partnered with Sponge Group to provide interactivity with readers. The paper is peppered with appeals for readers to express their opinion on current stories. To do so readers text in comments preceded by a five-digit number known in the industry as a shortcode that allows editors to place the message with the right feature. Barcodes are the latest development. Marketers can text a barcode to smartphones, which are then scanned by laser readers. Supermarkets accept mobile barcodes instead of paper discount vouchers. Chiltern Trains is adopting mobile barcodes as an alternative to paper tickets. Arsenal football club has partnered with mobile marketing agency Mobiqa to give free pints to fans using the technology.

advertising, many online companies have no viable business model given that people have shown little interest in actually paying to use an online service, even if its terrific and useful. His conclusion? Adblock is pure evil.

So far, two-and-a-half million people have downloaded Adblock And of course games are increasingly popular on mobiles. Player X can create a Plus, and the number is bespoke mobile game for you for 250,000. growing by 300,000 a month. Leading the Blogging backlash is Danny Carlton, an Oklahoma-based web If these newfangled technologies seem daunting and expensive then try the most frugal form of communication: a blog. OK, so there are 106 million blogs in designer and creator of www.whyfirefox cyberspace, but a good blog can create an emotional tie between your brand and the consumer. For a masterclass, check out Alex Tews day-by-day account isblocked.com. He is urging a worldwide of The Million Dollar Homepage as he reported on its growth from novelty boycott of Firefox stunt-site to global phenomenon. At its peak, Tews blog was getting three browsers, claiming that million visitors a week. blanket advert blocking is Be sure to give blog readers the option of receiving updates via RSS web feeds. an infringement of the This technology can update readers on new articles and is hugely popular. Evans rights of site owners and constitutes theft. Bicycles allows bike fanatics to receive RSS updates whenever new stock arrives. Alas, while site owners are free to block Firefox Or for a really sophisticated alternative, take a look at Zebtab. This turbocharged widget allows you to create a microsite on subscribers desktops, giving browsers, the launch of IE7Pro, an Internet them the latest from your site. The bookmaker AtTheRaces and Maxim Explorer add-on created magazine are two early adopters of this potentially powerful new marketing by a group of channel. independent Forum posting can be effective. Phil Williams, founder of Open Mind Commerce, programmers, means the advert-blocking says he gets 90 per cent of new leads by answering queries on phenomenon is UKbusinessforums.co.uk the busiest entrepreneur-focused site. Lime One spreading to the legal consultancy gets 60 per cent of its new business through forums. mainstream. Whatever you choose, keep your eyes open. New technologies develop every month. Take the launch of the transactional banner: surfers can make a purchase directly within the banner. Produced by Tailgate, these banners are secured with 256 bit-SSL encryption, which basically means they allow a faster purchase, reducing drop outs. Boots chemists, Navman sat-nav maker and Novotel hotels are already using them.

Case study: Walkers scores with a sure-footed shuffle

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How to... exploit digital media - The Marketer magazine

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Big Kick to come up with a groundbreaking idea to combat Linekers greyness. The resulting Win an iPod campaign got 6 per cent of the UK population to participate and put mobile marketing on the map. The return on investment was so huge that the campaign was widened to Holland and Belgium. Crisp eaters were invited to text in a code found inside each pack of Walkers Crisps and a draw for an iPod was conducted every five minutes. An internet site was created to support the competition, complete with usage graphs so that consumers could time their text-entry for quiet periods to maximise their chances of winning. Winners were notified by text and losers received consolation prizes. More than seven million entries were received over the three-month period. Charles Orton-Jones was PPA business writer of the year 2006

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