Your cat will love outdoor advertising

EuroAWK have a fun campaign at the moment, mashing up fake ads to create amusing, attention grabbing posters like this.

Elementary Advertising

Sometimes an opportunity comes along that’s just too good to pass up. This Czech car security company put an active or passive device in your car that makes finding it much more likely (98% success rate, and they list the cars they’ve recovered, to prove it works). They’re called Sherlog and they’ve been running ads like this all over town, coinciding with the cinema release of the Sherlock Holmes movie. I’ve no idea as to the backstory here – whether Sherlog are paying for all the ad placement costs or splitting it, but it’s a fun tie-in. The slogans are “Nothing escapes them” and “Nothing escapes us” respectively. Well done Sherlog!

Nobody seeks out vague promises

As marketers we all love to promise the earth but you need to be able deliver on what you’re offering. If you need to use weasel words and internal jargon to qualify your promises, you’re doing it wrong.

When you see an advert for flatscreen TVs offering a ‘free Blu-Ray player with selected TVs’ – what’s your thought process? Is it ‘ooh, I’m gonna get a free Blu-Ray player’ or is it ‘I bet the one I want doesn’t come with a free Blu-Ray player’. How about a sale sign that offers ‘Up to 50% off’? I guess it depends on whether you’re a glass half-full or half-empty kind of person. Maybe you get a nice surprise or maybe you’re disappointed. The one thing that word ’selected’ doesn’t do is fill you with confidence because it immediately creates a doubt in your mind.

Customers don’t know what ’selected’ means in that context, they don’t know what a company’s ‘primary service areas’ are. All they know is that the company wants their offer to sound good whilst leaving some wiggle room. Customers don’t care about a company’s ability to squirm out of providing something. They want what they’re promised.

Under-promise, over-deliver
That’s what we should aim for. That’s what gets customers telling their friends about us. The opposite can make people talk about us for all the wrong reasons.

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Tighten up your PPC strategy

Many small businesses love Google’s self-serve Adwords programme. Just sign up, create an ad, choose some keywords or let Google choose them for you, get traffic, pay the invoice.

Not so fast!
That’s all nice and simple but there are a few things you could be doing to make sure you’re getting the maximum juice from the squeeze.

Google is your friend. Sort of.
Google wants you to get some traffic, Google even provide you with tools to measure that traffic optimally. They even push you to do the most you can with the traffic you’re paying for, but the last thing Google are going to do is voluntarily reduce the amount of revenue they make.

It’s all about the conversions
If you’re not paying attention to the conversions (whether that is orders or leads) that you get from your Adwords spend, you need to, right now. You can track things internally if you like – assuming your content management system’s lead forms or your e-commerce platform show you all the ways someone got to your site (for extra credit, not just last-click tracking too). If that’s not possible, Adwords provides conversion tracking for you. You set up a conversion, add a bit of javascript to the conversion page (final page of checkout or contact form sent page) and you’re done. Conversions will be tracked right down to the campaign, ad group, ad variation and keyword that brought you the sale or lead. Once you know what’s working, do more of that, and less of the keywords and ad variations that are bleeding you dry.

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When a meme goes too far

On this week’s Beancast the topic of viral vs memes came up, I won’t spoil the show for you, but to sum up the host’s question, “is there too much pressure on creatives to come up with something that becomes a meme?”

It reminded me of a meme from the 90s that definitely went too far -- Tango’s ‘You know when you’ve been tangoed’

- For my non-British readers, Tango is an orange (also available in other flavours) soft drink.

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Sell a feeling not features

I think we’re all largely agreed that bullet points aren’t even that great an idea when used in keynote or Powerpoint slides. [If you don't agree with that, watch this video by Garr Reynolds and read the rest of the advice on the post too]

Here’s a (blurry, sorry, taken with iPhone) shot of a billboard for a Toshiba notebook.

OK, I’m a Mac fan and have been since buying my first Mac in 1994 so I’m biassed. I usually look at PC adverts critically anyway but this one struck me as singularly awful. We’ve got a product shot, with the computer upside down, because the headline is ‘Enjoy the Brilliant HD Resolution Whenever and Wherever’. For the curious, that’s 720p. hardly anything to right home about, if you own a Mac.

So we have a so-so headline, a quirky product shot, and the ‘creative’ didn’t stop there, they figured we needed some bullet points. Some aren’t even features, none of them make you think ‘wow imagine what that could do for me’.

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How to let people really opt out of your Facebook Ads

This post by Chris Brogan where he complains about the prevalence of ads for things he has no interest in, plus what I recently noticed in the Facebook ad targeting interface come together to suggest an interesting method of filtering.

Let’s face it, some ads are annoying to some users but there’s not much of a way to prevent your ad from showing up on someone’s page ahead of time, over and over. Sure Facebook put an X there for the user to say ‘I don’t like this ad’ but it seems they don’t pay it much attention – the “Over time, this information helps us deliver more relevant ads to our users.” doesn’t commit them to taking any action.

The keywords option when setting up an ad is rather random and provides only for positive associations or occurrences of words in user profiles.

Create antifans

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A good reason to outsource your Facebook ads?

Experimenting with setting up an advert on Facebook today I noticed an interesting option, the practical application of which became apparent to me immediately.

You can target people who already have a connection to a page, group, event or application you administer. (The boxes auto-complete and only let you enter the names of entities that you’re an administrator of.

Have a think about that for a moment…

Mutually beneficial targeting

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Is paid search the height of responsibility?

In response to The Irresponsible Marketer

Having just read Mitch Joel’s latest post, I was going to post this as a comment, then when I got to writing it and it grew to longer than would be polite, or even that readable, as a comment.

To paraphrase, Mitch is saying that marketers should put as much as they can into search marketing, spending “whatever is left over for your more general branding campaigns”. Now I’m sure that Mitch is trying to seed a discussion rather than truly believing that we should give up on all other kinds of marketing efforts to concentrate on the low-hanging fruit and maximising our Adwords spend and hiring SEO experts..

What about cumulative effects?

I think this is a perfect case for ‘with, not instead of’, to quote Mitch again. Paid search, and to almost the same extent, well done SEO/content marketing efforts are eminently trackable. But what drove that search? Reading this post I immediately thought of David Ogilvy’s belief that a consumer needs to see a message multiple times before they act on it (though as he was head of an ad agency, one might question the number of exposures required). Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising Smarts

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