Category: Online Advertising

We’re firm believers in the power of utilizing behavioral data to solve business problems. With the availability of reliable quantitative data, goals like marketing optimization and efficiency become a reality. Under the old database marketing paradigm, life was straightforward: Every marketing dollar was tracked against resulting customer-specific, transactional metrics. Inquiries, registrations, purchases, and profit could all be tied to addressable prospects and customers, and the cost of soliciting those actions could be calculated with precision. What we learned about consumer behavior informed our efforts, and the outcome was, in most cases, measurable improvement in our marketing efficiency over time.

But recently, the avalanche of new online data has threatened to derail us, cluttering our minds and our marketing dashboards with an ever-expanding array of disparate tables and graphs. A significant amount of time and effort is invested in compiling and reporting on these new metrics. But are all of them really advancing us toward our goal? Impressions, clicks, page views—where did the customers and sales go?

Author and business consultant Eric Ries wrote a post for the Harvard Business Review titled Entrepreneurs Beware of Vanity Metrics that really gets to the heart of the matter.  In it, he presents a discussion about Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics.  Whether you are a Start-up or Big Company, we think his observations apply to the multichannel marketing arena.  We agree with him that metrics should be:

Actionable—If you don’t believe it or you can’t repeat it, you can’t be confident in your decisions.
Accessible—To support effective business decision-making, reports must be understandable, available, and timely.
Auditable—Metrics must be credible, with no loss of integrity between the individual customers and atomic activities that roll up into summary numbers that appear in reports.

The Web brings us a lot of instant gratification and a mountain of data. As Mr. Ries accurately points out, people have a tendency to believe (and take credit for) positive metrics while they excuse (and deflect responsibility for) negative ones.  The most successful organizations will be those with the objectivity to discriminate between the actionable and the feel-good data. In other words, let’s be picky about what we measure and separate metrics that capture the essence of consumer behavior from metrics that reflect our own marketing department’s output.  If we maintain our focus and believe in our metrics—positive and negative—our business decision-making will be cheaper, clearer, and better.

In the last few months, I’ve been reminded (several times) that bringing brand and technology together sometimes means creating marketing materials that funnel people to the web sites and interactive tools we spend so much of our time and energy creating.

More often than not, that means conceptualizing, designing, and building banner advertisements that drive people to these web experiences that we’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears over.

Oftentimes, our banners need to compete with a ton of visual distractions. Capturing an Internet user’s attention has become a big challenge. Thus, you need to incorporate the best-possible banner ad designs to make your ads attractive enough to compete for your target audience’s attention.

Obviously, creativity plays a big role in successful banner advertising. Developing that catchy headline, or just the right balance of colors and photography can go a long way towards effectively reaching your target audience.

But, before you can do any of that, it’s important to remember some of fundamental banner design guidelines.

Things to remember:

1. What is the objective? Are the banner ads an exercise in Branding or Conversion?
2. Where are the media placements?
3. What are the site-specific specifications (e.g. unit size, file size (k-size), frames per second (FPS), and maximum animation length)?
4. When in doubt, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (iab.net) is a good place to start.

Tips: 

1. Ask for an action.
2. Know your audience.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Emphasis the benefits, not the features.
5. Optimize source files in native applications.
6. Use words that attract or capture an emotion.

Before you know it, you’ll have created very interesting and effective ads that will drive millions of people to interact and experience the web sites that you’ve poured hours of your time and thinking into.

Late last month, Intel and Asustech launched wePC.com as a method of leveraging conversation marketing and crowdsourcing to drive brand awareness and product research. Visitors are invited to submit ideas for the dream laptops and are allowed to vote for all those submitted. For those of you who haven’t encountered the concept of crowdsourcing, one definition is “outsourcing repetitive or challenging work to a large group of semi-organized individuals.”

The use of crowdsourcing online is relatively new. It an fresh and ingenious way to leverage the best of the social behaviors online. People love to be heard and they are passionate to contribute to those things they feel most strongly about. WePC.com hopes to harness this energy from those who are technology passionate to uncover some hidden product design gems for their next generation laptops which empowers the user with a sense of voice in the next, great laptop.

While there is a long way to go with the evolution of crowdsourcing, I think the strategy will be successful if properly applied. The purpose must be true to its intentions and therefore the ideas should truly be heard. If the web audience starts to encounter that their participation is truly heard, it may be tough going for the concept in the future.

Note: SolutionSet built and designed the WePC.com website in collaboration with Federated Media.

Online marketing is a quick-or-dead business, which is probably why people try to shave microseconds by turning everything into an acronym. Alexandra Wharton pulled together this nice little glossary of online marketing terms, so you can know what the heck to say when you asked:

“Do you want to learn from link bait with PPC, or test a blanket effect with PPI?

I have found the best definition of graphic design is, a visual communication that combines images, words, and ideas to convey information to an audience. So in a nutshell, my job as a graphic designer is to basically organize someone else’s information and make it attractive and enticing. At SolutionSet I mostly design for the world-wide-web, or as it is sometimes called, “the information superhighway.” The Internet allows us to stack layers upon layers of information and access this information anywhere and anytime; the list of things we can do with information on the web is endless.

Recently I read the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. This book takes a deeper look at how we use the information that we pull in from all around us to make decisions. The author is particularly interested in an idea he calls “thin-slicing.” Thin-slicing is the ability of our unconscious to make rapid decisions in a situation solely based on a very narrow ’slice’ of that given situation. Gladwell states that in certain situations the judgments we make in a couple of seconds can be as good as or as reliable as those we reach after careful deliberation. He gives numerous examples through experiments and life stories where people made a decision based on tons of information or very minimal information. The results were very counterintuitive in a lot of these situations. He is not saying in all cases, but in certain instances thin-slicing was more accurate because too much information can actually get in the way of making a decision.

It started me thinking how this applies to the communication of information through design, especially when trying to introduce a brand on the web. The web gives us the ability to offer up buckets and buckets of information and in most cases the more information we have the better decision we can make. Is this correct in all situations? I’d have to say no. A brand is strongest when it can cause an emotional reaction as well as appeal to us analytically, especially if you are trying to start a relationship between a brand and a user. But, since the viewer may have only a few seconds before they click onto the next website, you must grab the viewer quickly on a gut level and entice him/her further into your brand. Then you can appeal to them on a more analytical level and offer more information about your brand. In order to grab the viewer at that emotional gut level, the designer must use the most simplified - yet specific communication that is based off their core understanding of the brand.

A brand is a balance of information and emotional understanding, and this is where I have found SolutionSet’s strength. We are a group of dreamers and a group of realists. A group of people who think in code and a group of people who think colors and typography can change mood. This dynamic of opposites allows for a balanced solution to a given design problem. We know when to trim the fat and when to fatten it up, and it shows in our designs.

Day one of the community forum has treated us to a keynote speak from Alan Weber (Co-Founding editor of Fast Company) to talks hosted by Rohit Bhargava (SVP Digital Strategy and Marketing Olgivy) to Rachael Makeel (Ebay) and Mark Williams (Apple Support Community).

This invitation only event has attracted an impressive list of representatives from Cisco, eBay, Microsoft, Consumer Reports, Apple, Yahoo amongst many others.

One exciting fact: Mikhail Gorbachev is staying at our hotel speaking about the environment in Santa Fe. I’m hoping to get a glimpse of him.

Some interesting top line points/notes from the conference:

1. Community Strategy - two fold (Business Strategy and Community Strategy)

2. Don’t think the community belongs to the organization. The community belongs to the users. This approach will help drive managing community strategy and decisions.

3. ROI - Analyze in two ways (Investment but also Time)

4. Metrics (business and user specific) - List out the community site objectives then outline a measure-able metric for each. This applies for both the organization but also driving and understanding the objectives of the users. Then providing them with visibility of their success for their own objectives can drive higher adoption and use.

5. The opportunities with communities go beyond the revenue measurement. The value of brand equity, knowledge sharing, self support etc is more difficult to measure but hold value within the community engagement.

Day Two

Future of Online Communities

1. The future of community will blur distinct communities and content to be less about features but more about “my relationships” with my constituents. Also the speaker mentioned considering the open framework (e.g. OpenID) between varying communities to allow users to weave at their own patchwork of communities around their own interests. Jenna Woodul CCO LiveWorld

2. Corporate America needs to open to have a dialogue with their customers to drive relationships, loyalty and interaction. This will drive brand engagement, product strategy and thought leadership. Stephanie Bowman - Sr. Product Manager Adobe

Wow, these messages sound familiar and part of the genetics of how SolutionSet views the impact of Brand Marketing. The leading organizations will drive and lead this methodology with creating relationships through community marketing strategies.

Comscore just recently released a study examining the effects of search and online display ads to varying conversions such as site visits and offline sales.

A few years ago while working at a previous agency, I launched a similar campaign for an established and well known helmet manufacturer based in Santa Cruz. The purpose was to run an online campaign to drive sales of their products at a large retailer. The executive team at the helmet company was skeptical about the effectiveness of online advertising. However, we were able to convince them to test a pilot campaign.

We measured the sales at retail locations in the quiet period and gather historical sales for the same period for the past two years. The reason was that seasonal purchasing behavior affects these types of products also. This served as our baseline. We then tested our campaign with PPC search only and a combination of both online ads and search. We found that there was a statistically significant list on in store sales as a result of the campaign. However, we also found that the search medium provided the heavy lifting in terms of sales when compared with online display ads. One note not reported by Comscore was that we experience a lack of about 2-3 weeks after the online campaigns launched before the in store numbers reached their lift peak.

I was excited to see that the Comscore study supported our results. However, they are reported much larger sales lifts percentages. This may be due to any number of variables.

The big take aways?

1. Online advertising significantly effects offline sales

2. Search advertising is more effective than online ads to drive sales conversions

3. Running both mediums drives a larger return on advertising then running independently

On February 25th, New York Magazine introduced an issue baring Lindsay Lohan mimicking poses from a famous photo shoot at the Bel Air Hotel in LA as Marilyn Monroe. It was photographed by the same gentleman, Bert Stern, who photographed Marilyn. There was some controversy and good taste backlash - which was probably to the benefit of the publisher.

Smartly, the publisher decided to include the photos free online via their slideshow feature that appeared in the actual magazine. The numbers are staggering…In the first TWO days after the release, which included a server outage due to traffic. They experienced 34 Million page views. It is estimated that ad sales for those two days at an estimated $15 CPM that the New York Magazine earned $500,000 on online ad sales (IN TWO DAYS without the overhead costs of paper and printing). The amazing part is that the slideshow can reside virtually forever with $$ coming in with each impression. Consider that actual magazine sales are short lived and restricted by the numbers that are printed in the run and that they get replaced with the next issue - the online medium’s ceiling is less limiting.

Anyway, granted Sex sells but this is a great example of the power of the online medium and the power of how more accessible content is online to drive such volume of viewership.

Check out our recent commentary on MediaPost’s Online Media Daily that addresses leveraging the power of community and content for reaching brand and advertising goals.

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Paul Rand once said “Don’t try to be original, just try to be good”. Some may argue with that, voicing that originality and inventiveness rule the business we are in. Many would think without it we would all be bored out of our skulls and stuck in the dark ages. I can partially agree with that…but without consistency we would all be lost. I like to think what Paul was saying was be consistent. Consistency undoubtedly breeds “good” visual communication.

Why?  Because without consistency you end up presenting multiple problems to your audience before you can even begin to communicate with them. I often push design teams to build “rules” for themselves that will establish systems of consistency. This way we can “teach” users our rules, related to the particular problem we are solving. That could be extending a brand or relaying the idea of some new technology, sometimes both. These rules that enforce consistency, visual handrails if you will, that provide a sense of dependability and safety. This all makes it easier for the audience to venture out to different parts of the communication we’re creating and immediately get down to doing what they came the for, the business of finding, exploring and digesting information contained within printed pages or digital experiences.

I love it when clients, friends and even our families think that designers, creatives… whatever you call them, are artists in smocks and berets, throwing pixels around. Ideation can happen in that environment, but the craft of actually making the delivery mechanism of the communication, (Websites, brochures, ads, etc) is far less sexy than that. Simply because what we do is about thinking and reasoning, to reach conclusions and to tell those stories, you need rules and systems. Big or small, rules and systems provide the consistency, that make sit possible for information to be distributed and consumed. It’s kind of ironic to think that in the world of brand and technology which is in a constantly state of re-invention and always looking for originality, really can’t move forward with out some adherence to consistency.

Whether its messaging, visual systems or even coding…to be “good” at what we do everyday there needs to be a set of underlying rules, known as consistencies.