PardonMyFrench

Google's New View Through Conversions Tracking - About Time

I logged on to one of my political AdWords accounts last night and I saw a new column called View-through Conv. and I was definitely pleased.  Sure it is only for your Content Network campaigns but I'm glad they finally added it because this type of metric has been around for years and as I've written before Google's Content Network is a great platform for display advertising especially for the small business marketer. 

View-through or impression based conversion tracking has been available for a while.  Historically, around 50% of your conversions could be view-through for banner ads with about 80% of them coming through within the first 5 days.  I tested this for search years ago and found that 90% of the latencies come within 1 day so that's probably one of the reasons Google isn't providing this for search.  If you want to read more I've reprinted a short post below that I made almost 4 years ago.  Enjoy the walk down memory lane - I did....

Latency What Is It Good For?

I was asked a few days ago to explain latency or view through/impression sales in a beautiful office overlooking the Potomac River. And, if you don't know either, I'm honored to be the first to explain it to you. Now maybe we can explain a lot of those unknown sales you've been tracking on your sales reports!Have you ever been looking to buy something at your favorite e-commerce site while at work and just before you hit the next button, your pesky boss pops up from behind, so you close your browser. Sound familiar? Well it should. Industry studies (although an old one) show that 75% of all shopping carts get abandoned. Are we to assume that these items are never bought or are they sometimes bought later? Perhaps when the boss is at lunch? 

Let's say (really write) that you are an online marketing manager for a shoe company and you use an ad server to place your ads on your media buy. A potential buyer clicks on your banner, visits your site, and just before they complete the shopping cart, that boss shows up again, and they abandon the cart. However, they show up the next day without clicking on the same banner and complete the sale. Now what? Well, armed with a cookie courtesy of your ad server, a completed sale, and a click on a banner, your ad server should be able to determine which cookie completed the sale and which banner generated the sale. Therefore, you have a latent sale. Sometimes, those pesky consumers never click on your banner and then mysteriously arrive at your site and make a sale; this is called a view through or impression based sale.

Doesn't sound like a big deal to you? Well it should because I've seen average latent sales in the 55%-60% range and the % varies from site to site and from product to product; especially when the product has a long sales process or sign-up page. Several companies that I'm aware only started tracking latents recently and up until then had a large % of sales generated from unknown channels.

Think you know everything now. Well there's a lot more to it especially when it comes to interpreting the number and running campaigns using latent sales. However, that's for another week.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Let's say (really write) that you are an online marketing manager for a shoe company and you use an ad server to place your ads on your media buy. A potential buyer clicks on your banner, visits your site, and just before they complete the shopping cart, that boss shows up again, and they abandon the cart. However, they show up the next day without clicking on the same banner and complete the sale. Now what? Well, armed with a cookie courtesy of your ad server, a completed sale, and a click on a banner, your ad server should be able to determine which cookie completed the sale and which banner generated the sale. Therefore, you have a latent sale. Sometimes, those pesky consumers never click on your banner and then mysteriously arrive at your site and make a sale; this is called a view through or impression based sale.

Revisiting Facebook for Online Advertising

You long time readers know that I've had a love-hate relationship with using Facebook as an online advertising buy; that is specifically buying banner ad space and not for using it for connecting with customers-supporters which I always believed it was extremely useful.  Facebook with its low CPM rates and lack of targeting options coupled with boring ad units put it extremely low on my media recommendation list.  That is until recently. I've become very bullish on Facebook advertising and hope they make more targeting options changes.

On the right is a screen shot of a make believe ad buy (actually it was a real one but I

 can't who it is really for).  So, let's take a tour and describe  what I like about Facebook for advertising and what I think they should still change.

1) The geo-targeting works fine if you want to target by city, state, or country.  However, there aren't zip code, county, or MSA options plus I could really use a bulk upload.  I'd imagine Facebook will be changing this in the future.

2) Other demos like male/female, targeting on a user's birthday, education level and whether you are in a relationship and if you are interested in males or females provides some interesting targeting options especially if you are a dating site (for example) or need to target based on marital status.  Interesting targeting but really this is left over from their college only Facebook days.

3) Now the Keywords is where it gets very interesting.  You have to be a keyword wizard and you have to understand that these keywords are not the kind you would normally search on but really kind of like groups within Facebook of what people put on their page.  The main problem I have with this is that if you enter in more than one term Facebook looks at it as an OR instead of an AND.  For example if you wanted Republicans who like Obama you can't (see below for the exception),  You'll find 2.9 million Facebook people who have Barack Obama on their page but when you add in Republican you get about 3.17 million which is just adding in Republicans to Obama's total.  This is good targeting, but an AND function would be much better,

4) The workplace targeting is very interesting especially if you are going after a certain company.  This is unbelievably cool

5) Connection targeting really only works if you are the Facebook admin so you can target your own supporters or if you want to exclude them.  This is how the Barack Obama admin can target their large fan base and then use keywords to further segment them out.  That's how they could find Barack Obama Republicans.

6) The CPMs or CPCs are dirt cheap still - at this level I like using CPMs so I make sure my ad is shown.  The ad units are not their new sexy units which are usually reserved for their large customers (this should change too soon) and the media is not on a user's home page but on their subpages.  Again this is kind of a bummer if you don't have multiple thousands of dollars to spend, but still quite the non-premier options are quite good now.

I think Facebook is a good tool right now especially with their targeting options and dirt cheap CPMs.  I do hope they make some improvements to their keyword targets by making it an AND and not an OR plus provide the option for lower spenders to get on a home page or get better ad units.  At that point with those three changes, Facebook would explode for the small advertiser.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google The Great Money Equalizer

I just finished a fun interview with Micah Sifry over at Personal Democracy Forum and I used one of my favorite lines which is Google Is The Great Money Equalizer.  I also touch on this subject in my keynote next week in London for Econsultancy's Future of Digital Marketing conference.

Basically the idea behind this is that Google puts so many tools at your disposal there is no reason a smaller marketer can't take on and compete with a big marketer.  I perfected this while at Harrisdirect when we competed with the big players like Schwab and Fidelity and one could argue that we did quite well with Senator McCain's Primary and General Election campaigns.  Anyway, here's why Google is the great money equalizer:

1. Keywords - everyone's keywords are different and depending on your strategy you may or may not choose certain words to bid on or you might even focus just on long tail words.
2. Quality Score - Google rewards your smart, relevant campaigns with good Quality Score so even though you might not have as much money as your competitor  you can out Google them.
3. Free Conversion Tracking - using Google's own tools you'll know how effective your marketing is and once again if you are setting and meeting your own conversion goals, you can be smarter on how you use your marketing dollars.
4. Click to Play Video Ads - have a commercial you are running or perhaps that's too expensive?  You can add click to play video ads on Google's content network where you can have your ad watched for free and only pay per click when they go to your website.
5. Geo-targeting - zipcodes, states, MSA, major cities, or even hand drawn targeted areas, you can dominate a target market for no additional costs.
6. Behavior Targeting - even though Google is not as major of a supplier of Behavioral Targeting as say - Yahoo or Ad Networks, you can use age, income, gender, demos to reach a specific audience.  Throw in content targeting off your keywords and you can finely target for no additional money.
7. Placement Targeting - Again for no additional fees you can hand select sites where your ads appear and then get good placements based on an ongoing auction process.  Are you just looking forward to buying crap impressions on MySpace?  Have no fear you can usually get on that "site" for about 10 cents per 1000.
8. Self Directed - You can turn your campaign off and on or even increase it all with the click of your mouse.  No more calling into an account exec who won't honor a 24 hour cancellation clause.
9. Google Surge - Dominate your competition in a short, contained burst across 80% of the internet.

That's why Google is the great equalizer.  Where else can you get service like that for no increased rates and no commitments?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric 

Using Search for Political or News Rapid Response

During the Presidential Campaign season I didn't realize I used search marketing for a very unique tactic - Political Rapid Response.  In fact, while moderating a panel on search marketing at AAPC a lot of folks came up to me after the panel and asked me to elaborate on using search for Rapid Response.  In this YouTube video, you can hear Peter Greenberger at 1:20 singing our accolades using search for Rapid Response. We used Rapid Response in quite a number of very high profile situations including:

• Sarah Palin Defense - Forget about the day she was announced as McCain's running mate which is a whole different story, the story I like to tell is when I was called over to McCain's Hotel in Minneapolis on Labor Day during the convention to fix some search problems.  In particular the truly disgusting blogging stories that tried to say that Governor Palin lied about giving birth to her last baby.  Besides running Rapid Response on that story, we also bought words around the most search on keywords including Palin Nude Photo, Palin is Hot, Palin Vogue Photo and Sarah Palin Photos.
• Joe The Plumber - You can see this post I made watching the search results on Joe The Plumber and you'll see we had a search campaign running within minutes of Senator McCain mentioning Joe The Plumber.  That night I watched that debate from McCain campaign HQ in Crystal City, but had no idea it was going to be mentioned and built that campaign from scratch on the fly.  Not only that, I put in thousands of economic and financial services terms in over night.
• ACORN Voter Fraud - While driving my daughter to a doctor's appointment I had Fox News on when they were talking about a breaking story that involved fraudulent voter registration records submitted by ACORN.  By the time I got home, I built a search campaign around ACORN and waited for the results to pop. It took a few days for the rest of MSM to pick the story up, but when it did, the campaign was already ready to go.
• Countering Joe Biden's Announcement

Rapid Response doesn't just have to be for political campaigns.  Issue Advocacy can certainly use it as well as private companies and even news organizations (ex - Fox Sports).  So how do you actually use search for Rapid Response?

HOW TO USE SEARCH FOR NEWS RAPID RESPONSE

1. Dedicated News Hounds - Of course political campaigns have a war room, but for a variety of reasons I wasn't tapped into it.  I kept Fox News, CNN, and CNBC running in the background of my office so I was very likely to catch breaking stories.  You also of course can use Google Trends multiple times per day. 
2. Google Trends Is Your Best Friend - Even if you get a story elsewhere, Google Trends is helpful because it quantifies how hot a story is and helps get you started with keyword development. 
3. Website Access - The person building the campaign must either have an in-depth knowledge of your website to know where to point the traffic to or access to someone who can build landing pages on the fly.
4. Autonomy - The person or group building the search campaign needs autonomy to build it on the fly.  Sure you might have some legal approvals, but the way to lose out on the traffic is to get bogged down in an approval process.  Don't lose your traffic with a slow approval process.
5. Budget - Some times we were given new budget other times we just used the extra spend available from a very high ROI on search.  This search activity comes and goes and you need money quickly to run a campaign.  Also, keep in mind that some times this search activity is brand new and you might have to suck up a high search bid as Google learns more about the activity,
6. Hire An Expert Like Me

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

How To Run a Google Surge aka a Google Network Blast

My favorite ClickZ reporter and Jersey City native Kate Kaye has been on a roll lately when it comes to writing about a seldom used, yet increasing in popularity tactic offered via Google called a Google Surge or a Google Blast.  First she wrote an article about the New York Congressional Race in which the Democrats used a Google Surge, then she followed up with a profile of the Yes on Proposition 8 race, and a blog post naming me (yes yours truly) as the inventor of the phrase Google Surge.

As you can see in the comments I left, yes I did started calling it a Google Surge but it had nothing to do with McCain's strategy of supporting the Iraq Troop Surge; it was simply a surge in spending and the first time I employed it, it was during Bobby Jindal's campaign for LA Governor which he won.

Since Jindal's campaign I've used it several times including the RNC during the 2008 Presidential Race, McCain's campaign during both the Primary Season as well as the General Election season, and in my own race to gain a seat on my town's Board of Education (just ask some of my neighbors who couldn't log on to their PC without seeing one of my campaign ads).  Since the cat's out of the bag (thanks Kate), here's some more details on how and why you'd use a Google Surge.

  THE INS AND OUTS OF RUNNING A GOOGLE SURGE

1. I didn't invent this process at all and never claimed to have invented it.  All I did was listen to my Google Sales Rep years ago that told me I could have my ads run across Google's search and ad sense networks.
2. A Google Surge can work because Google's network reaches about 81% of the internet according to comScore's February traffic rankings.  Google ranks fourth behind Platform A (AOL and ad.com), Yahoo, and ValuClick. 
3. However, Google makes it very easy and transparent to buy across their ad network as opposed to the other three ahead of them.  You can turn it off and on, switch your creatives out on the fly, use their conversion tracking, and adjust your cost bids by site or overall.
4. The only real catch with Google is that you are buying this Google Surge on a CPM basis not on your typical CPC purchase tactic.
5. The amount of money you are spending on a Google Surge is not for the timid advertiser, but you can of course geo-target and time of day target it.
6. Google supplies you with the site list and you can adjust it.  That makes any Google Surge a proprietary strategy unless of course you don't change the site list.  I ALWAYS DO. 
7.  The site CPMs also need to be adjusted, but don't forget you are dealing with 1000s of individual sites so it really takes dedication and knowledge to make the changes.
8. You need to make sure running a Google Surge aligns with your campaign's goals.

Anyway, I have other tricks of the trade for running a Google Surge, but the most important thing for you to remember is to work with your Google account team when setting something like this up.  As my version of the name implies, this will definitely cause a surge in your daily spending.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google's Expanding Ads Helps Advertisers and Google Too

Google announced March 4 on both their AdSense blog (for website owners) and their AdWords Blog that they are testing expanding ads placed via 3rd party ad servers in Google's Content network.  I've been running expanding and streaming video ads for as long as I can remember marketing online.  My original use with them was the old Enliven product and I've used BlueStreak, Atlas, Eyewonder, and PointRoll.  So I love them.

Google's version is a little different than what I've run in the past, but here's what they've told both advertisers and website owners.

• The ad expands on a click and not on a rollover
• The website earns money and/or the advertisers pays money on a click sent to a website or on a CPM basis.  So like Google video ads, no money is exchanged on the expanding unit.
• The advertiser must be using one of Google's approved 3rd party ad servers
• The expanding ad won't get larger than twice its size.

The reason Google is doing this is simple.  Expanding ads get higher click rates and while they are not huge jumps, based on Google's volume it provides a slight bump.  Based on my experience, I'd peg rich media increased CTRs at about 10% which is enough to make significant changes to Google's bottom line.  Advertisers love it because the interaction rates (% of people expanding ads and doing things within the expanded unit) are in the low single percentages which is awesome.

Are you an advertiser?  If yes, you should be building expanding ad units and now that you can run them on Google's AdSense network, you'll only pay a CPC if you buy it that way.  This is just another reason why Google dominates the online advertising world.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Do You Really Need a Website for Your Business?

I'm back home after spending the past 2.5 days in Atlantic City's Borgata Hotel for some meetings and one of the more interesting comments mentioned was whether businesses (and to an extension campaigns) need websites.  This isn't the first time this has come up so that's why I decided to write a post on it. 

Before I put some thoughts down, if you are an eCommerce site you need a website.  Sure you can use Google Shopping/Checkout but that really isn't an online store for you.  Yes you can go the Amazon-eBay route which will work in the beginning, but eventually you'll need an eCommerce site.  Personally, I'm leaning towards not having my own corporate website and just go the blog route.

10 THOUGHTS YOU SHOULD HAVE BEFORE YOU SPEND BIG $ FOR A WEBSITE

1. Website are often just static pages that tries hard to get you to return over and over again via SEO, bookmarks, emails, etc.  Sure you can add blog components to keep content fresh, but if your site is not primarily about being a blog-news generating site, you are probably better off with other options
2. Now if you have a blog, you probably notice that a lot of your readers get your content off-site via email or more likely a feed readers.  You can still make money in the blog feeds with advertising and then if they want to make a comment they can click over to your site.  However, notice that you can get your message out and brand yourself as effectively offsite as you can onsite.
3. I don't know about you, but my traffic on my site has plateaued in the 150 daily page view range.  Granted I've focused less on traffic in the past 6 months, but I get the majority of my traffic now to my blogs from Twitter links and SEO results.
4. Twitter has changed the way you promote yourself and push information out.  People subscribe to your brand to receive quick, pithy messages and then decided whether to dive in or not.  Basically Twitter can act like your Outlook Preview Pane and once again remember people are primarily interacting with your brand offsite. Also, I personally have way more Twitter followers (560+) then I've ever had on my RSS subscribers or average unique website visitors.
5. Social Network sites like  Facebook have way more utility and way quicker updates then you can possibly have unless you are the king of spending like President Obama.  Your brand in Facebook is more powerful because of the embedded tools, linking, widgets, and commenting functions embedded within Facebook's basic functionality.
6. Have I told you that you can build a great looking website in about 1 hour of work by using Typepad or WordPress?  Now it would be blog based which helps quickly generate content but the ease of use and price (basically cheap + consulting/design fees if you need help) makes it invaluable. 
7. You can even add in Google Checkout to process your eCommerce activity if it isn't too large of a store on your blog site.
8. A combination of landing pages, YouTube channel pages, and Facebook profiles can deliver a cost effective and efficient marketing campaign.  For example, here is the Captain Morgan for President page on YouTube which links over to the key page at Facebook.  I can't go into the marketing details but this combination was very cost efficient at getting 20K+ Facebook supporters.  Think of what you would know about your supporters with this efficient combination.
9. A static website takes resources to keep running including an agency to host and build pages, plus some content management tools.  The cost doesn't just stop once the site is built.
10. Finally, think about how you are going to get traffic coming back and the tools you need to measure what people are doing on your site.  That probably means Google for SEO and advertising and Analytics for your tracking.  Big sites require big expenses for tracking while the blog-Analytics costs you around a cup of coffee.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount Part 5 - What's The Value of a 300x250 Flash Ad?

This is part of my 2008 presidential election recap.  You can find Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 on the links above.  This posts looks at the value of a 300x250 flash ad and since that sounds a little boring I'll make this post as a fictitious meeting that never occurred.  Oh and in case you want my answer before reading the post - the value of a 300x250 flash ad is not much these days....

eCampaign Guy - Thanks for coming here.  Let's review where we are with our online ad buys - search and display with only 4 weeks to go.

Marketing Consultant -   Sure.  Well our display buys are going ok.  We had 6 ads in rotation and most of them have CTRs under 0.50% and we aren't getting enough conversions on the back end, so we pulled more out of rotation.  Our best ad in the past year was the "Meeting Unconditionally" ad or Hippie Hillary.

eCampaign Guy - What kind of results did you get with those?  Any other good ads?

MConsultant - Those ads got CTR's north of 2% and the amount of donations and email signups we got from those were through the roof.  CPA's less than $1.  Pre-roll ads worked great for us.  Basically, fun or entertaining or scare tactic ads work the best.

eCampaign Guy - Gotcha.  How's the search doing?

MConsultant - Paid search is off the charts.  We are returning at least $2 in donations for every $1 we are spending, CTR's are awesome, we are driving tremendous amounts of traffic to your Obama attack sites, and maxing out the daily spend.  Any chance to get more money?

eCampaign Guy - No chance to get more money.  Well at least search is returning.  Think we should brainstorm new display ads?  How long will that take?

Creative Chick - Well we can have some new ads for you to look at tomorrow, but your approval process takes some time.

MConsultant - I have a better idea.  Why don't we cancel the remaining display buys and plow all of that money into paid search.

eCampaign Guy - Well, we are getting better results and better traffic.  We still haven't received the results of our branding study so we can't know for sure.  Yes - that's a great idea, let's move it now

Of course the meeting above didn't exactly go like that, but the end result was the same.  Yes for both the RNC and McCain I advocated moving almost all of our dollars into paid search because it was working so well.  The good folks at the RNC and McCain agreed without much of a discussion and in fact pored more money in with a few days to go, pretty much guaranteeing it was the largest political search campaign in the history of politics.  We didn't quite turn off display ads, but here's when I think they were worthwhile...

Eric's Reason's for Running 300x250 Ads

1. Ads that generate earned media
2. Ads that generate internet exposure
3. Google content ads included video ad units
4. Pre-roll video to guarantee a TV like experience
5. Streaming video ad units that are highly targeted

That's it and in that order.  Of course that's after you max out and fully fund your paid search or social networking campaigns.  Right now unless it is via Google, why lock yourself into an ad buy that requires long creative timelines for something if you are lucky gets better than a 0.50% CTR?  You shouldn't because the value of a 300x250 in getting lower and lower; stick to newer ad units and paid search.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Mike Shields Asks Are Display Ads Dead - My Answer Below

A very interesting article in today's AdWeek by Mike Shields called Is The End Near for Display Ads? and you know what?  I don't think he is that far off.  Before my answer, a couple of interesting points from the article.

• Even those who said they believe in the power of display advertising acknowledged the industry faces a major challenge in proving its worth, particularly as bottom-line-obsessed CMOs fixate on click-through rates for banners that rarely approach 1 percent.
• It’s really the question of brand versus direct response,” said Vivek Shah, group digital president at Time Inc., who recently characterized display advertising as being “under assault.” Said Shah: “In times like this, the balance can tilt towards direct. That’s a challenge for traditional content sites that rely on display ads.”
• Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Forbes.com, ....“Ad networks have pushed the focus back on [cost per click],” he said.
• Carrie Frolich, managing director, digital media at MEC Interaction, ...“The industry is still focused on impressions as a currency,” she said. “People are not impressions.”

This article is one of the most interesting and thought provoking articles I've read in a long time.  I've know Jim Spanfeller a long time and the first time I heard him speak he was guaranteeing positive branding results of display ads on Forbes.com.  Vivek Shaw owes me lunch from back when he met with me at Harrisdirect and I convinced him to put in a broker center with button ads on CNNMoney.com.  I met Joanne Bradford when she was with MSN and she was the executive who helped me get Senator McCain's search campaign in MSN way back for his Straight Talk America PAC.  That's quite a list of who's who in online advertising.

So what do I think of display ads?  They are absolutely on life support and have been for a while.  I doubt they will end, but their dominance in this space is over.   The click rates still hover at way too low of a level, they take a lot of effort to produce, you need a Dynamic Logic study to measure brand impact, and as mentioned above, we unfortunately count impressions not people.  Heck, social networking with its abysmal CPCs and CTRs are far more effective of a channel if you stick to word of mouth marketing.

This is a screen shot of one of the highest clicked ads for Senator McCain's campaign.   Even if I told you the exact CTR it wouldn't matter.  Let's just say that it had a click rate higher than 1% which means that the vast majority of people didn't click on the ad so they didn't watch the video.  Generating donations from banner ads are hit and miss unless we do revenue share.  Even Senator Obama's campaign focused on creating beautiful ads that reinforced his brand and didn't focus so much on post-click actions.  I ran display ads for my own Board of Education campaign, but that was highly targeted, cheap, and had a short timeframe to generate the most earned media and local buzz.

So why are banner ads on life support?  Simple (the details after the continuation link)

1. Google is the industry's best friend and worst enemy (I've advocated recently shifting all online ad dollars to search marketing)
2. The branding argument for display ads is weak at best
3. Creative development takes too long
4. Why do we still count impressions?
5. Marketers demand more than a 300x250

What's going to happen with the display ad?  Costs will plummet and end up where they were in 2001 - mostly performance based.  That is unless we can sell based on individual or focus on better creative types like pre-roll.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric
(more on the continue)

Confessions from a Google Junkie on Google AdSense's Political Advertising Policy

I got a real chuckle out of this post that Google had to make on their Inside AdSense blog called Political Ads on AdSense Sites.  A chuckle because Google waited until November 7th to make that post which revealed nothing new.  They could have made it years AGO but waited until their revenue dropped down to almost nothing before they made this post.  Basically Google reiterated their policy and reminded blog owners that there are competitive filters in their AdSense for Publisher tool system.  That's why you NEVER saw Obama ads on my site. 

You can read more details on my experiences with Google AdSense in the posts called Go Run Google's Content Placement Report Now, How Reliable is Google's Content Network, and Yet Another Reason to Love Google. However, let me shed some light on the subject for you in my....

CONFESSIONS FROM A GOOGLE AD SENSE JUNKIE:

1. Obama as well as Romney ran a ton of money through AdSense.  The McCain campaign (which I ran the online advertising for as part of CDI) used it a lot as did the RNC (me too) but we focused more on search advertising.
2. Running ads on Google AdSense is a great way to stretch your ad dollars and offers demographic as well as content targeting that allows the small advertiser to act like a large advertiser.  Also, because it can be credit card based and self-servicing you can move the dollars around at lightning speed.  Hence the reason why political advertisers used it.
3. While Google offers up some major sites in their network like WSJ and CNN the vast majority of the impressions come from blogs and secondary sites.
4. I very rarely recommend using text ads in AdSense programs and instead focus on flash and video ads.  I NEVER run text ads when I'm buying on a CPM basis.
5. Google does a great job filtering the content on their partner sites but does a HORRIBLE job understanding the tone.  So that means while you have a site that bashes Republicans Google doesn't know that and might have run RNC, Romney, or John McCain ads.
6. #5 also includes sites that had a URL like www.IHateRepublicans.com
7. I used Google Alerts via a RSS feed to see when people complained about the ads.  Depending on how pressed for time I was I commented to let people know how to filter the ads or I removed them from our Google program.  By the end of the campaign we had thousands upon thousands of site exclusions.
8. We also ran reports in Google to see where the ads actually ran and then we subtracted sites out.  This was particularly important during the primary season when every few hours a new Ron Paul site showed up.
9. While some people think it makes sense to competitively advertise when a reporter, site, etc makes negative comments, that wasn't a strategy we employed.  In politics it was a major problem if our ads appeared on a site that was bashing us and besides, we didn't have enough money to advertise on negative sites.  I'm sure Obama's team didn't care or had a strategy as witnessed by their ads on Townhall and Drudge.
10. Finally, there was a time when we ran McCain ads that said "Surrender is Not an Option on Iraq" and they ended up on The Daily Kos.  That wasn't something we planned to do.  Kos turned on Google AdSense and we didn't have them excluded because they were new to Google; plus it wasn't like I was reading The Daily Kos to see them go live.  As soon as we found out we turned the ads off.

We did what we could to avoid running ads on sites where they didn't belong.  It wasn't a strategy of ours and while Google could do a better job filtering for political tone, you as a site owner should have used the available tools at your disposable to remove ads you didn't want running.  That would have been far more productive instead of just complaining about them or making a post that says "click those ads."

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

McCain's Paid Search Marketing Campaign Still A Mystery To "Experts"

(In the interest of full disclosure I'm Chief Internet Strategist for Connell Donatelli Inc the company responsible for Senator McCain's Online Advertising.  I personally take an interest :-) in the Paid Search Program)

Sorry I didn't respond to this article sooner, but I was attending possibly the greatest Springsteen Concert since the Nassau Coliseum shows from 1980-1981.  3 hours 16 minutes, 30 songs, fan requests, on and on and Blinded By The Light, Incident, Spirits, Rosie, and 5 songs from BTR. 

Anyway, this article in Politico called McCain's Internet edge: Ad Price while on the surface seems positive, is short sighted and shows once again that self-proclaimed "internet experts" have no clue when it comes to online advertising and particularly search marketing.  Here's what has me perplexed as to the general understanding of search marketing in this arena:

• advertisements targeted to users searching for “John McCain” on the Internet cost nearly twice as much as those targeting users searching for “Barack Obama.”
• Google sells ads in a constant, nearly instantaneous auction in which advertisers bid on individual search terms.
• But Republican new media consultant David All thinks one reason for the price difference may be that the McCain campaign itself is bidding up the price of “John McCain” related ads.
• “It’s a free market, and John McCain’s campaign has said very publicly that they’re investing resourced into online advertising,” says All.
• The high prices, though, could be evidence of a problem for the McCain campaign. Because of the vast interest in their candidate online, the Obama camp simply may not feel it has to bid as highly for ads on “Barack Obama.”

The main problem with the article is that even though it mentions quality score, it purposely tries to paint a picture that bid cost is the major factor for determining the cost an advertiser pays and backs it up with a quote from David All who thinks McCain is bidding up the price of John McCain.  And, it plays into that there could be problems for McCain because Obama doesn't have to bid as high (totally inaccurate).  David's quote could not be possibly more wrong and shows a complete lack of understanding of how paid search works especially for Google and demonstrates the overall lack of experience in running online advertising campaigns.

Now I can't go into specifics into the McCain search campaign, but allow me to enlighten you search novices especially the ones in the political industry.  If you really want a detailed explanation see this post I wrote called My Tips for Setting You Google Ad Prices.  Basically your maximum bid price is NOT the most important factor in your paid click price; it is relevancy and quality score.  If your ad and landing page are very relevant to the words you are buying and you make brilliant ads, you are rewarded by Google with a higher quality score and YOU PAY LESS PER CLICK.   The reverse also works true. It also works that way for Obama and McCain.

The McCain campaign or ANY OTHER ADVERTISER does NOT need to bid up the price on their branded keyword.  If they have experienced online marketers they will PAY LESS per word than someone else.    

Bidding up prices on keywords is a poor strategy for any marketer especially the ones that own the brand name.  You don't need to bid up words, especially if you have back end metrics like ROI or conversion into sales.   You should be setting your bid prices based on hitting your metrics not "how much you pay for a click".

The only advantages that McCain's search campaign has over everyone else is that we are experienced in search marketing (I've personally been doing some form of search marketing since 1998), we have very relevant ads, we enjoy high quality scores, the landing pages will always be relevant (McCain name is ALWAYS on the landing page), and we measure the campaign based on ROI. 

Bidding up your own branded keyword is not a good strategy.  As is guessing what is really happening behind someone's search campaign when all you are really trying to do is get face time in the press.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

BTW - check out the celebrity quiz over at the RNC. http://www.gop.com/CelebrityQuiz/

My Tips for Setting Your Google Ad Prices

About a week ago Google made a post called How auctions set ad prices which I thought was very important for you to take a look at.  I would have posted a little sooner, but I was slammed with work last week.  Let's take a look step by step and I'll give you my personal tips along the way.  I figured what's a little online marketing secrets revealed between friends.

1) Each advertiser enters a list of keywords, ads, and bids.  OK, here's where a little art and a little science starts and helps later on when they get to quality score. 

• First you need to come up with your strategy for how you'll organize your words.  Don't just stick them in a single ad group -create multiple groups and organize your words.  This is probably the most important tactic for you.  ORGANIZE YOUR KEYWORDS INTO GOOD GROUPS
• Second, you need to figure out what your daily spend is based on your goals
• Third, use Google's keyword tool as well as other ones to come up with your base of keywords by ad group.  Make sure you use another keyword tool otherwise the words will look like your competitor's words
• Build your text ads by ad group.  Make sure if it warrants, to use the keyword insertion tool
• Start your basic maximum bid at the ad group level to what you can afford.  When Google determines your Quality Score you'll know what to do next

2) Google matches search queeries with keywords - Don't forget long tail words (think three or more keywords); these will probably convert better for you but at much lower volumes and hopefully cost.

3) The list of ads are ordered by bids and Quality Score.  This is where things get a little tougher and separates the search children from the search adults.  Google lists 6 ways it makes up Quality Score so let's examine them but quickly

• Historical click rates on Google's network (which you may or may not have anything to do with).  This will be one of the reasons why you need to pay the mythical $5 CPC bid for an extremely relevant campaign.
• Other relevancies factors again that contribute to a higher CPC which probably upsets you
• Relevancy of keywords in your ad group (see step #1)
• You account's CTR history (that is your quality score changes over time)
• Historical CTR of the display URL in your ad group (see step #1)
• The quality of your landing page.  Make sure your pages are relevant by your ad group

4) Google ranks the ads
5) Once a user clicks on an ad the advertiser is charged the minimum CPC over the advertiser right below it based on bid and quality score.  You can try and optimize these bids by hand or get a bid manager to automatically adjust your bids multiple times per day based on your goals.
6) There are actually two auctions Google runs.  One for the shaded bar on the top left of the page and one for the links on the right hand margin.  To get listed on the top you must have a high quality score for a particular keyword; the top shaded area will cost you more than your normal #1 place.  According to a blog post back in August 2007 your maximum cost per click will be considered to get you in the shaded region.  So what does this mean to you?  You will pay close to your maximum bid and when I personally tracked my best keywords over time I did see a significant increase in actual CPC for my #1 placements.  Basically you must know for sure whether you want that #1 for a certain word; you might be better off with a lower placement at a much lower cost.

That's it.  Enjoy your search tips...

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

What Is The Right Amount To Spend on Online Advertising

While reading this article found over in MediaWeek called Only Tentative Web Ad Spend During Primaries I kept thinking to myself what is the right amount to spend of your advertising budget on interactive. Before I continue with that train of thought, I want to write that the article itself is well informed. I do however get tired when people write as I myself have in the past "that candidates and their consultants are “creatures of habit” when it comes to media strategy. But, he theorized, when the brand is a living, breathing person, TV may remain preferred."  While that might be true for some it is no longer the norm, however it gets to my original question which is what is the right amount to spend on online marketing?

Now before you just jump in and start shouting percentages, let me lay down the rules.  First, this is a budget from scratch.  You can't optimize last year's budget because in politics it might not exist.  You might be a new campaign with new issues, new opponents, new followers, etc.  Second, search marketing does not count.  You are already planning on putting aside significant dollars on search and will maximize it.  Third, there are no real case studies that tell you if you spend $X on display ads you will move Y% of voters.  Fourth, free (except for campaign support) techniques like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and etc are not coming out of this budget.  Finally, as shown in this now dated AdAge study (I'm sure there is an updated one but I'm too lazy to look for it), the private sector is on average putting aside 5% of their advertising dollars on the internet.

So marketing genius, how much do you allocate to online advertising?  Seriously.  10%?  25%?  50%?  All of it?  What do you do?  What is the number you would recommend and how do you justify it to the campaign manager and the candidate?  What's your argument?  This is the same discussion that everyone has, political or private sector.  It isn't that much different except there are probably little to no benchmarks to justify your number.  Do you go after the Direct Mail budget?  Sure that sounds like a great idea to me, but believe it or not a certain demographic still responds to DM (you can guess the demo).  How much TV do you need?  I have my answers but what do you think?

Circa 2004/2005 at Harrisdirect we were running a ton of online advertising (17th largest in the US).  And as most industries do, the competitors were all studying what each of us were doing with our ad budgets.  It was then that I ran into an acquaintance of mine from TD Waterhouse named Stuart and he ran online advertising for TD.  Stuart said to me that they were reviewing competitive advertising spends and specifically the % of offline versus Internet for the sector firms.  That %, no surprise, fluctuated within an acceptable range for all the competitors except for Harrisdirect which showed a huge amount of online with little offline.  He thought it was hysterical because clearly our strategy was unique.  Personally, I couldn't tell him that his data was wrong and besides it helped fuel the legend of our online spending.  Even in the financial sector there are "norms" for spending, but those fluctuate based on brand, strategy, tactics, target market, and etc.

So I ask you once again, wanna be political marketing consultant or marketing critic, what is the % of dollars that you would allocate towards internet advertising and why?  How do you determine the % in your firm today.  SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS THE RIGHT ANSWER?  Why is it only "tentative" web ad spending?  Why isn't the tentative spending the correct amount (it isn't and really wrong when you look at search).  Here's a hint for you.  Whoever wins the nomination and whoever wins the Presidency will have spent EXACTLY THE RIGHT % EVEN IT IS ZERO.  You may not agree with that statement, but unfortunately it will be true.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

P.S. I'm off to South Carolina to work on SC GOTV for Senator McCain's campaign.  Hopefully the next few posts will be showcasing an online veteran in a retail politics world.

McCain Dominates Online Advertising

Kate Kaye over at ClickZ gave a good summary of the Presidential Campaigns' use of online advertising for their quests for the nomination in the post called Romney, McCain, Obama Dominate Presidential Display Ads This Year.  From what I know of Nielsen Net Ratings, Kate's analysis for the most part excludes search and probably a fair chunk of Google's content network, but it provides a great synopsis.  Before I jump in with why online advertising is the great equalizer, here are the highlights for me from Kate's story:

1. Romney and our John McCain campaign accounted for 70% of all online ads bought this year.  Throw in Obama's ad buy and you have almost 99% of all ads bought this year.
2. The rest don't count because their ad buys were so small.  Pretty much any impressions under 1 million means that it is just a rounding error in their campaign spending and really counts for nothing. Tancredo had a one day buy on Drudge which accounted for his impressions; personally I think Drudge is a terrible place to buy unless you like automatic page refreshed or you need to target inside the beltway. Clinton continues to ignore online advertising, but personally I think they are just waiting until the general.  Thompson and Edwards ads are from their blog advertising but probably didn't amount to much for them because they haven't extended beyond.
3. According to Kate, Yahoo is cleaning up in the display ads space which is good news for my friend Richard Kosinski who runs politics for Yahoo.  While I've been critical of Yahoo's search I've always been a fan of their display ads capabilities and with new tools like BlueLithium and RightMedia they are my favorite stop.
4. Kate reminded everyone that Romney ran on alternative lifestyle websites which as a veteran of buying ads for almost 10 years made me laugh.  On the one hand, that happens when you buy on networks, but on the other hand McCain didn't end up on those sites so there is no substitute for experience in buying on networks (yes I have techniques that minimize problem sites).

The numbers that Kate published reminded me of my long standing Harrisdirect media buy which right before E*trade acquired us was ranked as the 17th largest US advertiser.  Our motto at HD was do more with less money because we certainly couldn't outspend Schwab and Ameritrade.  And that's what makes online advertising so powerful - it is the great equalizer.

If you can't (or won't) outspend your competition (see Romney or Schwab), you can be smarter than they are when it comes to how you do your ad buy and where.   Anyone can come up with great creative and it doesn't necessarily mean that the advertiser with the biggest pocket book gets the best creative.  That was certainly not the case at Harrisdirect where Grey Interactive led by my favorite account person Joan Zulawski delivered really beautiful ads.  Jason, Justin, and Ryan that work on the McCain creatives deliver the best ads out of any of the Presidential campaigns. 

We at McCain and of course at Harrisdirect have better media buys and better search advertising than all others.  That's because we have a ton of experience, understand optimization and targeting, and of course have the best product to sell - John McCain. Advertising online is the great equalizer.  All you need to do is jump in and start working your creative and optimization magic. 

More Smoke and Mirrors from MySpace on Politics

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of MySpace.  I haven't been from the very beginning.  I believe it is the 2010 version of Geo Cities and that the only advertisers that really shown any results are online dating, soft porn, and entertainment.  Those types of advertisers are fine when you are starting out, but to never grow beyond that it is pathetic.  The CPMs you can get there still cost you less than buying a gum ball at your local diner.  That's right for 25 cents you too can have a banner ad run in the "great" MySpace 1000 times.  I don't really see any significant results that have made me approach them for a deal, let alone in politics.

Of course that won't stop them from trying to get a share of the political advertising budget which of course is expected to be huge.  Webware has a summary of a recent survey that MySpace is releasing to try and make their case.  You should not be fooled into thinking this is a fertile ground for you political marketers.  Here are some highlights from the post called MySpace touts early success with political initiatives:

• banner ads invited a selection of users to participate, meaning that in order to even notice the invitation to participate (MY NOTE: SELECTION BIAS)
• the MySpace user in question would have to proactively click through (MY NOTE: MORE BIAS)
• Responses showed that MySpace users are 139 percent more likely than the population at large "to have visited an online chat room with public officials or political candidates in the last 30 days," according to a release (MY NOTE: THAT'S THE BIAS IN ACTION)
• They were also 29 percent more likely to have searched online for political information the day before the poll was taken, and 16 percent more likely to have read news online. (MY NOTE: THAT'S THE BIAS IN ACTION)
• It's convenient news for MySpace, which has been branding itself as a new-media political hub with its series of candidate dialogues co-sponsored by MTV, and a mock primary scheduled for the beginning of January (MY NOTE:  MORE THAN JUST A CONVENIENCE)

Ok, so let me give you some inside baseball on surveys online.  MySpace runs a survey using a pop-up banner and for a user to participate in the poll they need to click on that banner.  Hmmm, let me tell you that I've participated in similar online surveys, but the big difference was they were conducted as control-exposed to the ad experiments.  Those survey ads typically get a click thru rate of less than 0.01% and when I've run them they were run on reputable sites, not a Geo City clone where click rates for real ads hover just slightly above 0.01%.

What does this mean?  Well for someone to participate in the survey they already have to be pre-disposed to seeing banner ads, seeing political ads and then be willing to take a poll.  These types of people would of course be VERY INTERESTED IN POLITICS.  So of course the numbers look great.  This type of data is self serving for someone in the advertising business.  All it is really trying to do is make it easier on their sales force to sell through to politics.  Usually these ideas get cooked up by a sales team to make their lives better.  The conversation goes like this behind the scenes.

BIG VP OF SALES: Wow Ace Sales Man, I just read a report that says political ad spending is going to approach a Googol Dollars by November 2008.  If we can get 1% of those sales we can make our end of year goal.

ACE SALES MAN:  Ok that sounds great, who do you want to work on this.

BIG VP OF SALES::  Well of course you!  You are my top sales person so we'll make you Head of Political Sales.  How does that sound?

ACE SALES MAN::  Well what about my big client, who gets that?

BIG VP OF SALES:  We'll give it to Molly, she can handle it.  Think of how rich you'll be.  This will be an easy sale for you because we have a huge audience.

ACE SALES MAN: OK, well do you know anyone in politics?

BIG VP OF SALES:  My neighbor is running for the Planning Board in my home town, I'm sure he knows somebody in Mr and Mrs President Campaign.  Better yet, we'll make them come to us because we have such an awesome, engaged audience.  Let's throw a survey together and build this new web page that the candidates will be beating our doors down to advertise on...

The problem with a self-serving survey like this is that it is almost insulting to the community of e-Campaign directors and media consultants (like me).  While some campaigns (obviously not McCain or any clients that work with us) might be playing a little catch up on the internet that doesn't mean they can be fooled with survey data.  Here's a hint MySpace, Political campaigns know more about polling and survey data than you do.

If you have a product that goes well with the content in MySpace, then by all means go for it.  If you are a political campaign and you have a reason to advertise in there, then ummm, email me so we can talk unless of course you are one of the other Presidential campaigns and then spend, spend away in MySpace.  Social networks work best as a CRM tool and not so well for acquisition unless you have R-rated ads.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

How To Scam YouTube To Get Top Rated Videos

I saw this post the other day over at Techcrunch called The Secrets Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos and like the over 400 or so comments I was appalled.   That is appalled until after I took some time over the long weekend and read the post again.  Am I pissed off about some of the tactics mentioned in the post?  Of course, but I'm not surprised at all that there are companies out there that help advertisers get top rated videos and top blog posts.  If there are ways to game a community voting system, there will be companies to help you out smart the system.  As Dan Ackerman Greenberg bragged about in the Techcrunch post "How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine."

Is this an indictment of social media and social networks?  A little.  Personally, I've often wondered how some marketing blogs get a ton of traffic when really their content is completely useless.  Some of the things I've noticed about these blogs are that they've been around a long time (3+ years), have a blogroll that features a similar cast of bloggers, and perhaps were someone famous in the marketing community.  However, having a large following for a long time is NOTHING compared with what Dan outlined in his post, but what is similar is that it all comes down to building a following, naturally or not.  Let's take a look at Dan's tips and translate the good and the bad of them...

1. Not all viral videos are the same - Basically nothing Positive here, just a viral slap in the face to let you know that some of those viral videos are not getting natural views.
2. Content Is Not King - Good content works, but Dan gives the following Positive tips: make it short (15-30s), design it for remixing (lets others use it and spread it), don't make an outright ad, and make it shocking (make a controversial post that gets people to respond).  Those are great tips.  However, his last two tips go down the black hat SEO route of using fake headlines (annoying and really just video spam) and appeal to sex (UGH).
3. Getting into the Most Viewed Page - This entire section reminds me of the age old argument of getting high search engine rankings (I need links to get listed high, but unless I'm listed high I don't get links).  Most of Dan's tips if looked at from a macro level are steps you should follow, but I wouldn't recommend following them exactly because you can start moving down a slippery slope; that is unless you are ok with that.
   1. Blogs - you should reach out to bloggers with a following or content you crave, Dan pays people to embed their video
   2. Forums - again it is ok to reach out to forums and post videos and links; that's good outreach to the community.  I fall off the wagon when he says that he starts multiple accounts to kick start a conversation.  Again I'm not surprised this happens, in fact, coordinated or not by political campaigns, you can see this in action of plenty of political blogs and forums.***UPDATE*** See this link regarding Hillary Clinton supporters paying to have people leave comments; they've announced that they called this off but none the less I told you people do this.
   3. Facebook, MySpace, and Friends list - the tips here are all good tactics to use, but one has to wonder how much having a large Facebook list is worth on the open market
   4. Email List - this looks and feels very spam like to me, since he separates out his own friends list.  Of course you can buy lists legally of people who agree to accept 3rd party email solicitations, but one has to wonder how much of these emails lists were actually purchased with the right privacy settings.
4. Title Optimization - Again these are good strategies to use and reminds me of email subject line optimization, however Dan gives some questionable tips like "so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”
5. Thumbnail Optimization - For the most part the tips outlined here are all good to go, but unless you have women in your video, you won't be able to follow Dan's main tactic "As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views."
6. Commenting:  Having a Conversation With Yourself - I have to be blunt, I can't find any Positive tips to pull out of here other than stay active on your comments.  Dan admits to having multiple accounts and stirring up trouble by making negative or inflammatory comments.   
7. Releasing all videos simultaneously - A great tip to follow, unless of course you are a political campaign and your ads, videos change constantly.
8. Strategic Tagging - A great strategy and one that I always tell clients and friends to employ even for their blog (why do you think I tag every post I make with PardonMyFrench).  Searches in social networks look for tags first and then make "long tail" type searches so it is important to get your tagging strategy in line.  BTW - I doubt Dan invented this technique and besides, I'm not sure it is something that could be invented.
9. Metrics - The only tip Dan provides is putting a pass thru value on the end of a URL which is nothing new.  In fact, that's how I've been tracking online advertising since about 2000.  What this string allows you to do is to write in your database where the original lead came from and then you can track whatever actions you are looking for over time (sales, email signups, site visits, etc).

The original Techcrunch post sure got a lot of people fired up, myself included.  At a high level, Dan's tips look like this "use hot women, pay bloggers to make posts, setup fake accounts to make a ton of comments, mislead people with provocative headlines, and then make sure you have hot women on the thumbnails".  It certainly casts an ominous shadow on real word of mouth marketing.  However, if you sift through the shady tips, there are some useful tactics that you should be using on your own social networking campaigns.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The Good and The Bad of Advertising Networks

I got a real chuckle out of this article in the New York Times called Your Ad Here:  Web Surprise Hits '08 Race.  Basically the article talks about some unwarranted political ads showing up on sites that political campaigns didn't intend for them to show up on.  I'm not going to repeat the examples used in the article because I think they are almost laughable.  Laughable because the New York Times does a great job of baiting wanna be online marketing "experts" into commenting on the effectives or lack there of ad networks.  To me, it almost seems like a hit job by old media New York Times ripping on the "Wild West" of new media; the underlying tone of the article is see political advertisers you don't have this problem with old media newspaper (a complete waste of advertising dollars unless it is your local community newspaper) or TV.

The article does touch on a few points that are more critical than a few errant ads that were not directly placed by campaigns (please the point of the article is not that Romney ads appeared on Gay.com).  The only good points in the article are:

• But on the Web, campaigns are also venturing into unruly territory where they risk losing the thing they crave most: control.

• But for all the promise of the Web to allow sophisticated microtargeting of messages, it remains to many campaigns a bit of a Wild West where the rules are still being written and politicians by and large are newly arrived settlers.

• and Web advertising sales outlets are not necessarily aware of the unique sensitivities of each presidential campaign.

When any advertiser, political or not, goes to an ad network they are trying to get a broad reach with relatively low priced CPMs.  The inventory often provided by ad networks including Google are often sub-premium because to be blunt, if they could have sold them direct for a higher price the site would have.  Google for all of the love I give them and they give me back, the inventory often available is most likely unsold with Google AdSense being the ad filler of last resort.  When you go to an ad network you give up control of which sites are in the mix, but you can always opt-out of sites; if you knew the actual number of sites we exclude for McCain, you'd be surprised and we add in more every day.

How do ad networks compensate for your loss of control?  By bringing the promised land of behavioral targeting and conversion optimization to the mix.  With promises of cheap CPMs, huge reach, optimization, and behavioral targeting an ad network is very very promising for any advertiser.  However, those promises often fall very short of what a campaign manager would like to have when they see their ads running.

You see in an offline world you have control over where the ads run, which newspaper, what TV show, and maybe even the section of a magazine or newspaper.  The ad runs and BAM you don't have "bad placements" like you can on the web.  In an online world to have complete control you would have to buy direct on sites and most web teams that I know don't have the bandwidth to do all of those buys or don't want to pay a media agency the right amount of money to manage that type of campaign.  Have you ever bought on a ton of sites?  Probably not, but I have and for every $5K buy I've done it takes almost as much work to get a $500K buy done.

Finally (some rant I have going here isn't it) the ad networks including Google don't really have a good handle right now on content tone.  Sure they can identify consumer generated content, but they don't know how to separate out conservative versus liberal sites and other nuances that political advertisers would want controlled.  I actually have a media recommendation in my hands that lists The Huffington Post and The DailyKos as good sites for a conservative Republican.  When I said to them, that's not going to fly they replied back "really, I never would have thought of them that way."

Ad Networks can provide benefits that going direct just can't get you which is mainly huge reach at a fraction of the cost.   Unfortunately misplaced ads are going to happen; this post is long enough but maybe this weekend I'll repost a story of how some AT&T One Rate 5 Cent banners appeared in serious porn pages.  The internet is still growing, but unlike newspaper, TV, and radio ads at least we can track the results to see what works and doesn't work.  At the end of the day, it matters whether your online campaigns deliver your results or not; you cut the bad stuff away and move on.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Newsweek Searches for A Candidate and Finds Our McCain Search Program

Newsweek has a great article in this week's magazine called The Search for A Candidate and it basically goes into an analysis of the search campaign that we at Connell Donatelli Inc run for the McCain for President campaign.  Highlights from the article include:

1. "The national polls don't reflect it, but in one sense John McCain is the clear front runner in the presidential race: he leads in search-engine ads."  Personally I'd rather see McCain leading in the polls and winning states with a smaller Google buy.
2. "Those who've figured it out are cleaning up: McCain's people have stated that for every dollar they spend on this form of advertising, they bring in three or four bucks in contributions."
3. "Right now they're getting the words dirt-cheap," says Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a think tank that helps Democrats. "It's amazing how many people don't buy their name and the name of their opponents. That's a no-brainer."
4. But only a few have realized that buying "competitive words"—meaning your opponents' names —can be even more effective. "It's a tactic, but not nefarious," says Eric Frenchman, a McCain consultant active in buying search terms. "Buying competitive words is a key to getting people information." Frenchman says that such ads often "convert"
5. "Here again, McCain is busy; his people say that at various times they've bought 10,000 different words"

I think that was the most we've seen yet of anyone digging into political search campaigns.  I don't think that keywords are cheap right now in fact I believe cost per clicks are going up.  Besides a change to Google's algorithm which impacts how much you pay to be in the top position, there are more than just campaigns that are bidding on the candidate's name.  Just look to see who shows up on the search results.

Finally, I'm also glad that Newsweek quoted me regarding buying competitive words.  I've written and said over and over again that it isn't some nefarious trick to steal votes or web traffic (stealing traffic that doesn't convert is a waste of time).  Search is built around people looking for information and if someone is searching for a competitive name, why wouldn't you want to have your ad there too?  That's why super markets have a soda aisle and put Coke next to Pepsi.  If you are looking for soda, why wouldn't you want to look at all the choices.  I wish more bloggers and marketers would pay more attention to this tactic.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Facebook Ads Get Kicked Up a Notch

Three interesting articles this weekend and in no particular order....

1. Techcrunch goes into details about Facebook's new advertising plans that they will announce on Tuesday in ad:tech.  Basically an expanded network on and off properties and the potential to combine purchases and actions off the Facebook platform and display them in your news feed.  That's almost mind blowing to think your Amazon book purchases can appear on your news feed for your network to see.
2. BusinessWeek looks at (surprise) declining click rates across the internet and it includes a quote from fellow internet Oldtimer Kevin Lee "Targeting will come in to rescue all forms of digital advertising."
3. And Cnet writes about more of Facebooks advertising and targeting plans

That's certainly a lot of articles on Facebook who continues to rival Google for news and changes to their advertising platform.  Notice the lack of any marketing buzz these days for MySpace which I've stated over and over again that it is nothing more than the Web 2.0 version of Geo Cities.  I've pretty much stated (and did so at a conference on social marketing) that buying banner ads on a social network is almost a complete waste of marketing dollars.  The vast majority of ads that I see in Facebook today are cheesy network buys that are probably worth at best a CPA; personally, I always asked to remove consumer generated content from any network buys.  However, even without Project Beacon (from Techcrunch) there is hope in the Facebook ads when you use their flyers or get access to their targeting selects.  I've seen better ads lately and unscientifically here's what I'm seeing tonight on 10 page refreshes

1. Untargeted acne ad
2. Potentially targeted pharma ad (drug for kids problems)
3. Crappy untargeted MSN search ad
4. Untargeted college intern ad
5. Untargeted Vonage ad
6. Untargeted JC Penny ad
7. Untargeted acne ad
8. Untargeted Vonage ad
9. Facebook flyer partially targeted to 30+ singles (I'm married)
10. Untargeted Monster.com ad

Clearly Facebook figured out that right now they are selling ugly wall paper which their users are most likely ignoring en masse.  Using the available data in Facebook to work on targeting is definitely a welcome step.  Project Beacon however "kicks it up a notch". 

One of the great parts of Facebook unlike Google, MySpace aka Geo Cities, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and all of the other pretenders is that Facebook makes it fun and easy to blast updates to your network.  They import my blog and tagged articles, when I take an action on Facebook it is broadcast, when I meet a new friend my network is notified, and I can send a blast note out to the entire group.

Now off-Facebook actions like book and CD purchases can be broadcast.  This provides powerful word of mouth marketing and testimonials without asking you the purchaser to write a post.  It can be broadcast to your network giving the product owners and website owners free advertising.   Couple that with Facebook demographics, movie ratings, etc and if Facebook can actually make sense of that data for the vast majority of stupid advertisers they have a real shot to solve the consumer generated content advertising challenge.

The other thing I like about Facebook's ad changes is that anyone, regardless of spend or importance can get access to demo targeting and ad construction.  This makes it very Google-like and helps the small advertiser to get access to their user base.  Clearly they are moving in the right direction.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

I Still Get Excited When I See A Retargeting Ad

Yes I have to admit that I get excited when I see a retargeting ad in action.  For one of our online advertising programs that is in market right now, we set up a retargeting campaign within Atlas to market to people that signed up to join our client, but haven't made a donation yet.  So instead of running the same acquisition ads we run ads that basically say you joined the team now make a donation.

Some people that I work with think this isn't that big of deal because it well works and isn't that what it's supposed to do.  Well of course it is supposed to work, but when you see it in action after setting up the campaign, I still get excited; it wasn't that long ago when I convinced BlueStreak to put retargeting into production.

I don't remember the exact time but I want to say it was the end of 2002 when then BlueStreak's head of technology Eric Picard met with me in our offices in Jersey City to go over his priorities for the coming year.  I'm sure all of them were brilliant but I remember asking him for the ability to market to current customers differently from new or unknown customers.  Eric put it on the potential development list but a few weeks later he informed me that it was moved down in priority due to lack of demand from other clients.  Eric who is very brilliant agreed with me that it was a priority when I told him "trust me, when the other direct marketers figure out that you can market to people that have already bought your product they will all sign up for it.  Right now the ones that don't get it just don't understand it right now."

Once it was available we immediately turned it on for our ad buy and saw immediate dividends.  Not only did the CRM team realize that we can now do cross sell marketing on our ad buy with our existing online campaign, we removed these impressions and spend from our acquisition cost numbers which of course helped drive the CPA down.  As I recall 10-15% of our acquisition media buys was made of existing customer impressions.  New channel and lower acquisition CPA made us look like marketing geniuses. 

A few years later we of course get to use the same technology through our ad server Atlas and for the most part remarketing is part of almost every major publisher and ad network.  It still amazes me when I see it in action as I witnessed the other day.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

NY Times Reports on A Latency Study

The NY Times reported on an analysis of online banner ads that shows that they are effective even when someone doesn't click on them.  In the article called Click if You Read This Column, reports that "All ads had the same level of impact in the unconscious explicit memory, however, whether or not they’d been clicked,” Andrew Schrock writes in Technology Review."

Woot, that's good news but already confirms what you long time readers know which is that you have to track latency on your conversions.  Whether that latency is brokerage accounts, telecommunication winbacks, or political donations you need to track them.  Now the study referenced in the NY Times article just proves my point and strategy that I've been using for 9 years.  For a walk down memory lane, check out my post Latency What Is It Good For?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Suprise! E*Trade and TD Ameritrade in Merger Talks

I also woke yesterday morning to see this article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal called TD Ameritrade in Merger Talks with E*Trade which only surprised me for the length in between the previous mergers of these companies.  It seems that E*Trade has a knack for announcing merger talks in the summer.  You of course can read the article yourself to see what the experts think, but from a guy that lived and was relieved to not have stayed post the Harrisdirect merger I have a definite opinion on this based on my own experience.

• First of all, I'm not sure this is a slam dunk unless the combined company can figure out a way to appease the Toronto Dominion part of the TD Ameritrade company.  As I recall when TD merged with Ameritrade one of the "benefits" to the American public was access to TD Banks.  I don't think TD is going to walk away so easily unless the price is right.
• Speaking of Canadian Banks (Bank of Montreal owned Harrisdirect), they have an uncanny knack for buying low and selling high at least that's based on my experience so I'm sure there is a way out if the cash is right.
• While I'm sure this will face little regulatory objections, consumers are the ones that will be taking it on the chin.  As more of these big advertising and big promotion companies start gobbling each other up, we will see less choice and less offers.
• Oh and you can bet that the combined online advertising budgets of these two will not be added together.  They both compete pretty heavily against each other right now so there will be a definite marketing savings when these two merge.  For example, they both are one of the Yahoo Quotes Results Page advertisers which probably cost each of them $7  - $10 million per year on just that package.  BTW - according to ClickZ, E*trade was the #5 advertiser and TD was the #11 in online advertiser in April.  Assuming they spend about the same in reality (the differences are really in the known errors in tracking and perhaps E*trade is slightly more efficient) half of those ad dollars will be GONE.

What's really upsetting to me is all of their employees who are now not sure what happens to their job.  I remember when I was first brought over the wall to help with the transition I had a lot of feelings about what laid ahead for me and my friends.   From that moment on people were really really scared about their next paycheck.  What must be really frustrating is the inevitable separation of people who have to work on the merger and those that have to keep their heads in the sand and run the business, but hey those executives will cash in nicely so keep working.

I'm sure the PCFN-DLJdirect-CSFBdirect-Harrisdirect-E*trade merger binder will get used again especially if my old co-worker Lea is running the merger playbook again.  In case any of those E*trade or TD Ameritrade employees need a good read on my own feelings at the end of my time with Harrisdirect, check out the following posts (I apologize that the formatting is off when I copied them over from my old Blogger site).  Don't worry, everything will work out and who knows maybe you too can work on a Presidential Campaign; that's infinitely more exciting and more rewarding than selling trading accounts.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

I Love This Stock Ticker Ad from Scottrade

(FYI - SORRY ABOUT THE TYPO IN THE ORIGINAL TITLE.  I WAS IN A HURRY)

So I was checking on my favorite company to rip on Vomit..erg I mean Vonage and I stumbled across this brilliant flash ad execution from Scottrade (BTW - for those of you keeping score from home Vomit, uggh I did it again, Vonage closed at $2.40 today).  Why was this ad so brilliant from Scottrade?  Simple.  It was a combination of using ticker targeting available from Yahoo! and then repopulating the banner ad with a recent chart plus Scottrade research.  Freaking brilliant to add in the research (VG is below its 13 day moving average.  This bearish sign is even more significant because the moving average is also trending lower).

Sure ticker targeting is like so 1990s, but you don't see a lot of Financial Services companies using them.  We did at CSFBdirect circa 2001 and then Harrisdirect after that, but you don't see a lot of it.  However, there is a lot more to love about this execution than just ticker targeting.

1) It is on THE MOST COVETED financial services page on the internet - The Yahoo Quotes results page

2) Scottrade already has a button which will do the heavy lifting for conversions but this unit will help build awareness about "being smart" about trading via Scottrade.

3) Combining real time research provides value via the banner ad and makes it smarter which ties in with their ad campaign

4) When I clicked on the ad and reached their landing page it carried through the same ticker symbol with the same research.  It also seems that the click thru had a PointRoll redirect in it which must be the technology they are using for the ad.

Anyway, you can tell that I L-O-V-E this execution and it is similar to an idea of mine using ticker targeting with real-time research.  Sadly the companies I presented it to didn't bite on the idea for whatever reason, probably because they don't advertise a lot online.   The only negative I have with the execution is the boring (really boring and bare bones) landing page.  Sure it carried the information through, but the page is too white.

All and all a nice execution on the most coveted as well as most competitive page on the internet.  Way to go Scottrade.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Summer - Good Time to Play in the Sand, Bad Time to Advertise

We have relocated to our Jersey Shore Home.  Yes I'm working from here (not posting as often) and was even in DC for meetings with the Pentagon Memorial Fund, John McCain 2008, and others but like everyone else on the east coast, I'm thinking about the beach, baseball, pools, and etc.  You get the idea - it is SUMMER.  What this time of year is not good for is advertising especially online.

I've been running online advertising since 1998 when I was with AT&T.  You know when the worst months were for marketing AT&T service - July and August, not December.  When I managed online advertising for the brokerage firm formerly known as Harrisdirect/CSFBdirect/ DLJdirect, it was even harder in the summer.  The last things people talk about are stocks and bonds in the summer.  Trading volume is much lower during the summer.  So ANY online marketing plan I provide or campaign that I run has minimal volume in the summer; those that know me and work with me know that this is 100% accurate.  That's why it should come as no surprise that the display ad campaigns that we are running, excluding Google, have been slowed down in the summer.

Summer months are good times to take a pause and evaluate.  I wouldn't recommend shutting off advertising completely, but cutting back on the spend and analyzing your results is a perfect SUMMER activity.  Another great SUMMER activity is to prepare for September and come out in a big way. 

So there is no reason to get that excited about online ads not running in the summer, that's just smart advertising.  Besides, running a banner ad on Drudge like Tancredo did is definitely ZERO cause for celebrating that they are running online advertising.  Getting a link on Drudge is FANTASTIC earned media, using it for online advertising is not something I recommend.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Why Pageviews Dying Breath May Not Mean That Much to You

Yes.  It is big news if you are a publisher or website owner.  Pageviews as a metric are dying.  Sites are now into video streams, interactions, social media which translates into time spent on a website so the big measurement companies like Nielsen have announced that they are no longer ranking sites by pageview and instead are ranking based on time spent.  According to the same article, here's what changes when you move to time spent instead of pageviews:

• Google drops because of its model of giving you results fast
• AOL jumps to first because of instant messaging
• Yahoo of course remains strong and this change helps them because of the use of Ajax on their websites including the homepage

From a marketing POV, I'm not sure how much this helps you.  If you were just ranking publishers to include in your media buy based on pageviews you were doing a poor job anyway.  Personally, I've been using time spent on a website and their user profiles for years so for me this doesn't change much.  Plus, you need to know how a site converts or generates whatever actions you need so knowing pageviews never really helped anyway.  Time spent, activity, content, user profile, audience duplications, and uniques were always more important measures anyway. 

For now, the industry moves in the right direction - away from measuring eyeballs and into time spent.  Personally, I'd rather see some combination of user interaction with time spent so sites that people use as wallpaper can be separated from sites that people truly interact with.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

CNN Knows How Important Search Marketing is To Political Campaigns

As I was eating brunch at Yankee Stadium today (July 4th) before the Yankees lost to the Twins, I received a phone call from Becki Donatelli to tell me that CNN wrote a very favorable analysis of the search campaign that my Connell Donatelli team is running for John McCain.  The article called Study:  John McCain leads pack in online search campaign picks up on a report issued by iCrossing which you can find here.  ClickZ also picked up on the study and scooped them a bit with an article written by Kate Kaye called Study:  Edwards Search Campaign Lacks Efficiency, McCain's Is Strong.  Highlights from both articles include:

• Sen. John McCain may trail in recent polls and fundraising totals, but when it comes to paid online visibility, the Arizona senator tops the list of all presidential hopefuls,
• The report, titled “How America Searches: Election ‘08″ found McCain’s presidential Web site has the most paid visibility in search results for several common issue-based web queries as of the end of May.
• McCain “has clearly embraced paid search as a way to gain exposure for both his name and his stance on issues,” the report states. Meanwhile “Edwards appears to be spending a lot of money to achieve some level of visibility, but not doing so with optimum effectiveness.
• "McCain is taking a very sophisticated approach to Google search engine marketing," said Michael Bassik, vice president of interactive marketing at political consulting firm MSHC Partners. At this point, said Bassik, most candidates "are still really focusing on using search to solicit e-mail addresses and contributions." Therefore, many care only about targeting ads to keywords associated with issues that generate the most action for the least amount of money.

I can't go into details on my search strategy, but if you are one of my clients than you know that you are getting the highest possible expertise in this area and if you are one of my Political clients, than you now have confirmed that we at Connell Donatelli are "The Political Search Gurus" and everyone else is just playing around in this field.  A couple of other observations regarding these reports:

• I've been doing Search Engine Marketing for quite a long time and I have plenty of other best practices that we are implementing that will make McCain's search campaign second to none.  I've also been with Google since their beginning so working with them is like spending time with an old friend.
• Election 2008 will not be about who can get the most friends in MySpace or Facebook or even YouTube views.  Election 2008 will be about who can use Google and the other search engines to their fullest potential.
• Not only is McCain's search campaign very sophisticated and the biggest, it is also the most effective by bringing in more money in contributions than we are spending; that my political search novices is called having a positive Return on Investment.
• Finally, will people and bloggers STOP TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHO IS BUYING SEARCH WORDS BY SPENDING THREE MINUTES ONLINE SEARCHING?  It is a complete waste of time and shows your inexperience.  It takes a company like iCrossings to actually do a thorough study.

Anyway, good news on the Fourth of July.  At least CNN, WSJ, and ClickZ are starting to notice effective uses of online advertising, especially something that is outside of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

GoogClick - Google Gobbles Up DoubleClick

I've been advertising with Google since way in the beginning of their PPC platform and continue to run very large search marketing campaigns.  I've also run huge (north of $130 million in online advertising) display/banner advertising campaigns since 1997 and always have used an ad server for placing my ads, tracking results, measuring post-click conversions, and etc since 1997.  I've tried them all - MatchLogic, BlueStreak, Atlas, and of course DoubleClick.

So, unlike other blogs that claim to have experience (especially in the political marketing blogosphere), I actually have a ton and continue to work in this space.  One of things that's always been tough is having a single source for reporting, optimization, trafficking, planning, and counting conversions (more on that in a second) and now with a stroke of a pen and $3.1 Billion in cash (yes cash or as Henry Blodget wrote:  a few quarters of free cash flow) Google solves advertisers problems by acquiring DoubleClick.

Now why does this solve a lot of problems?  Simple.  Let's take a look at how this helps advertisers and agencies:

• I've never been a fan of DoubleClick's customer service, although to be perfectly fair, I haven't experienced it in the past 5 years, but combined with Google I may give them another shot
• Counting conversions becomes a lot easier now that I can use one source for tracking display ads and search ads.  Sure, you could have used a combined platform in the past, but that needed long redirects and a PHD in setting up tracking tables; and it gets more complicated with rich media executions
• Double counting of latency conversions should now be a thing of the past because theoretically, GoogClick will have a complete picture of the post-click tracking
• Hopefully, the reporting platforms will become easier to use like Google's today
• One name to present to clients and upper management for reporting and tracking - Google
• Finally, it should be easier for optimization because both the advertiser and Google will have a complete picture of the media buy and the relationship between display and search advertising

For Google, the advantages are huge starting with the fact that they used cash and kept DoubleClick out of Yahoo's and Microsoft's hands.   They can combine search, display, blogs, email and  site targeting into one neat package; plus, retargeting efforts become that much more ubiquitous.   I never bought off on Google's complete search tracking package, but now I might.  Finally, imagine all of that data they now get to go through and analyze; it can only improve their targeting capabilities which is currently top notch, but could use a boost (just check out some of the ads on my blog to see what I mean by targeting mistakes).

Finally, where does it leave Microsoft and Yahoo?  Yahoo, probably not that much worse off because I know they have powerful targeting tools already and analyze the data on the family of websites.  Microsoft?  I think they are fighting against a strong current and looks like every stroke they try to take in the online river, they just end up going back towards that waterfall.  Nice move Google. 

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Yahoo, Google Testing CPA

I'm sorry I'm a little behind on my posts, but I do have to work sometime.  Anyway, I got quite a number of emails from friends and co-workers on what I thought of Google testing a cost per action deal structure.   Funny thing is that I caught wind of it a while back and wrote a post called Google Testing CPA Network - Yahoo?  Anyway, here are my thoughts on CPA and while I'm not as cynical as that original post, I'm not that far off from where I was back in June of last year.

• Read the fine print, this is for Google's content targeting network, not for Google search results or search results on partner sites.  If you are like most advertisers, Google's content network is either turned off or a small percentage of your spend.
• A CPA deal will go a long way to solving a click fraud problem, but I didn't read anything in their details about visibility as to which publishers will be running the CPA ads.  That's always been my biggest issue with content and until they tell you where the ads are running, that lack of visibility is still a problem.
• You'll need to implement Google's conversion tracking codes which of course work really well, maybe too well.  As outlined in their own help on conversion codes, Google places a 30 day cookie on the user's PC which will be used to connect a conversion with a click.  This 30 day window opens up a large latency and double counting issue with your other ad buys (yes, I just linked to a post from 2005).
• The double counting becomes an issue because Google won't have any visibility (unless you let them) into your other ad buys and could potentially count a conversion that you've allocated elsewhere.
• I usually solve that problem by insisting on using a 3rd party for tracking, but didn't find any options for that path other than turning all tracking over to Google.
• Finally, I found no mention of impression based conversion tracking versus click based.  Again, Google's PPC works well because it starts with a click, but how will they count a conversion that's generated from a view through impression and should you be paying Google for that?  What happens if you are also running ads via a different network or are already on that site due to your own wheeling and dealing?

I tried looking around for clarification on the above, but couldn't locate it based on my usual blog readings.  So in the end, would I test CPA?  Yes, but only for clients that have shown successful content campaigns already.  Do I think this is some change the game or advertising altering panacea that delivers great value for advertisers while rescuing Google from click fraud issues?  No.

I've run a TON of CPA deals over the years totaling in the multi-million dollars.  What I've found is when publishers are desperate for ad dollars, an advertiser can make a killing, but otherwise a CPA deal is just one of many options available to you.  Sometimes it is better for you, sometimes it is better for the publisher, and sometimes nobody wins and you get outbid for the inventory; heck, there is always the possibility you don't convert enough and the publisher drops you altogether.  However, if you aren't already translating your CPM or CPC deals into a CPA than  you really don't understand performance marketing and a straight CPA deal won't be able to cover up your marketing short comings.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

*****By the way, my friend Kevin Lee from Did-it wrote a post for ClickZ which mirrors my post almost to the letter.  Good to know great minds think a like.

The Life and Times of Elsie Lee - The End

I hope you enjoyed the story, I of course have no idea if you did until I can get access to a PC again.  I've told this story over and over again and as you can see from the articles and entries on the internet that I linked to in the posts, this wasn't some secret story; I just filled in the blanks with my own personal recollections.  Plus, the recollections of the conversation are just that - recollections and not official quotes.  The pictures all except the ones that showed me with Jamil are all available on the internet.

And, what happened to Jamil?  Well here's a link to her Google search results and Wikipedia entry which sadly does not mention Harrisdirect.  I actually had one last interaction with her that lasted a few months almost daily.  As Jamil told me on our golf photo shoot or via a personal email (I don't remember which one), she was digitized and became your first-person shooter side kick in the game Half-Life 2.

Again, hope you enjoyed the story.  It is always one of my favorite personal stories to retell.  One more look at the photo....and another...

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The Life and Times of Elsie Lee - Round Two

One of my favorite write ups was done over at iMedia by Joe Jaffe called Harrisdirect Adds a Human Touch.  The article highlighted our strategy for using people in their daily lives and how investing helped them achieve their goals.  We knew we had a great strategy going and continued to prime the pump with new direct investors, so I fought to bring her back.  The one caveat that I had with the second shoot was, I had to bring Megan W. along to make sure we had no eye-popping t-shirt issues again.  So, we worked with Modem to come up with two ideas, Elsie golfing and Elsie performing yoga in the same loft again.  On the way over, our photographer warned me not to mention anything about her online following or results we were seeing; he didn't want her to be offended and therefore ruin the photo shoot.

Right after the yoga part, Jamil came up to me and pulled pages and pages of printouts from her fan following online.  And, she was excited to meet with the marketing team.  I was relieved to stop my acting and be myself again.  After we chatted for a while and some photos were taken, we were off to Brooklyn for the golf shoot.  BTW - my hug was more of a thanks for delivering on my account signup objectives and hopes for a great follow-up campaign.  Fast forward to this call on the way over to Brooklyn when I realized that Jamil was not in the van with me and the photographer.

Eric: ModemAE, where is Jamil?

ModemAE: Ummm, she's with us.

Eric: Well, don't you think it is a problem that you have the model and I have the photographer?  Shouldn't she be with the photographer?

Photographer: Wow, Eric and ModemAE are having an alpha male fight!

Eric:  Yeah, I'm the client and she should be with me!

ModemAE: (realizing that I'm half-joking) No, she's with me....

Well, we arrived at the golf course without any real fights where we met up with another Modem AE who had the golf clubs.  When Jamil showed up, she of course walked over to him.   He originally thought he was going to teach her, but sensing a once in a life-time opportunity for a happily married man, I pulled rank on him and said "I'm showing her how to golf, you go over the shots we need with the photographer."  Yes, rank has its privileges plus I  extracted some amount of revenge over stealing Jamil on the ride over.

The photoshoot went very, very well and we had even more photos than we could have imagined.  The photos spanned two online agencies and the campaign lived on.  We used her in a number of creative executions and Elsie Lee remained the focus of our creative strategy up until the middle of 2005.  It wasn't that the results still weren't very good, after all the ads ran for 3 years and were still consistently our most popular ads, but as they say, all good things must come to an end.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The Life and Times of Elsie Lee - Deftone.com

After that day, there were many Director's pressuring me to pull the ads and wrote emails to this effect.  I'm sure quite a few people thought I should be removed and considered this the biggest black eye in the history of this proud online pioneer.  They however, didn't have the data that I had at my finger tips.  I ended up writing a one page response defending the ads which I pinned on my desk for the next 3 years and didn't remove until my last day in the office.  Of course, I don't have the data, but the results went like this:

• Click rates sky rocketed (no surprise there)
• Conversion rates dropped a little (again no surprise)
• Brand awareness metrics, intent to purchase and any other branding metric you can think of went WAY UP.
• New accounts per day increased and cost per new account decreased

Clearly, we had a winner because for all the bad press that we had out there, it was overwhelmed by the added new accounts.  Eventually, things calmed down in the office and almost everyone could laugh about launch day.  We even had her image up on the home page (face only) and that ad went on to be the most popular ad we ran for THREE years running.  I'd go to meetings and people would always mention that ad when they heard I was from Harrisdirect.  Yahoo flew me out to present the results and I have Jerry Yang's autograph of a screen shot of Elsie.  Everything was great until we started noticing more activity in message boards again.

It seems a blog, Deftone.com and a few other websites were tracking (or stalking) Elsie Lee.  There was even an analysis of the removal of her nipples from the ads and some commentary on what was going on (simple, I was getting yelled at).  Elsie had a cult following online; it was so bad, that I actually started running PPC ads on the term Elsie Lee or Elsie Lee, Harrisdirect to take advantage of the traffic.  There was even a contractor who posted her resume online with the following words towards the bottom "I am not the Elsie Lee from Harrisdirect".  For months and maybe up to a year, they couldn't figure out her real name, but clearly everyone liked the ads.  We liked them so much and knew of the cult following, that we decided to bring Jamil back for round 2....

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The Life and Times of Elsie Lee - Launch Day

Late Friday afternoon, we get a phone call from an irate female customer complaining that we were degrading women; however, she never mentioned we had a nipple problem with the ads.  We just assumed she didn't like the fact that we were using a young attractive woman for selling financial services.  That was the tip of the iceberg.

The market opens up Tuesday morning and our giant online ad campaign launches right when the TV goes live (Elsie was only in print).  The ads were click rate optimized so that the best performing ad was shown the most times.  Unfortunately, the ad that was being shown the most times was a giant 160x800 un-airbrushed ad on the NY Times.  The other eye popping ads were an introductory message on MarketWatch.com as well as a 728x90 ad on Yahoo Finance's home page that expanded below.  Within 15 minutes of the market opening we had about 100 written customer complaints and so did many of the websites.  In fact, this was the first time that I learned that a Compliance Department in a Financial Services Company monitors message boards, because we were all over them.

Megan got the offending ads pulled down as soon as we found out, but the pain didn't end there.  The remaining ads were moving or as some jealous Director's in the company said were jiggling and this offended customers too (I think they were trying to follow the dots with their eyes).  I had numerous calls with Brenda, the president of Harrisdirect, Bruce S, as well as Brenda's boss Susan P.  Around 2 PM that day the following call takes place....

Brenda:  Eric, have you fixed the ads and made sure that none of the other ads have a (nipple) problem?

Eric:  Brenda, I've been staring at this women's chest for 5 hours now, I can't tell what I'm seeing.

Brenda:  But, are they fixed?

Eric: Brenda, sometimes I see something, sometimes I don't, and sometimes I see a shadow.  So, I think we are good to go.  If I have to look at another pair of breasts today I think I will scream.

Brenda:  Ok, let's not go that far.  Did you eat lunch?  Why don't you take a break?

Eric: Brenda, I don't know if you know this about men.  We can not think about food and women at the same time.  Kinda of affects the same region of our brains....

Once I was sure the ads were fixed, off they went back into rotation, the entire nipple gate issue over or so I thought....

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The Life and Times of Elsie Lee - Photo Shoot

---Reposting this because Typepad is giving me fits-----sigh----

The original photo shoot was done in a loft in downtown NYC.  I was not there, so all I can tell you is what I was told by the agency and marketing team that was there.

Evidently, the loft was a little cold, but nobody noticed it and certainly not Jamil.  She went into one of the bedrooms and put on a white t-shirt and came out for the photo shoot.  Of course, she was gorgeous but nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary.  That's is until a few weeks later.

The online team waited anxiously for the photos because we were getting squeezed on the back end for time.  The photos went over to Modem Media and then after a week I had a creative review with them.   The mood was a little tense because we were running out of time to hit our launch date to coincide with the offline campaign.  Right after this call, I had to review the creatives with my boss, Brenda T. who was head of North American Marketing for BMO Investorline and Harrisdirect.

The first review was held with my account team at Modem (all men), myself, Jackie P, Megan W, and Kari F.  The first ad we saw was Joe from one of the commercials and what was interesting about Joe was that the ads were created in Flash (first time for this company and I had to fight to keep it by the way) and Joe's photo moved up and down to grab your attention.  The second ad was for Robin and buxom beauty with the same movement. 

Finally, they showed the Elsie Lee ad, which also moved.  When compared with the print execution, Jamil was even more radiant and the ad definitely popped in more ways the one.  Of course being the male, I noticed what was popping out to me, but given my politically correct training from AT&T, I waited for one of my female direct reports to say something...the review went like this:

Eric:  <head spinning around> Umm, well, that is really, an eye opening creative.  Megan?

Megan: <stone faced and serious> Yes it is.  Kari what do you think....

Kari: <smiling and nodding her head up and down> Yep and....

Jackie: <interrupting Kari>  Hey, she's got her headlights on!

Eric: <relieved and voice increasing> Thank god somebody said something.  Come on guys.  I can't show this.  You are going to fix her.  I can't do this.

Male Voice for Modem: We like her just the way she is.

Eric: <stunned, but not surprised given the male/female ratio on this call> Well.  I'll tell you what.  I have to show it to my boss, Brenda.  She's from Canada and not uptight by these things, but in the outside chance she says keep it, you'll get your wish.  Otherwise, you are going to have to airbrush them.

Of course when I showed Elsie to Brenda, she wasn't up tight, but did have me guarantee that we can air brush her, which I assured her we could.  A week later, Modem sent Megan over 80 creative assets for trafficking which Megan put live within a few hours.  See, at the time, the publishers that we were using (MarketWatch, Yahoo, NY Times and others) didn't require prior approval for our creatives.  So, as soon as Megan loaded them into our ad server, BlueStreak, they were live in an hour; probably around 4PM on the Friday before Memorial Day....we didn't notice that three ads were not airbrushed...

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

---Again sorry about the posting problems

The Life and Times of Elsie Lee - Introduction

--Not sure why this never posted...so I'm re-posting for you fans out there.  Sorry---

I've been meaning to write this story for a long time and was going to wait until the official 5 year anniversary, but since I will be unable to post for this coming week, I thought it would be great to load up some posts for you.  And, what better story to tell then the Life and Times of Harrisdirect's Direct Investor Elsie Lee.  Don't know the story of one of the greatest banner ads of all time?  Well sit back and enjoy the story as it unfolds and if you are in this advertising space, you will enjoy learning about an ad that was Harrisdirect's most served ad for 3 years running.

Harrisdirect was the online brokerage company formerly known as CSFBdirect which was formerly known as DLJdirect which was formerly known as PCFN (try saying that in an intro).  It existed up until E*Trade completed the acquisition in the fall of 2005.  In the summer of 2001, the company then known as CSFBdirect was running an integrated offline/online advertising campaign starring a series of direct investors shot in black and white with a hint of red.  The red was from the CSFBdirect logo. 

After 9-11 we pretty much stopped all advertising and were sold to the Bank of Montreal.  The company was named Harridirect which combined the name of BMO's US Bank Operations, Harris Bank, with the direct part of the CSFBdirect name.  Plus, Harrisdirect picked up an upscale version of the Harris lion (Hubert).  One of things that attracted BMO to Harrisdirect, was the synergies in marketing by going after consumers that wanted to direct their own investments - hence direct investors.

I ran a series of interim campaigns that demonstrated to the BMO personnel that online advertising was an effective channel for acquiring customers and (I'm assuming here) that I actually knew what I was doing.  I was never told this, but I always felt that the CSFBdirect marketing folks pretty much auditioned for our jobs.  The interim campaigns that I ran with the help of Megan W, Jackie P, and Kari F were a lot of fun, featured some other direct investors, and we even tested some Eyeblaster ads that featured animals running across the screen being chased by a Harris lion.  For more information, see Eyeblaster's case study.

It was that early spring of 2002, that we started developing plans for a major re-branding campaign set to launch at the end of May 2002.  The offline advertising team that included then named advertising agency Messner (now Euro RSCG) was working on our campaign, while the online team led by myself with then named online advertising agency Modem Media waited for the creatives.  And, that wait, dear friends, turned out to be well worth it.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Web Traffic and Your Blog

It's almost the end of the year and with the kids being off from school, they are staying up later, cutting into my computer time.  Anyway, I was expecting to see little traffic on the website, but surprise I have good traffic.  In fact, I've had good traffic for a while now.  It couldn't possibly be the Reagan/MSN post I did from a few days ago;  what I thought was going to be a good post, didn't even make the cut over at Marketing Prof's Daily Fix Blog.  So what gives?  It is a combination of the Z-Lister Meme and my content popping up in search results; this experience should be helpful to new bloggers.  Of course, it is meaningless if you already have a name for yourself out in the real world.

One of the keys to getting traffic is to have momentum with your fellow bloggers.  Sure you might start out to attract other readers, but at the end of the day you need the blogging community to link to your articles to boost your ability to be found.  Personally, I haven't focused too much on Technorati, but with the boost in links from the Meme, my rank has dropped from around 195,000 to 47,113 which is great.  The links also help with your search rankings.

The second tip I'd give new bloggers is to focus on trying to get associated with a larger blog or network.  That was a tip someone gave me a long time ago and I can vouch for it.  I can't tell you how many links, emails, and comments I've received from folks that read my posts over at Marketing Prof Daily Fix.  I can't thank Ann Handley enough for inviting a year back when she started it.

Also, focus on your own content.  Write your own material.  Constantly commenting on others blogs won't do it and will not build an audience.  If you want to link to articles that you think your readers will like, then just make a post of links and don't waste people's time with comments.  I like using Del.icio.us to auto post to the blog.

Finally, don't make the same mistake that I did and have two URLs pointing to your blog.  That's the single biggest mistake I made in the past year.  What this did was split the blog traffic between pardonmyfrench.typepad.com and www.ericfrenchman.com.  I didn't think it would be so critical when I moved over to Typepad from Blogger, but it has.  Pardonmyfrench.typepad.com has a ranking of 362K probably from all the search results while www.ericfrenchman.com has an Alexa of 483K.  If I only had one URL pointing to the blog, it is quite possible I'd make Mack's Top 25 Marketing Blog list further helping my traffic.

That's it for today.  Check back tomorrow night.  I have a What The Vonage Post on the way for you fans of my Vonage series.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Schwab Finally Gets Their Online Ads Right

I saw this article in MediaPost called Schwab Ties Positive Gains to Chuck and I thought you'd like to read a little more behind the ads.  The ads in question are the cartoon like Talk to Chuck creatives, but before I go on about how much I like the ads let me give you a little background.

Back in my day as Managing Director, Channel Marketing at Harrisdirect which was the 17th largest US advertiser in 2005 right before E*trade acquired us, I pretty much ignored Schwab's online advertising.  What?? How do I ignore such a large advertising spender?  Simple, they had no clue as to what they were doing and were a complete mess when it came to online advertising.  All my agencies would come in with their competitive scans and tell me how much they were spending and what they were doing and my reply was always the same "Oh, they'll change their creative strategy by the end of the week."  And, sure enough, the Big Dawg (me) was always right.  Out would come a new creative execution that was completely disconnected from their offline ads and in general was just awful. 

Plus, their media buys were all over the map and inconsistent.  They would often buy the same button position for Schwab Active Trader and Cybertrader, basically competiting with one another and paying double.  I never knew how the economics would work out on that.  Plus, their search marketing was in the dark ages.  All that changed in April 2005.

Going into 2005, we were working with our traditional agency of record, EuroRSG on a new brand platform.  It was a complicated process, but we were making some real headway and were putting into motion a non-traditional marketing plan when Euro won Schwab's account.  Schwab's first demand was to drop Harrisdirect as a client which they did.  A few months later, Euro pumps out Talk to Chuck and we recognized it as a great execution of our direct investor platform, but backed up with the humanity of asking Charles Schwab.  Quite a winning combination.  (side note:  I am not saying that Euro used our ideas, pretty much everyone in the direct broker category had a direct investor brand play).

I'm glad that Schwab has righted their ship and are seeing success.  Plus, I'm happy that the hard working folks from EuroRSG finally got to put a good plan in action in the financial services industry.  It all is good because if they didn't win the business, they would have lost out on our business anyway with the acquisition. 

The only knock I'll send Schwab's way is based on this statement "Already, Schwab is ahead of most advertisers, Stuart maintains--noting that although 25% of all media consumption is online, most advertisers allocate around 10% to online ads. Schwab already spends about 20% of its media dollars online."  That is just sad in the financial category.  Sure versus ALL advertisers Schwab is spending more on average, but within the direct brokerage category, I'm sure they are WAY BEHIND.  I once had a director of marketing from TD Waterhouse tell me that after they viewed competitive spend of the competition who allocated 10-20% online, they saw the Harrisdirect spend which was 75% online and he realized that was the future.  That was back in 2003. 

Come on Schwab you can do better than that. Just lift your head out of the sand and see how the world has changed and figure out that the audience shifted a long time ago.  If you can't, I'd just talk to Chuck.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

A Little More Background on The Roehm Firing

Now, I never met Julie Roehm and have also never done business with Wal-Mart; in fact, my wife breaks out in hives whenever I mention that we should go there to pick up an item.  I've been reading a ton of articles on the subject because it has the makings for a great soap opera.  Accusations of inappropriate behavior, big dinner parties, and what looks like a butting of culture heads.  In my opinion, it just looks like a marriage doomed from the start and that Wal-Mart was looking at any way to get themselves out of this deal and that includes choosing DraftFCB as their AOR.  The most interesting article I found was from Stuart Elliot of the New York Times called Wal-Mart Fires Marketing Star and Ad Agency.  Why, because it talks about someone I worked with during Harrisdirect's agency search, Linda Fidelman.

Linda, president of Advice and Advisors, runs a very well organized and thorough agency review process.  She helped Harrisdirect navigate through choosing our last AOR, Strawberry Frog. And, that was quite a complicated review because I had chosen Grey Interactive as our interactive AOR and when we needed print/TV help (BTW - why did we ever do print ads - UGH) after Schwab had Euro RSCG dump Harrisdirect, I asked Grey WorldWide to pinch hit until we chose an offline AOR.  Linda set the review ground rules including who can meet with the perspective agencies, who can fill out the forms to help narrow it down, and even who can join in with the agency socials to understand chemistry.

She is quoted in the article regarding comments made at the now infamous DraftFCB-Nobu party and correctly pointed out when:

Ms. Fidelman said she asked Ms. Roehm why she appeared at the dinner and whether the other ad agencies being considered along with Draft FCB were upset. Ms. Roehm’s reply, according to Ms. Fidelman, was along the lines of “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

Ms. Fidelman said guests at the dinner were “all fairly flabbergasted,” adding, “I’ve never seen an existing client at one of these things — much less a prospective client.”

That was classic Linda telling it like it is and trying to keep order around an agency review process that she had nothing to do with (assumed).  Linda's number one concern is to have a fair and unbiased agency selection process, especially when things can get out of hand.  For example, I was once offered New York Yankees World Series Tickets during a review process which I of course turned down; some agencies will do anything to win your business and that's why people like Linda are there to protect the process.

Anyway, that's a little more background added to the story.  I do hope Ms. Roehm lands on her feet.  I witnessed plenty of change agents brought into the old and better AT&T who were shunned by the old timers when they tried to buck the AT&T culture.  It is a double edged sword because as a change agent you are brought into well, make changes, but often you run into the old ways of doing things that people cling to and in the end you either compromise and give up your change agent mantra or leave.  At AT&T most of them ended up leaving...

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Since Wenda Is Still There, Yahoo's Reorg Will Work

I had no intentions of making another post today because I have several lined up, but with the news of Yahoo's Reorganization and several high level departures, I can't resist one more post.  You can read the official press release, CEO Terry Semel's blog post, or wait a little longer in the day for links to several other blogs commenting on the story.  Personally, the other blogs didn't add too much, but the best one I saw was Om Malik's Yahoo Reorg or Retread; not that I agree with everything that Om wrote but at least he added to the discussion.  Speaking of adding to the discussion....

I've bought tens of millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo over the past 6 years and continue to buy advertising on them.  Why?  In the finance category they are the #1 property, can reach targets using their behavioral modeling (Fusion) better than others, provide scale, huge branding opportunities, and low cost/high reach units.  The account and sales team are the most professional around and if you know how to work with them it is very smooth process.  Plus, the Finance team has always recommended and helped me navigate Yahoo's org structure when I wanted placements outside of their core area.

However, Yahoo is very big right now with many organizations.  The streamlining in the reorganization hopefully will help; however, please don't start layoffs.  It will just kill morale and from what I've seen in the Finance Group, you need more people not less.  I also hope the reorg allows Yahoo to bring new products, processes, tools, and rationalize overlapping products already in their portfolio.  Yahoo should be the leader and the #1 destination for all advertisers, not just Finance.

However, with the announcements of Dan Rosensweig and Lloyd Braun leaving (yes the name from Seinfeld) what was left unsaid was that as long as Yahoo's Chief Sales Officer Wenda Harris Millard is still leading their sales group, Yahoo will win in th e long run.  I've spent some time with Dan R. at a Yahoo/Jack Welch dinner and met Yang and Semel, but I've spent a lot of time with Wenda over lunch, meetings, and even via email.  Out of all the sales executives I've run across Wenda is the most professional one out there and if you read this AdAge article still has a lot of fight left for Yahoo.

The Ad Age article is pure Wenda as she comes out swinging and telling it like it is.  Here are some quotes:

• ...defined the success of YouTube as "a lot of page views. What was their revenue this year?
• the reality is that there are very few companies (user generated content)-- if any -- that are doing what you would call a good job of monetizing it
• I have a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old, and they don't want to be [MySpace] friends with the Burger King king
• But the reality is we are a company that has grown at an extraordinary rate, and that doesn't come without questions about your ability to move with competitive speed.

That was pure Wenda and I wish I was there to see it when she delivered those messages.  Maybe Yahoo's problems are that they aren't sexy enough for analysts any longer or they can't quite keep up with the growth expectations.  Certainly not upgrading the old Overture Search platform is/was a critical mistake, but they have one ace in the hole unmatched at other online companies, which is their Sales Officer.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Internet Key to 2008?

I've been so busy as of late that I let this one slip through.  A friend of mine from Google, in addition to a few folks from Connell Donatelli, sent me this link last Thursday called Google CEO Calls Net Key to Whitehouse but I never commented.  So, better late than never. 

First of all, of course Google is correct that the internet is key to gaining the Whitehouse in 2008.  The examples that Eric Schmidt gave are the obvious ones which include postings on YouTube of Rep. Murtha and Sen. Allen, Kingdom of Bahrain having screen shots from Google Earth posted comparing lavish homes with the average person's home, and of course Google Bombing the election courtesy of some liberal bloggers.  Ok, so what's a politician supposed to do with these?  Simple, stop ignoring that this can happen and be proactive about using the internet.

1. Allocate at least 25% of advertising budgets online.  Why 25%?  Well on average companies today spend about 5% online and what is that going to look like by 2008?
2. Organize your online teams between website, advertising, and social marketing.
3. The social marketing person will be in charge with blogger outreach, consumer generated media, and monitoring the blogosphere
4. Use search marketing and display advertising to promote your message; don't just rely on what people might say, control the message just like any other medium
5. Build ad units that really take advantage of the medium; at a minimum stream your offline commercials in banner units (Just Stream It)

I witnessed some of these examples referenced by Schmidt.  In the case of YouTube postings a simple way to combat the posts was to make sure your own messages are posted on YouTube earlier enough in the process as well as running search ads so that the YouTube postings don't appear so high in the results; you can no longer ignore 323K views of these videos.  Why?  Even politics is effected by the Long Tail of Marketing:  reaching smaller niches of people in very cost effective methods or said another way, a few 1000 people viewing a not-so-flattering video can cost you an election.

Speaking of ignoring things, I still believe Google should do more to combat Google Bombing certain words.  I firmly believe that this impacts their brand and shows that a small group of people can manipulate the results.  Google Bombing the mid-term elections was really started too late to impact the vast majority of targeted campaigns, but the fact remains that people believe that they can manipulate Google's organic search results.  Sure, campaigns are starting to embrace the internet, but the internet should do a little more to customize tools and reach out to the market place; ending Google Bombing would be a start in the right direction.

Is the internet key for 2008?  Well it is a key component in messaging and strategy.  Just like anything else in the world, a good product will sell itself, but it sure helps when marketing channels are used effectively.  Stop trying to fight what's happening online by sticking with the same old ways of marketing; use the Long Tail to spread your message out more to many groups of small niches.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Counting Video Streams

I had a follow-up meeting today (Connell Donatelli) with our new PointRoll account manager and I brought up the YouTube/CBS press release which broadcast how many views per day the CBS shows received on YouTube and the impact on the offline audience.  What upset me most about the press release was the lack of good actionable numbers.  Sure the number of views is impressive, but a view of a video ad is the equivalent of a banner impressions.  Nice numbers for tracking, but meaningless measurements and in my opinion do more harm then good. Why?  The internet measures everything and to put out a lame figure like views belittles the tracking available and reduces online advertisers to their offline equivalents:  peddlers of useless numbers to pad their wallets.

So, what does a view mean to you?  Did the video load?  Did someone watch it for one second and bail out?  Did they leave a comment, vote on the rating, any of that?  No idea what it means?  You know what I translate it into:  internet eyeballs circa 1996.

When we started streaming videos for our political candidates we immediately started reporting on meaningful numbers like average time spent with the banner unit, number of hours watching videos, click thrus to website, donations, email sign-ups, and panel interactions.  Statistics that are easily measurable by any online video product and especially for a company like YouTube.  For example, here's a link to an article in ClickZ that features our online video campaign for Dick DeVos for Governor of Michigan which showed at the time over 1,200 hours of interaction within the ad unit.

As an industry, we should refrain from producing useless factoids like video views or video loads.  I tried looking over at The Internet Advertising Bureau, but all I found was a link to how to count video views.  We should just stop the madness now and throw out video views as a measurement and move towards average time spent and total time spent viewing ads.  Only then can we really rise above the offline measurement game.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google Has A Secret - Get Rid of Your Sales Force

John Chow let the cat out of the bag when it came to breaking the news that Google is working on a Google Display Advertising Network. John broke the news because he got invited to participate in this secret club; I wonder if it comes with secret Masonic Handshakes?  The details which John shared are:

• Google is creating this network to go after the big Fortune 1000 brand advertisers
• They want to sell video and banner ads to these companies for high CPMs
• Lucky publishers get to have a flat negotiated fee with Google for a full year and must guarantee a minimum amount impressions

About two weeks back a friend of mine asked me to poke around and see what I can find out about the double secret probation ad network.  She already had some scoop on the CPMs and the length of the deal.  However, what we talked about was some other motivation behind the now not-so-secret plan.  With success, Google can theoretically eliminate a site's sales force.  Think about it.  Google represents you to these big fortune 1000 company and sells your already negotiated CPM to them on your behalf.  No need to have somebody on your payroll peddling your product; just a site manager and a trafficking coordinator.  No need for your account manager.  So, not only do you get your CPM theoretically if you are over-sold you could eliminate some cost too.  Not bad, huh?  Plus, perhaps you have reduced paper work.  However, isn't that a possible sales pitch for all ad networks?  BTW - before you think the old man is crazy, imagine if the deals included some upfront payment for part of or all of a site's inventory?  Google has deep pockets.....

I guess I'm a little skeptical.  Ad networks are nothing new and the marketplace is very crowded.  Besides the rare occasion when I used content networks and Google's Site Targeting, I am a huge fan of Advertising.com for their reach and ability to predict and optimize my advertising campaigns.  Can Google build a better mouse trap the Advertising.com ?

The other part that makes me skeptical is my assumed interpretation of John's post is that these Fortune 1000 companies are willing to pay big CPMs in the name of simplicity and assumed targeting.  And, having been one of those Fortune 1000 online advertisers on more than one occasion (ex - AT&T, Bank of Montreal) and I'm currently consulting for a few of them, it just isn't the case.  Brand marketers need documented results and if they are sophisticated like my clients, it is a lot more than just running some impressions without an expected action or ROI.  A number of my clients require sophisticated behavioral and/or geo-targeting while boosting brand awareness and post-click actions.  Everything is getting measured.

Maybe Google is just testing here again or maybe not.  They have so many balls in the air now like radio, print, mobile, spreadsheets, and now this it becomes almost difficult to keep track of everything involved and what they are becoming besides a CPC search network.  I hope they don't start eating peanut butter sandwiches.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Major Politicians Are In Google - You Just Need to Search

In today's iMedia Connection there is an article (if that's what you'd call it) written by Brian Easter, Nebo Web's CEO, titled Major Politicians Missing from Google; however what really is missing is Brian's use of Google to actually find politicians using search engine marketing.  Brian's article reports:

• "very noticeably, there is a lack of major politicians in the search engine results for keywords that people search on. (Each campaign is unique so their words are unique)
• So, if you were a politician like Hillary ...or John..., you would probably want your site to be ranked for a whole host of terms like "national security," "Iraq war," "War on terror," and many more. (They are there for words that are important to the individual campaign)
• It seems incredible that major politicians are not putting out their messages on their key positions through the search engines. (It is incredible that you didn't find them)
• If someone is motivated enough to type in a search on immigration reform, then, I as a political candidate, would want you to read my position on this issue on my website.(See screen shot below)
• First off, it means our politicians are not web-savvy when is comes to marketing". (Believe me, they get search engine marketing)

Wow, if you actually read this article you'd think that politicians are ignoring search engine marketing.  "Incredible" he wrote; it is incredible that a CEO of  a company that supposedly delivers results and lists search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising as a skill set, couldn't find the political PPC advertising.    For example, instead of just blindly writing point #4 above, he could have actually typed in immigration reform into Google and he would have seen a political advertiser as shown in the image above.

I won't give away our search strategy for political advertisers, but let's just say that we and our clients are more sophisticated than what Brian reports.  As any private marketer knows, it depends on what the goals are and how much budget you have to spend when it comes to designing a well managed search campaign.  We construct individual search campaigns for each of our clients based on their budget and objectives; some campaigns are as complex as any private sector advertiser but everyone is unique.

Political advertising is not as simple and certainly not as clueless as Brian writes about.  Each one has different goals and challenges and what works for one campaign (ex, immigration reform) may not work for others.  A simple search via Google would have turned up PPC advertisers and not just the ones we are working with.  Heck, he could have found this website or an article in ClickZ today that mentions yours truly talking about among other topics, political search marketing.

When choosing an agency to handle your search engine marketing, make sure you choose one that actually knows how to use search.  Having a skill that you pay an agency for is usually an important component of the relationship.  And, when it comes to political advertising, having the right relationship is key to getting out the right message in a cost effective manner.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Yahoo's Finance Woes or Something Else

Ok, so Yahoo's stock got hammered yesterday for warning that sales revenue would be slower in the third quarter and that they are seeing slower growth in the automotive and financial services sector.  Yahoo's total revenue was $5.3 billion last year and according to eMarketer via the article both of those sectors each account for 12% of ad spending.  Layering on top of that are more places on the internet that are siphoning off eyeballs (YouTube, MySpace, finance blogs, etc) and of course the analysts like to point out that Yahoo!'s search platform (Overture) is in need of a face-lift.  Wow, seems like a lot is going on here.  Is this a slowdown?  No, just a little speed-bump.

In the finance sector, things are moving around quickly and with consolidation in the brokerage category from the past year, Yahoo! Finance lost two big spenders in Harrisdirect and TD Waterhouse.  Since I directed Harrisdirect's online advertising for 5 years I ought to know how valuable those buttons are worth.  The quotes results package, which Harrisdirect tested for a few weeks as the fourth button (it used to be 3), is the premier spot on the internet and all of the brokers compete for it.  As you can see in the screen shot, E*trade is now one of the buttons when it wasn't there last year; taking TD Waterhouse's spot.  E*trade and Harrisdirect were part of the next tier of spenders last year at this time and a merger between those two eliminated a spender as did the TDAmeritrade merger.  Now, it's not to say that other spenders like Banks and Insurance companies can't jump in and pick up the slack, but it takes a longer sales process to educate these folks as they look to test, where I would have jumped in if a good deal was presented to me.  Plus, the price of the buttons (multi-million dollars per year) can only be sold to a group of advertisers that will continue to shrink.

Next is all of the talk and press on the search platform.  Can it use an overhaul?  Yes.  And, obviously from recent data from Hitwise, Google holds a commanding lead of 60% of all searches, while Yahoo comes in at 23% (MSN = 12%, Ask=4%).  Can an overhaul take over Google?  Probably not, but it certainly can boost the amount of searches.  Personally, I've been turning to Yahoo search more and more when it comes to trying to buy those annoying $5 minimum cost per click words on Google (ex - Hillary Clinton).  Yahoo search has become the Walmart of pay per click words where I can buy volume at a dirt cheap cost especially when clients can't afford to spend $10K or more per month (ie I hit the monthly budget with more clicks and conversions).  What does Google have?  Name cache and the majority of US searches and that won't change.

Ok, we have a speed bump in the finance category and the continued search issue, but what I personally think is hurting Yahoo the most is the competition for their user's attention span.  Yahoo! still is the #1 ranked finance site for traffic, followed by MSN, AOL, and Dow Jones (notice Google is not in the top 10) so it can't be traffic and I'm sure their users are still getting a ton of quotes.  However, I wonder if the average time spent has dropped or the % of a user's internet time spent on Yahoo dropped.  There are only so many blogs, video sites, MySpace pages, and Bud.TV sites that a person can visit in a day.  And, the advertisers are going to follow those people when they employ targeting techniques from Tacoda, RevenueScience, and the Advertising.coms of the world - advertisers, especially sophisticated ones, are starting to buy users and not sites.  It also doesn't help that the portal strategy is fractured as well.  How many of you used to use Yahoo as your homepage and now use your broadband provider?

Yahoo!'s challenge now is to push more of these new finance advertisers through the sales process and build out more and more of their content play to try and keep people longer on their site.  In this day and age with so many places to visit, it should be more about time spent and pages accessed, rather than just impressions.  Heck, trying an old strategy of being an on ramp to the internet might even help.  BTW - I'm keeping my Yahoo! shares...

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

 

Connell Donatelli Article on DeVos

We got some nice press the other day on the work we are doing for the Dick DeVos for Governor Campaign courtesy of the AP.  In the article called Nearly $26 Million Spent on governor's race so far found over at the Chicago Tribune, it talks about how much money is being spent in the Michigan Governor's race and highlights our $200K online media buy.  Of course to the article what was most interesting was the amount of the spend, but not what I consider significant which was the campaigns innovative use of our Just Stream It Strategy where we are streaming their offline ads in an PointRoll ad unit.

The Dick DeVos for Governor campaign is one of my favorites for their innovative use of online media and integrated offline/online strategy.  The campaign was also featured in this week's BusinessWeek for its targeting tactics.  Hopefully, at the end of a winning campaign, we'll be able to share some of their cutting edge online media programs, because other than one other campaign which we don't talk about, the Dick DeVos campaign has it all for marketing online.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Politicians Should Just Stream It - Part 3

One of the best things about last week's All Things Politics conference besides the visit to San Diego was that I received a copy of a study called Moving to The Mainstream.  The study was released by the e-Voter Institute and was sponsored by PointRoll.   You can download a copy to read it for yourself, but as usual I've gone through it and have of course my own opinion.  There were 7 key findings, but for this post will focus on Finding 2 which is called the Practical View.

As written in the report, consultants say rich media is effective with 4/5 saying rich media is effective for getting email addresses, 3/4 for taking surveys, and 7/10 for raising money and motivating the base/persuasion.  It also examined which internet methods are effective for all audiences, loyal bases and swing/independent voters and online video ads came in second at 36% for all audiences.  So what's a campaign supposed to do?  Just stream it.

Streaming videos are very effective when it comes to online advertising.  According to the survey, voters like video and with all of the rage of YouTube, more and more people are embracing it as a form of content.  The consultants seem to think it is effective with generating content, but personally I think it is secondary to getting out the vote message, pushing critical points, and brand awareness.  When we generate donations or emails from the Point Roll units I consider it a bonus when coupled with viewing video.

If I hear a campaign is trying to raise awareness or push a certain message, I immediately go for a Point Roll execution.  Just to illustrate the point, check out these two PointRoll executions that my agency Connell Donatelli worked with PointRoll on for Dick DeVos and Rick Santorum.

What could be better than reaching your audience with a streaming online video wrapped around by a unit that can take an email sign-up or a donation?  Nothing.  A well placed media buy with a PointRoll Fatboy streaming an offline ad is poetry in motion.  Try tracking that with your TV ads.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric 

Can Bloggers Make Money - Yes With A Little Help From Friends - Part 2

In this month's Business 2.0 (yes I still read it) is an article called Blogging for Big Bucks where it examines some of best and well known blogs started by Michael Arrington, John Battelle, Jason Calacanis, and Drew Curtis all of whom I read almost every day.  The best points of the article are how with little to no overhead it is possible to make a great living with nothing more than a laptop, URL, and some content.  Everyone in that article should be applauded because they are getting well deserved money.  I guess the one issue I have with it is how it makes it seem that it is relatively simple to make money.  In fact, maybe if you follow their 7 habits of highly effective bloggers you too can make money writing posts in your boxers.  Here are their top 7:

1. Focus intently on a narrow niche
2. Setup blog so each post gets its own permanent URL
3. Think of your blog as a database
4. Blog frequently and regularly
5. Use striking images in your posts
6. Enable comments and interact with readers
7. Make friends with other bloggers

If only that was it.  No, I'm not complaining that I've made about $50 in ad sense and I'm not starting the A-list, B-list, C-list argument of blogs.  Look this is America and blogging is democracy at its best.  Anyone can start one with little money and take your best shot at making some bucks.  Before I jump in with some additional steps  based on my own experience, let's take a look at what you are up against.

According to LeeAnn Prescott at Hitwise, the top blogs are either political, tech, or just great links.  So, if you are not in one of those categories how can you compete?  Don't you need more than just the top 7 listed above?  Yes.  However, you need to figure out one thing first - why are you blogging?  I do it for personal PR and maybe find more business opportunities.  I should have started this a while back while at Harrisdirect because I probably would have built a following sooner.  The next thing you need to realize is, that there are 50 other people already writing on your topic.  So with that backdrop, here are my top 10 other best practices to earn money based on my experience and if that throws you back into reality, well Pardon My French.

Pardon My French Additional Best Practices in Blogging to Make Money

1. You need to have a following of people long before you start posting
2. It is all about your content; posting links to other blogs unless you have an easy URL is a waste of time
3. Using just the standard template for blogging is not good enough, try customizing
4. Having your ads running across the side is not good marketing; they need to be embedded within your comment (fyi  - I haven't had the time to redesign, but I plan on updating)
5. Get off your blog and visit other blogs; that way you can see what other people are doing (thanks Mack)
6. Other than your content, nothing matters more than links to your site
7. When you visit other sites, leave a comment and trackback if necessary to get traffic back to your site; also Techorati is your only friend
8. Write about politics, tech, or celebrities because that's what people care about the most
9. Try and get picked up in a network or post for a more popular site like I do for Marketing Profs
10. Finally, figure out why you are blogging and stick to it.  If that means you don't care about ad dollars because you are after a new job or consulting opportunities then that is great.  Just be true to yourself.

That's it.  I hope you didn't find this negative because it wasn't meant to be.  I really enjoy all of the people I've met online and I am really upset I didn't start this sooner.  Imagine the following I would have had while at Harrisdirect when I had multi-million dollar ad campaigns in market.  If only....

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Adventures of OnlineGuy: RFP Nightmares

PushySales: Well thanks for giving us a shot at the RFP.  I know we are going to win it.

OnlineGuy: Great, we're looking forward to your presentation.

PushySales: Before we get started, I took the liberty of ordering breakfast.  You're Jewish right?  I ordered you Scottish smoked salmon, cream cheese, bagels; plus, for people that don't eat smoked fish, we have an omelet station.

OnlineGuy: No really you didn't need to go to all this trouble, besides I ate already.  After all, it is 10:30, but I'll help myself to coffee.

PushySales: Well, we have Irish coffee, all kinds of flavored coffee, plus a selection of nice teas.  Don't fill up too much because I made lunch reservation at NoBu.

OnlineGuy: Well, not sure I can do lunch, lets see how Q/A meeting goes.  Do you have any questions on the RFP?

PushySales:  Well it was very thorough, I still have my team going over it.  However, it said in your bio you worked at AT&T, isn't that right?

OnlineGuy: Yes, I spent 10 years there in various....

PushySales: Great. I'm thinking of the perfect account person for you, she's...

OnlineGuy:  Wait a second, didn't I meet your proposed AE last time.  You know the experienced guy by the name of Bill.

PushySales: Well Bill is OK, but we think you'll like to look at, err I mean work with Candy a lot more; she just finished working on our prepaid phone card account and she is itching to jump in with you on the project.  Candy, are you available?

Candy:  Hi OnlineGuy it is a pleasure to meet you.  That was really a big RFP you gave us, have you been married long? (BTW - the perfume arrived before Candy)

OnlineGuy:  Well, yes, but we should stick to the RFP.

Candy:  Oh, we are still going through that; it was so powerful that it required even more time.  Hey, I know, PushySales, don't we have two extra tickets for tonight's sold out Stanley Cup game 7?

PushySales: Why yes, maybe you and OnlineGuy can go and talk over the RFP some more; maybe, you can even help us out on some of the more subtle points?

OnlineGuy:  I can't go tonight sorry.  Look, I'm available to meet anytime to go over the RFP; we'll expect your formal questions in a week and then a presentation in two.  Thanks.

Now, why do some agencies in a pitch process turn it into the Dating Game? True there is a lot to be said for chemistry between

Adventures of Online Guy in: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Thanks to my friend Art who told me I may have a career with these stories (I doubt it but I have fun), I'll try and make this a weekly post.  Anyway, back to our hero who finds himself in a conversation with his account rep whom he has known for many years.

OnlineGuy - Look you know how much we've liked your work over the years, but lately the quality has started to slip.

CluelessAE - Really I hadn't noticed a problem.

OnlineGuy - We'll we had a new price point for our Widget and instead of showing the price going down, you had it going up.  Then nobody caught it, we trafficked it, and it went live.

CluelessAE - Well you guys do the trafficking so you should have caught it.

OnlineGuy - Ummm, no but lets not harp on that.  The big problem was that my CMO caught the ad live on YouGoogle and remember she had problems with your agency going back a few months when the email QA suffered.

CluelessAE - Well, you took us off of email so I don't understand why you are bringing this up again.

OnlineGuy - Right.  Well, I'm giving you a heads up that we are going to start an agency review.

CluelessAE - What?

OnlineGuy - Yes.  She has had enough of the mistakes.  We love the work and the creatives, but their are too many errors.  However, we want you in the pitch process as one of the finalists.

CluelessAE - I doubt it.  The incumbents never win, we'll probably pass on this.

OnlineGuy - Look I'm not supposed to say this, but we just want you to come back in and fix the QA of the ads.  That's it.  You don't even need creative work, just a plan for putting back on the good staff and correcting errors.

CluelessAE - You guys are serious, you really are going to a RFP?  I don't know, incumbents never win.  Look instead of doing that how about we put a new QA manager on the account?  Things will get better you'll see.

OnlineGuy - We've already tried that.  Look she is pissed at me and said "you can't defend these guys any more.  This time they made you and your team look bad."

CluelessAE - Well, at least let us help you write the RFP.....

 

Google Provides Click Fraud #s

Widely reported all over the internet, Google is providing visibility into the number of fraudulent clicks and the click fraud % which I think is a good first step. 

If you run a campaign or account performance report, you can generate the overall click fraud number.  However, I wish they went a step further and provided the data at the keyword level because Google knows as well as any advertiser that there are probably some words that provide the majority of clicks; these fraudulent clicks are the ones that Google figures out and doesn't charge the advertisers.  I wonder how much Google misses. 

So, I decided to check the search campaigns I manage, including my own and here's what I found.  The period is from January 1st through July 24th and remember Google did not charge for the fraud clicks it identifies:

• Overall click fraud was around 5%
• I'm not sure how Google calculates click thru rate now.  It looks like they subtract out the invalid clicks, but then when I calculate the CTR with the raw numbers it doesn't add up client by client.  Overall, it looks like they do subtract it out.
• There isn't a pattern month to month.  The numbers fluctuate from month to month, but as an old statician there are no trends to it.
• Click fraud varies from each search campaign 

That's it.  Good luck with your click fraud data.  I really wish they added in click fraud data by keyword..

PardonMyFrench,

Eric (links to articles below)

Adventures of Online Guy

Back by popular demand, the Adventures of Online Guy returns this time in a battle of life and death between himself and DM Gal.  DM Gal of course reports to the villain from the previous adventure, Trad Gal.

DMGal - Hey online guy.  We need to talk about your tracking.

OnlineGuy - Hold on a second.  I need to finish this report.

DMGal - No we need to talk now especially before you publish that crappy report.  We need to talk about your tracking and how you are stealing my widget sales.

OnlineGuy - Steal your widget sales?  Listen, I haven't stolen anything unless of course if you count the time I rang up organic bananas as regular bananas in the self check out line.

DMGal - No you are stealing sales.  You are counting all sales including what you call latent as yours.  And, your latent sales are mine because I dropped a direct mail piece in the last month.

OnlineGuy - Look, just because I can count people that view or clicked on an ad and then within the next 30 days make a widget sale, doesn't mean I should ignore.  Besides, what makes you think they are your sales?  I spoke with my friend Barry over in customer care and they are still waiting for the first 10 calls from your crappy direct mail piece.

DMGal - Well because it isn't fair.  You don't know for sure they bought a widget because of your advertising.

OnlineGuy - Well they clicked on an ad, went to our website which my group runs, and made a sale.  Sounds like it belongs to me.  Besides, maybe if your direct mail piece included a call action besides an inbound telemarketing number you could have counted more sales.

DMGal - Ummmm

OnlineGuy - And, don't forget I begged you to include an URL and your agency refused saying they didn't like the look of it in the piece.  Maybe you should yell at them for a bad creatives and lousy targeting.

DMGal - well, <cough> maybe I could talk....

OnlineGuy - How about the next time you drop a DM piece we create a unique, short URL for your traffic and then you can get credit for any latent sales that visit the page.  Also, we should discuss targeting strategy.....