The Right Way to Make Your Brand Disruptive
December 8, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
The most common question I’m asked by clients is: where should I be marketing my business to drive results? The funny thing is that the answer is never the same for that particular question. Your tactical advertising plan needs to be in line with your product strong suits. A good rule of thumb is:
If your advertisements are annoying to their audience, they are being distributed on the wrong medium.
For example, if you are running social networking ads that constantly get complaints, you probably shouldn’t be placing your banner ads on sites like Facebook or Myspace. Every business has its sweet spot, the key is being able to recognize how to become ‘disruptive’ without becoming annoying.
Let’s compare two ‘disruptive’ advertising mechanisms: Product Samples vs. Internet Pop Ups. Both of these marketing tools ‘disrupt’ the user experience, the key difference is that giving away product samples help to establish brand loyalty while pop up ads simply annoy viewers and many times drive them to competing companies.
Every business sector has a specific medium in which their advertisements should be placed, below are some of the best pairings I’ve witnessed with clients:
- Car Dealerships – Newspaper and TV
- Legal Counsel – Yellowpages
- Consumer Electronics – Search Engine Marketing
- Movie Studios – Online Video Pre-Roll Commercials
- Business to Business Enterprises – Blogging
So remember to keep on disrupting your audience (it’s the only way to get their attention), however make sure that you are building strong and positive relationships with consumers as opposed to simply throwing an ad in front of their face.
What’s Your Marketing Risk IQ?
October 23, 2008 by OA Group · 1 Comment
What's Your Marketing Risk IQ?
Marketing is a risk intensive endeavor, there is a wide ranging risk vs. reward matrix which can bring even the most innovative experts to their knees. So why am I telling you this? It’s because I want to describe the OAG marketing mechanisms and illustrate how they each minimize risk while simultaneously maximizing the reward. Below is a basic walk-through of each service:
1. BlogSpur
The BlogSpur service is a multi-faceted social media marketing service produces long term results with minimal risk. The OAG Social Media and Search Engine Specialists dramatically increase a brand’s online web presence through blog postings and social media syndication. The fees are minimal compared to hiring a blogger and the service produces industry leading results.
2. AdSpur
AdSpur is a performance based marketing service. This means there is little to no risk for you as an advertiser. You only pay when you receive an order, lead or visitor.
If you are looking for your company to receive online or offline press exposure, a strong PR push is required. This does have a higher risk compared to the BlogSpur and AdSpur services since the fees are higher and there are no guaranteed results. However the rewards are potentially exponential. Several companies such as Facebook and YouTube built their businesses purely on a solid public relations and press outreach strategy.
In the current economic condition of the nation, it is key to make every penny of your marketing dollar count, so choose wisely and let us help you create a marketing solution that fits your situation.
A New Age of Advertising
August 20, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
The Missing Piece(s)
For industry insiders, I think you will enjoy the inside joke with the title of this post. Last year, the Founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckeberg, was highly criticized for telling a group of media ad agency executives that every 100 years media changes (coverage), and that Facebook was bringing everyone else into this new ‘age’. Great statement, except for the fact that he was talking to a group of media executives who have forgotten more than Zuckeberg will ever know about online marketing.
One of my favorite guilty pleasures, Valleywag, posted an article yesterday with some great tips on how the online social networking space could actually appeal to the ad agency marketing dollars. The tips from the ad exec are below:
Build a toll booth.
Everyone knows banner ads don’t do it for big-budget advertisers anymore— not even ones that allow users to comment on them and share with their friends, like Facebook’s new ads. Instead of creating gimmicky features that users don’t want, Facebook needs to come up with ways for advertisers to be seen as providing new functionality on Facebook itself. By way of analogy, my source told me to imagine American Express sponsoring a normally congested toll road for a day. Drivers approaching the toll booths would see them empty and maybe billboard that read: “No toll today. Drive on through and see what it’s like to be an American Express cardholder.” That’s the kind of branded experiences Facebook needs to create for users and advertisers, my source told me. Not gimmicky ones like asking users to design Mazda’s new cars or come up with new Ben and Jerry’s flavors. Facebook should encourage users to feel like a site improvement was brought to them by a brand. Maybe Facebook’s Video application should have been sponsored by Sony’s CyberShot line, for example. The challenge: Facebook’s site developers work separately from the group which comes up with ad products, a divide Facebook needs to erase.
Facebook needs to stop imagining it will ever reach Google’s size.
One reason Facebook hasn’t come up with these kinds of advertising arrangements already is that they require lots of creativity, planning and customization. They’re one-offs, and Mark Zuckerberg can’t simply program a computer to sell them over and over. It’s a terrifying reality for Facebook because its investors put money into it expecting it would become the next Google, which is an automated moneymaking machine. (Only 3,000 out of its 18,000 employees are required to run its advertising operations.) The sooner Facebook management and its investors realize that the company will not be the next Google — which, let’s face it, lucked into a ridiculously simple way of making money — the sooner it can take advantage of its massive, desirable user base.
Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to hire Madison Avenue insiders.
My source says Madison Avenue avoids spending money on MySpace because no one in New York knows its ad salespeople. Facebook needs to put Madison Avenue insiders in positions where they have Mark Zuckerberg’s ear. For example: Zuckerberg could have used someone with advertising experience to challenge him with the baby-name test before the company went forward with its Beacon ads. The baby-name test? “You know,” he said, “The one where you take the name and think of all the terrible things it rhymes with and then decide if you still like it.”
Why Can’t I Choose?
July 10, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
I don’t think I will be able to hold my frustration if I hear about another company trying to monetize social networking traffic. Ad networks such as Social Media and VideoEgg have probably done the best job in the industry up to this point with running campaigns on Facebook and the other social networks out there. However this post’s focus is different.
Is there an easier way to make money for social networks?
Most ad networks try to differentiate themselves by building targeting mechanisms into their service. If you’re in the online marketing industry, you’ve heard terms such as:
- Behavioral targeting (Blue Lithium)
- Contextual targeting (Google)
- Rich Media (Tremor Media)
- Along with a slew of others.
And what is the goal of each of these technologies? Getting the right ad, in front of the right user, at the right time. And as great as each of these marketing tools are, I personally believe that none of them are right for social networks by themselves. And I know I’m right because no one has been able to successfully monetize a social networking portal. And so my question is this:
Why can’t I choose my ads as a user?!
I think it’s a fair question and I haven’t seen any large social network attempt this approach. Let’s walk through how this could work practically: As a user, Facebook brings up a page on the screen the next time you sign in. This page would say something to the effect of,
“We at Facebook want to make sure that you have a great experience every time you log in, and we don’t want you to have to see ads that are irrelevant or annoying to you.” You then choose 1 or 2 verticals that interest you from a list on that page, categories like: auto, faith, finance, gaming, health, technology, travel, et al.”
Now all ads shown on Facebook would be user initiated and would have a much higher level of engagement since the user actually CHOSE the ads they are being shown. These ad units would increase dramatically in value since vertically themed ad networks are generating incredibly higher advertising rates than the other forms of interactive ad units. So hopefully these social networks will wake up realize that giving more control to their users will actually generate much more revenue.
The Social Media Ego
July 1, 2008 by OA Group · Leave a Comment
I was considering what the writing options were for this first real blog post, and I decided I wanted to discuss what is the root motivation behind all of these social media mediums such as: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. And since I am a fan of each of these services I believe I am well suited to self analyze why these companies are capturing our minds and dominating our daily lives.
How Much Do You Love Your Online Voice?
This post is not going to discuss the technical specifications of any of these ‘Web 2.0′ services, there are literally thousands of blogs that have daily dialogue in regard to the social media world. However I have found very little discussion about ‘Why’ these online applications have captivated our collective psyches.
As our culture has become more and more introspective, simply put, I believe we have fallen in love with ourselves. I think that if we could run on a beach into our own arms we would do it! And with this new found love of self we have come to the, probably mistaken, notion that we are all geniuses. And we all feel that our ‘deep thoughts’ need to be shared with the world. It’s interesting to have observed the evolution of social media, see below for the time line:
1. Dating sites
We first began with ‘looking’ for other people to spend real world time with, these individuals should have common interests with us and the end goal was: physical, emotional, etc.
2. Myspace
We then moved to online social networking with Myspace (a former dating site). Myspace made it easy to make ‘online’ friends, 99.9% of whom you will never meet (hopefully).
3. Facebook
For as innovative as Mysapce was, it was mainly a static site that profiled the interests you typed into it on the day you signed up. Facebook introduced an entirely new world of connectivity when they launched the ‘News Feed’ service. The News Feed service allowed for people to track when you upload new photos, shared a link or video, and changed your ‘status’.
4. Twitter/Friendfeed
Taking Facebook’s News Feed process, services like Twitter made it quick and easy to share literally every part of your online self. They allow for you to share links, blog posts, videos, bookmarks, and status updates – many times on a dynamic basis. The majority of users on these services don’t even pay attention to the other members of the community, each of these social media mechanisms are completely ‘self-centric’.
So do you see the evolution? Starting with individuals searching for others online, we have migrated all the way to users being satisfied with being the talker in one sided conversations. Our inherent selfishness and narcissism, combined with technological advances, have led us down this path of egocentricity. So where are we going next? I don’t know, but I can promise you that there will be millions of opinions crossing the web, and all of them will be right (at least in one person’s mind).
Obsessive Agency Group Companies
