“Search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier has upped its estimates for search ad spending this year. The company now expects spending to increase between 15 and 20 percent, up from its earlier estimates of 10 to 15 percent growth, in part due to the economic recovery. By contrast, Efficient Frontier says search ad spending increased six percent in 2009.”
In Q4 2009 Google added to its enormous market-share lead:
“That was a shift from previous reports, which had indicated that Google was losing ground to Bing. Efficient Frontier says Google’s share of overall search ad spending increased to 74.5 percent from 73.9 percent during the previous quarter. Bing’s share, meanwhile, shrunk to 5.1 percent from 5.3 percent.”
Mashable reports on Chitika’s new study of the media consumption habits of 33 million web users in September 2009. One finding: Traffic that comes to your site from Facebook, Digg or Yahoo is more likely to become loyal traffic than traffic from Google, Bing or Twitter.
BusinessWeek’s piece on the “Twitter ecosystem” includes ExecTweets, a project sponsored by Microsoft and pulled together with the help of Twitter, Universal McCann and FM.
“Big advertisers are keen to get their message in front of certain Twitter niche groups, such as business executives. Microsoft is sponsoring Exectweets, a site that streams in Twitter musings from business leaders including Virgin Chairman Richard Branson and AOL co-founder Steve Case (pictured). The site was created by Federated Media, which shares revenue from Exectweets with Twitter.”
Interbrand’s Best 100 Global Brands (see Ad Age) puts Coke in the #1 spot again this year. Microsoft slid one position, from #2 to #3. Big upward movers were Google (+43%), Apple (+24), and Amazon (+19). BlackBerry broke onto the list for the first time at #73.
It’s great when advertising drives sales growth that you can attribute back to a particular campaign, such as Jones Soda’s Graffiti drawing contest, which they called out in the companys Q2 2008 earning’s call:
“We ran two very targeted online My Jones programs on Facebook’s Graffiti application along with the very popular I Can Has Cheezburger site. These programs along with increased awareness of My Jones drove our online sales to double versus the same period a year ago.”
But often marketing programs work with more subtlety, building brand preference that ultimately motivates customers to buy products (and, if done exceptionally well, to buy those products at a premium price over competitive wares) even though all the transactions don’t occur as impulse buys triggered by banner ads or 1-800 phone numbers. Sometimes the best marketing is hard to measure.
Microsoft’s recent TV commercial for Windows Vista got me thinking about measurement. The spot, starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, is pretty funny, but one might argue that it’s hard to see how it will drive sales or bolster confidence in the Windows Vista brand among computer users. In fact, much of the punditry is panning it (see a round up at Techdirt). Perhaps Microsoft itself has doubts; company representatives are calling reporters to explain the campaign. And Microsoft is hiring 155 Windows Vista “gurus” to deploy in Best Buy, Circuit City and other retail stores to do what the advertising may not — close the deal.
If we had a cost-per-guru scale, where naturally-occurring brand evangelists each added a point and paid gurus each subtracted one, Microsoft would start this campaign with a negative 155.
On the flip side, marketers that take a more conversational approach to advertising can launch campaigns in positive territory on the “CPG” gauge. I’ve posted a few examples here at ChasNote of conversational marketing programs that FM has played a role in. The Luvs unit of P&G, which built an ad campaign around a parenting-content site called TheMomSpeak, came out of the gates with a positive 1, when online retailer Momma’s Jewels plugged the site in its own customers newsletter. Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLs, the Blue Edition sparked 59 blog reactions, all positive as far as I can tell, according to Technorati. Or the 222 reactions to American Express’s OPEN Forum blog, which licenses content from leading small business authors.
I know, I know. I’m comparing apples to kiwis, maybe fish to bicycles. First off, some of those blog reactions may come from a single blogger, so it wouldn’t be fair to give Intel +59 or Amex +222. And maybe some negative sentiments are expressed in posts where I don’t read the language. There’s a difference, too, between a blogger writing a post and pointing his or her readers to a brand, and a guru making a 40-hour-a-week job of evangelizing a brand. Finally, it’s not an indictment of your advertising creative to also have a smart and aggressive retail strategy (like Microsoft’s Vista gurus or Apple’s “genius bar” staffers) or paid employees who share the gospel from public blogs (like GM’s or Sun’s). Hey, my cost-per-guru metric is still in beta!
But our industry would benefit from a deeper look at the amplification effect (or attenuation effect, as the case may be) initiated by advertising. The data is there; we just need to make better sense of it.
Caveats, disclosures and apologies:
FM, my employer, helped facilitate and received payment for the Jones Soda, P&G, Intel and American Express campaigns mentioned above. We have no formal relationship with Jerry Seinfeld.
One noteworthy FM campaign that felt the wrath of negative gurus is written up (defensively, my critics tell me) here.
Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends has launched a new section called the Small Business Success Center, sponsored by Microsoft Windows Vista. The body of the site is editorial content for business owners written by Anita, Harry McKraken (Technologizer), Ed Bott (Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise) and others. Adjacent to the editorial content, Microsoft supplies business case studies, technology FAQs and other resources.
Here’s my entry in Graffiti’s MUSIC! drawing contest, sponsored by Microsoft and linked to the social media music site CrowdFire, also sponsored by Microsoft. When you submit your drawing, you can immediately upload it to CrowdFire for a chance to win goodies.
Cut me some slack, I drew that with my thumb on my Mac’s trackpad.
Hey, it’s my site and I’m allowed to write snarky headlines.
Officially the news is this, as reported by Bloomberg: eMarketer plans to cut its 2008 and 2009 year-over-year growth forecasts for online advertising by a few more points, which currently stand at 23% and 16%, respectively.
“Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said for the first time last month that the company, the biggest seller of online ads, faces a more challenging economic environment. Google’s ads tied to Internet search results are still faring better than much of the graphical banner ads sold by companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft.”
I have no doubt that the online advertising market, across the board, will feel the pain of the broader recession. I also agree that Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL will feel greater pain than Google. But it’s not because Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — which sell mostly graphical banners instead of text ads — are used by advertisers for online brand-building, and brand advertising suffers more on economic downturns.
While the second part of that sentence is true, the first part isn’t. Most marketers buy low cost graphical banners on Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL for the same reason they buy text ads from Google, to drive clicks and other DR activities. Because they are less efficient DR vehicles than Google, they’ll be cut from plans first. The online publishers that have spent recent years working with advertisers on relevant, high-value, integrated sponsorships (rather than chasing Google) are going to fare better — in relative terms — than those three portals.
“In conjunction with the launch CrowdFire, the companies have announced that several kiosks will be placed at the upcoming Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco, Calif. on Aug. 22-24, where attendees will be able to produce and upload their own video, audio and text accounts of the events, in what will serve as a mass test run for the new site. During the event, video screens will display a real time ‘mashup’ of the crowd-produced content.”
