I love the UPS-sponsored PopURLs Brown Edition, a dashboard of business news. The site is built by PopURLs on top of the site’s system of filtering and aggregating web content. What I love even more than the PopURLs Brown Edition destination site: All of the site’s value is syndicated into ad units, like these on Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop. I don’t need to click on the banners to appreciate the value UPS is bringing to me.
Intel-sponsored PopURLs Blue Edition for Enterprise IT relaunched with a new look (the Intel multimedia assets and whitepapers have moved to belly-band positions). Check it out!
In the latest extension of its Epsonality campaign, which recommends printer models based on personal traits and work habits, Epson has teamed up with PopURLs on an intelligent RSS feed for DIYers, crafters, photographers, entrepreneurs and life hackers: the Epsonality edition of PopURLs.
The team at PopURLs points their technology at editorial content in those categories from across the web, and Epson sponsors a site and feed that caters to the informational needs of its core customer segments.
(Credits: Thomas Marban at PopURLs; Jordan Kretchmer, Ed Cotton, Shelly Hughes, Amy Rodier, Sankar Patel, Jordanna Howard, and Caroline Lewis at Butler Shine; and Leona Laurie, Bernie Albers, Josh Mattison and Mark Chu-Cheong at FM.)
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.
At a conference earlier this week, Intel’s David Veneski presented stats on Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLS Blue Edition for Enterprise IT. In May, visitors to the site, on average, were more than 100% likely to interact with content assets, clicking on headlines in order to read full stories. If the goal is to build something your customers want, the rate of active engagement is a great proxy for performance. In this case, Intel aced it.
I spoke at the Ascentium PDX onference, too. Here are some photos posted to Flickr.
“Now [PopURLs founder] Marban has partnered with Intel to create one of the most interesting ad campaigns I’ve seen in awhile, Blue.PopURLs.com. The site is a single page aggregator about hot enterprise IT news. Calm down, I know enterprise IT is boring — but the site is cool…..”
“The Intel partnership in particular is remarkable as a simple way for advertisers to deliver value to audiences in exchange for a little bit of mindshare. Next to the top enterprise software stories from around the web, you’ll find links to Intel white papers and blogs.”
I also love the disclosure attached to the post. FM manages advertising for ReadWriteWeb and Intel’s ads have been running on the site, but Marshall says he notices the campaign only after seeing Intel’s ads on another FM site, Boing Boing.
“Disclosure: The Blue ad campaign is being run through FM publishing, who also sells ads here on RWW. I just found the site through an FM ad on BoingBoing and thought it was worth writing up.”
Advertising works in mysterious ways.
Credits: The people behind this project include Thomas Marban at PopURLs; David Veneski at Intel; Josh Mattison and Jason Ratner at FM.
Intel has underwritten the launch of a version of PopURLs dedicated to enterprise IT content, PopURLs Blue. Another great example of Intel’s strategy to sponsor product enhancements at existing third-party brands that already reach their customers, like the launch of Digg Images, Digg’s Arc visualization widget, and a better music experience for My Space members.
