MarketingSherpa Blog

While we wait for the Federal Trade Commission to release its updated testimonials and endorsement guidelines, I’ve been talking to several experts to get a better idea of what the revisions might mean.

Last week, I spoke with Todd Harrison, Partner, Venable LLP, who focuses his practice on consumer protection agencies’ rules and regulations on drugs, foods, dietary supplements and other products.

Harrison went over situations where an advertiser might have to disclose more information, or remove certain claims, to be within the FTC’s proposed guidelines. Other practices might be explicitly prohibited altogether. One method in particular stood out to me: flogging.

‘Flogs,’ or fake blogs, are set up by companies or affiliates to look like independent websites, but in fact only promote a company’s products. There are variations on this theme with sites posing as product review sites and news sites. All the content — the articles, the comments, the ratings — is false.

“They’re not real testimonials, but they’re representing real testimonials,” Harrison says.  “The FTC is probably going to make it clear that you can’t have ‘flogs’…Even under existing law, those material connections are supposed to be disclosed.”

Harrison mentions that some companies may have affiliates that are flogging without the companies’ knowledge. They might be selling products through an affiliate network that attracts unscrupulous sellers and have no idea.

My suggestion is that marketers to take a look at their affiliates’ websites and tactics to make sure that they’re not deceptive or unsavory. If you use an affiliate network, contact its administrators. A simple checkup should help ensure that you’re providing your customers with an honest experience, and that you won’t attract any unnecessary attention from the FTC.

Marketing has undoubtedly benefited from the control and measurability of online channels. Teams can use search ads, email and websites to test and tweak their way to astounding returns on investment. But has this come at a cost in creative license?

Marketing requires creativity. All those commercials, direct mail pieces, and landing pages have to be written and designed. However, tests often dictate their ultimate layouts and content. Is this trend brining us toward formulaic, uncreative marketing?

These questions arose during a recent conversation I had with Brian Maynard, Director, Brand Marketing, Jenn-Air & KitchenAid. They were an aside to a conversation we were having on a KitchenAid promotion strategy (full article coming soon).

“As we get better at measuring marketing,” Maynard says, “I fear a bit that in the future, unless you show a positive ROI on every single tiny effort, that you won’t be bold. You won’t step out and do something that’s exciting and innovative because you cannot prove that it works.”

Maynard also noted that he worries that marketing could become like factory work, where switches are thrown and 3,000 more units are sold. That kind of environment would not be conducive to risk taking and creative thought.

“The best marketing ideas have come from people who take a chance,” he says.

Where do you stand? Have you lost some creative license since the Internet’s arrival? Or does measurement simply guide your decisions, rather than make them for you? Let us know in the comments…

National brand marketers are in a challenging position as the power of localized marketing shows positive results. Some marketers need to reach large audiences through nationwide advertising, which makes it hard to localize the ads.

Alistair Goodman, CEO, 1020 Placecast, and his team strive to overcome this challenge–particularly for driving traffic to nearby brick-and-mortar stores. They help marketers run campaigns that are able to detect a consumer’s location and customize the ads to include localized elements.

“An advertiser can run a national campaign but actually create a large amount of local relevance,” Goodman says.

When building a campaign, Goodman’s team first asks marketers for:
o A list of the physical store addresses to which they want to drive traffic
o A profile of their target audience
o The goals of the campaign

This information helps narrow down the exact location of the campaign’s target audience, and helps guide the design of the localized ad. The ad will likely have some consistent elements — such as a product image — and some interchangeable elements — such as a city name, local imagery, or the address of a nearby location.

Knowing which regions to target, the team then finds publishers that have localized content for those regions.

“We create a network of publishers that have what we call location-specific content, where we can apply our approach to targeting,” Goodman says.

These publishers might be local classified, news or events websites. Other publishers, such as travel, weather, and real estate sites, operate nationally but deliver localized content. Visitors to these sites identify themselves as either residing in or interested in certain areas.

Goodman’s team recently worked with Avis Rent A Car to drive people to Avis’ off-airport locations. They were able to create a national campaign that connected ad viewers with the nearest Avis center.

The ads they displayed on regular websites encouraged viewers to click to see a map or book a car. The ads they displayed on mobile websites encouraged viewers to click to call the nearest Avis center.

The team did A/B testing of the localized ads vs. non-localized ads. They saw a 50% higher clickthrough rate on the customized Web ads and a 124% higher click-to-call rate on the customized mobile ads, Goodman says.

“When you’re able to develop a relevant message, you’re able to achieve much stronger results.”

We’re planning several studies about social media marketing, and we’d like your help targeting our research on the information you really need.

We’ve set up an online form to collect your questions about social media. Let us know if you’ve got questions about social media strategy in general, or questions about specific social channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace.

Here’s the link:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/174250/smq

NOTE: This isn’t a formal survey that’s going to require a lot of your time. It’s a just blank field where you can supply as many questions or topic suggestions as you’d like.

Thanks for your input!

We’ve had a couple of great search marketing articles come through the pipeline recently, and we have one more this week on the way. Since our articles are available for one week before being added to our membership library, I thought I’d highlight a few key points while our readers can still peruse the pieces for free.

Last Tuesday, we featured Dan Tate, COO, The Concrete Network, and his team’s video SEO strategy. The team has uploaded over 220 short videos about concrete design to YouTube. The videos are:
o Branded
o High quality
o Generally less than 5 minutes

Tate’s team optimizes the videos’ metadata, adds them to relevant pages on ConcreteNetwork.com, and hosts them on their YouTube channel. Many of the videos show up in Google’s universal search results for broad phrases such as “concrete pool decks,” giving the team multiple links on the results page.

The videos capture thousands of views daily, have about a 17.9% clickthrough rate, and have about a 12% conversion rate among those who clickthrough to the site. That’s pretty amazing for not spending one dollar on advertising! (Details are in the article here)

Today, we published an article featuring Sean Reardon, Director, Sales and Marketing, The Liberty Hotel, and his team’s efforts to enhance their Google Maps result. The Boston luxury hotel opened about two years ago. Around that time, the team checked their result in the local search engine and noticed that it had the wrong address. Yikes!

The team jumped into action to take ownership of the result through Google’s Local Business Center and fix the address. They also started adding loads of descriptive content and pictures.

After building up their result, the team noticed that they were ranking high in local searches for terms such as “Boston hotels,” and increased their traffic from Google Maps by several thousand percent.  (Details are in the article here)

The two campaigns mentioned above are great examples of the low-cost, high-effort nature of SEO. Natural search often involves a little research, a little cash investment, and a heaping load of elbow grease–but it can pay off with time.

Lastly, keep an eye on our business-to-consumer newsletter this week, as we will feature Jennifer Brady, Director of Marketing, UMassOnline, and her team’s PPC strategy. Brady’s team started with a single generic landing page, expanded into dozens of search-specific pages, and used multivariate testing to further strengthen results. Their cost-per-lead plummeted and their per-month lead volume shot up over 80%.

I opened my Sunday newspaper this weekend and noticed an unusual ad stuffed among the many circulars. The ad was a full-sized grocery bag, and it was anything but subtle.

Office Max’s promotion runs from Aug. 16 to Aug. 22 and gives shoppers 20% off everything they can squeeze into the brown bag. If you’re thinking how best to fit a new office chair into the bag–don’t worry. All furniture qualifies for the discount, according to the small print. Computers, printers, and a few other items are among the unfortunate few that do not qualify.

I was surprised at the style and creativity of the ad. The bulky brown paper certainly stood out from the rest of the Sunday circulars, and the design looks good. There’s even a pattern down the side instead of the usual blank brown space:

Have any marketers reading this tried something similar? Or have you seen other companies try something similar in the past? Let us know in the comments…

Referrals from friends are a strong influence on how teens and tweens learn about “new brands and cool new stuff,” according to survey results released last week by Pangea Media.

Pangea is an entertainment an online advertising company that operates a network of quiz-related websites. The survey received 2,396 responses, and allowed for multiple selections when asking “How do you find out about new brands and cool new stuff?” The results:

o 76.4 % friends
o 75.5% stores
o 56.8% television commercials
o 52.6% magazine ads
o 39.8% online ads
o 35.0% Web/search engines
o 27.7% television shows

The results from asking how they “learn about new stuff” online (only one answer could be given):

o 27% ads in search engines
o 24% social networking sites
o 21% when friends email or IM
o 15% pop-up ads
o 13% trusted website

The results underscore that one of the best ways to earn your brand the elusive “cool factor” among consumers age 10 to 19 is have your brand referred to them by a friend. Stores are another powerful place to reach this demographic, even more so than any type of advertising queried, according to the survey.

Every once in a while I hear about a marketing promotion gone horribly wrong. When I first heard about a 1956 Reader’s Digest campaign that involved pennies, I thought it was another marketer’s tale of woe.

The late Walter H. Weintz, a direct mail pioneer and the circulation director at Reader’s Digest in the 50s, mailed 100 million pennies as part of a subscription campaign. The pennies were mailed with a letter encouraging recipients to mail back one penny as a down payment on a subscription, according to the New York Times article linked above.

Here’s what happened, according to this random fact book:

“The magazine planned to send out 50 million letters, which meant they needed 100 million coins–enough to deplete the entire New York area of pennies. The U.S. Mint intervened, forcing Reader’s Digest to make quick arrangements to ship in 60 million more pennies from all over the country. Then, when the company finally got all the pennies it needed, it stored them all in one room–and the floor collapsed under the weight.”

Sounds like a total disaster right? Not exactly. The promotion drew a record number of responses.

“That mailing, along with other direct marketing campaigns that Mr. Weintz conceived, was credited in large part for raising the magazine’s circulation” from about 4.5 million in 1948 to over 12 million in 1959, according to the New York Times.

Weintz took a big risk on that campaign, and it paid off big time. It goes to show that marketing far out on a limb can yield the best fruit–but only if the branch doesn’t break under your feet.

Well over half of marketers report that they’re using strategies that emphasize value propositions–such as sales, coupons and discounts–to pull through the down economy. The data comes from a collaborative survey from LinkedIn and Harris Interactive, published last week.

The survey queried 1,015 advertisers between June 22 and June 30, and 2,025 adult consumers between June 24 and June 26, to get both groups’ opinions on ad effectiveness. You can read the full release here.

Three in five advertisers (61%) say they are using a value proposition strategy and almost three in five consumers (57%) say that the strategy is working ‘very well’ or ‘well’ to help marketers sell.

From the charts below, empathetic messaging was the second most reported strategy used by marketers to address the economic crisis at 39%, and 24% of consumers say the strategy is effective.

Interestingly only 18% of marketers report using a ‘luxuries for less’ strategy, while 34% of consumers say that it works ‘very well’ or ‘well’ to help sell products. This disconnect could be due to a low number of luxury product marketers in the survey–or it could be a genuine disconnect between what consumers say they want and what advertisers are giving them.

Take a look at the survey’s results to see if you are using any types of messaging or tactics that are being reported to be less effective than others. You might just be able to make a few tweaks to your efforts to boost performance.

I recently had a conversation with Gordon Borrell, CEO, Borrell Associates, Inc., in which he made some startling predictions for the future of several advertising markets. Borrell’s team specializes in tracking local advertising and reporting how much advertisers are spending in a channel by region.

The most surprising prediction Borrell shared is that spending on direct mail will decline 38% over the next five years. Marketers spent about $48 billion on direct mail last year, Borrell says. While that size might suggest stability, Borrell says that it is actually an indication that the platform is in line for a mighty fall.

“When something grows really fast and gets up to a high level, and there’s a disrupter in the market place, some other technology that provides pretty much the same level of service but in a more efficient way, then you can expect there to be a roller coaster decline.”

That disruptor is Internet marketing in general, and email marketing in particular, Borrell says. Email is an affordable way to send personalized and targeted messages, and the technology continues to improve.

Also, recent reports that the United States Postal Service is considering eliminating Saturday service is contributing to his team’s prediction, Borrell says.

“If the day they cut is Saturday, then that really hurts direct mail. Marketers love to get pieces into homes on Friday and Saturday, because that’s when the buying is done in households.”

Borrell and his team base their predictions, in part, on a disruption model. They analyze what happened to markets of the past when disrupted by a new technology, and apply those lessons to current events.

Has your team cut direct mail this year? Or do you plan to in the next five years? Let us know in the comments…