Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

October 23, 2012 · 9:34 am

When Is A Medium Not A Medium?

An interesting piece of research from the folks at Borrell Associates this morning that concerns how small and medium businesses are using digital channels.  Given that nearly every local business seems to have a website, I wasn’t surprised to read that over half of SMB online marketing dollars are spent supporting what the survey calls “web presence.”  This is their site design and maintenance, hosting, as well as their social media management.  What I hadn’t thought about was the study’s conclusions as summed up in this post:

Digital advertising is yielding the spotlight to digital services. The emerging lesson, concludes the study, is that the Internet is actually not much of an advertising medium after all.

That was an “ah-ha!” moment for me.  Then again, I can’t remember the last time I clicked on a web banner and unless I’m searching with an intent to buy immediately (as opposed to just conducting research), I generally ignore the PPC ads that seem to surround everything.  As it turns out the average U.S. small/medium business spends $17,000 on online services, compared with $6,800 on online advertising, hence the conclusion about it not being a medium.  Then again, there is a big division even within this group since those with fewer than 50 employees will spend less than $500 a year, while a mid-size business with more than 50 employees will spend an average of $63,000.  The little guys spend a higher percentage of their budgets on web hosting and their site (make sense since this is the one indispensable element in my opinion) as well as email and SEO (getting found is always important!).  Once the budgets grow the companies can afford to branch out into other areas (blog management, analytics, etc.).

The report concludes by noting that, as the web becomes more of a basic marketing tool for business, the importance of online support services will grow as well. The midsize and larger companies are likely to internalize services that they once contracted out. Those larger companies will either assign SEO and social media management tasks to existing staff, or hire fulltime experts in digital marketing

I’ve seen that occur with some companies for which I’ve worked.  Here on the screed we probably don’t think about the interwebs as a service-driven space and probably spend too much time on it as a medium   I’m going to rethink that based on this study since many of the folks who contact me fit the small and medium business category.  What do you think?

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October 18, 2012 · 10:16 am

Gamifying The News

Here is an interesting item that made its way to my email box.  A researcher put together an online game to expose college students to news via a virtual social gaming environment.  Here is the premise:

More than 65 percent of Americans younger than 30 utilize the Internet as their main source for national and international news, according to the Pew Research Center. However, most young adults do not consciously seek out news online, but rather are exposed to it incidentally while searching for other information or doing non-news-related activities, such as visiting social networking sites or checking their email. Now, interdisciplinary researchers at the University of Missouri have created an Internet game that promotes school athletic spirit while engaging young people with the news.

In her previous research, Borchuluun Yadamsuren, a researcher in the MU School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, found that Internet users often are exposed to news through “serendipitous discovery” rather than deliberate consumption. Young people are especially likely to be “news encounterers” who find news incidentally while surfing the Internet for different reasons, she says.  “If we can develop a strategy to post stories or links from credible sources in locations young adults normally use, such as on Facebook or gaming sites, we can hopefully attract them to news media.”

So enquiring minds may want to know but they’re not very proactive in finding out, I guess.  The results were encouraging enough that the project is continuing on and I’m thinking we’ll see it as a full-fledged platform of some sort down the road.  What is really going on is a very basic principle of marketing – speak with (not at)  people in a meaningful way.  Rewarding them either psychically or financially for accomplishing a task can further engagement.  Think about what went on after the presidential debate.  While a lot of people watched, I suspect a lot more found out about the key moments through posts their friends put up on social media (the “binders full of women” meme took hold within hours).  Gamification techniques reinforce the discovery process.

Makes sense to me.  How about to you?  How can you use this idea in your brand’s business?

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October 16, 2012 · 10:02 am

Are Brands As Bad As Politicians?

There’s another presidential debate this evening so I’ve got politics on my mind.  While the debates are focal points, the entire campaign season (a way too long season IMHO) has been filled with charges of factual distortion or outright lying by one candidate or another.  There are numerous non-partisan fact-checking sites so getting at the truth (or nearer to it anyway) isn’t as hard as one might think.  What the entire process does call into question, however, is how willing most of the participants are to stretch the truth, to use selective data points while ignoring others that don’t help them, or to fabricate allegedly factual statements out of whole cloth.

The unfortunate reality is that politicians aren’t alone in this.  In fact, one could say that they’re no worse than many marketers.  There is an interesting column this morning in a marketing blog that asks if CMO’s know when they’re lying:

As consumers’ ability and interest in monitoring corporate behavior intensifies, major brands like McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, and Coca-Cola are clearly injecting corporate-social-responsibility messages into marketing platforms as never before.  Trouble is, telling the truth has never been a marketer’s strong suit. In fact, we are still shaking our heads at how distorted some of these hybridized half-pitches, half-aren’t-we-a-good-company messages are.

No one over the age of 10 thinks french fries or sugary drinks are good for you so selling them with a nutrition message is just wrong.  If you saw a message like that you’d scoff.  But  how many marketers knowingly tell half-truths that are less apparent to the consumer?  No, I don’t expect that any brand will state “this is an OK product that will probably fall apart in a year but what do you want for a third of what you’d pay for the best?”.  However, how many food products add “natural” to the label to imply that an otherwise non-nutritious box of cereal is wholesome?  How many bad home loans were written on terms the lender knew the buyer was unable to afford by making it seem as if they could?  I’m sure you could add a few examples here.

We’re quick to criticize politicians (you can tell he’s lying because his lips are moving).  It might not be a bad thing to think about glass houses while we do so.

Thoughts?

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