Advertising Archive

Product placement at its finest or a bit too cutting? – http://www.veet.com.au/

Pretty good 3 min video explaining the concept and outlining the undeniable benefits!

Thanks to Steve Clayton the the tip! 🙂

When you’ve just taken out insurance with a new provider, it’s bad enough to get an email with a subject line saying:

“Customer reminder: You (sic) home insurance is due for renewal in 15 days”

But when you get another one a few minutes later saying –

“Customer reminder: You (sic) home insurance is due for renewal in 5 days”

– alarm bells should definitely start ringing!

This happened to me this week but Swinton were swift to rectify the problem with yet another email with a subject line:

“We’re sorry…”

The emails content was perfect:

“We are very sorry but we have made a mistake in sending you an email informing
you that your home insurance is due for renewal.  This email has been sent to
you accidentally by an over enthusiastic member of our team.  Please ignore this
and we are sorry for any misunderstanding this has caused.

If you do have Home Insurance with Swinton, please refer to your policy
documentation or local branch for details of your exact renewal date and ignore
the email that has been sent in error.

Yours sincerely,

The Swinton Team”

Nice customer service Swinton!

Just goes to demonstrate the effectiveness of putting your hands up, admitting your wrong with a bit of humour, and setting your customers expectations that they have nothing to action or worry about! 🙂

Has to be some of the best email marketing around!

Wonder what the click-through-rate on that is?!

Further to my Woolworths Eulogy a couple weeks back, I was passing a store in Putney which was all boarded up with signs about refunds.

Obviously if all the stores are now closed, there’s nowhere to turn if you bought something in the “Woolrush” and want to exchange or refund it!

There is a helpline number – 0844 8117 112 – if you found something dodgy in your pick ‘n’ mix. 🙂

I wonder how much the www.woolworths.co.uk domain name is worth though?

How much would you pay for it?

Update: 1pm GMT – It appears there is another group on FB – Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!(Official petition to Facebook) – TechCrunch picked it up in 2007 so why-oh-why it’s hit the headlines again I don’t know!

Original post below:

BBC Radio Five Live’s Victoria Derbyshire has given quite a bit of airtime this morning to a new Facebook Group – Breast feeding is not a crime (Facebook bans breast feeding pictures)

Shoehorned in between coverage of the New Years Honours List and the bombings in Bilbao, the coverage has been greeted with mixed emotion by people berating Facebook for seemingly condemning what many see as a natural act, and those who can’t see what all the fuss is about.

Facebook has quite rightly banned photos of mothers breastfeeding where some or part of the nipple has been exposed because it violates their terms and conditions of service.

Those Ts & Cs are there for a reason and no one calling into Victoria’s show raised the issue of advertising!

It’s not that Facebook thinks that breast feeding is disgusting and somehow not worthy of parading on its pages, but it’s partly because advertisers don’t necessarily want their messages displayed next to images of nudity – what every form it might take.

Check out the group for some….erm……titillation….there are some weird and whacky comments, including one television company taking the opportunity to canvass for participants for a totally unrelated documentary.

One commenter from Australia says: “ITS YOUR FACE BOOK, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO PUT THE PHOTOS ON. THATS AS FAR AS IT GOES!!!!”

Actually it’s not just anyone’s Facebook and they have firm and decent reasons for policing images and making sure they keep within their guidelines.

Happy New Year! 🙂

P.S. At the time of writing the group had 1,156 members.

A survey by Intel has indicated women in the US would rather abstain from sex for two weeks than lose their access to the web!

In the “Internet Reliance in Today’s Economy” survey conducted by Harris Interactive:

· 65% of adults say they can’t exist without the net

· 71% say internet enabled devices like mobile phones, laptops and netbooks are important for immediate access to information

· 46% of woman but only 30% of men would give up sex for two weeks to keep their access

· Cable TV, dining out and gym membership all rank below the internet as “must haves” in this day and age

Like mobile phones, I can’t quite remember how we all managed without the internet, and I still can’t understand how people today can’t get into it or use it to the max.

But abstaining from sex!?!

Not sure Tim Berners-Lee knew he’d invented a form of birth control! 🙂

There’s a very cool ad running on MSN.co.uk today for Paramount’s Madagascar 2 Movie

Called a “SideKick” – the user clicks on the ad to see more and the whole page shifts left to reveal a choice of 3 preview clips and a game.

You can also win a WII so check it out at www.MSN.co.uk

I’m now 3 days in to a month-long stint at home in London and it’s very nice to be back!

Despite the leg-pulling about me having been “on holiday” for the past few weeks, I think most people understand it’s not all parties and airmiles! 🙂

Waking up in a Westin for me normally means reaching over and switching on the lappy and checking mail at 7am – pretty much doing the same thing last thing at night too.

Certainly not complaining though. I have a great job and get to do awesome things, meet amazing people in incredible places!

So where have I been?

Nick Drew of Search & Display fame at SMX London

Well on Wednesday 5th of November I was at SMX London boarding a plane that night for Tel Aviv to speak at the Rosh Pina Digital Festival – you can check out some photos here and here on our adCenter Facebook Page!

Transport from the festival back to the hotel!

I’d been invited to speak by the awesome Lior Zoref from our Microsoft Israel office.

He has a blog: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/liorz/default.aspx and although it’s mostly in Hebrew, if you don’t speak the language just watch one of his videos!

The enthusiasm is infectious even if you can’t understand what he’s saying all the time!

Check out video with Robert Scoble! Twitter’s sucked his brain!

His and the team’s hospitality while I was there was very friendly and I’ll definitely be back!

After a few days there it was back to London and then 18 hours later off to PubCon in Las Vegas where the week was a blur of learning, blogging, meeting and the odd beer thrown in for good measure!

One of the updates from our team was the launch of the FB Page and the fact I was live tweeting from: http://twitter.com/adcenterblog – so do become a fan and follow us too! 

A Young lady does a spot of welding at Search Bash!

After a week in Redmond in Seattle to catch up with some of the guys I’m back now till 18th December when I fly back to spend Christmas in Seattle with Ashley’s family!

Helluva trip but got a lot done although…………..I still have a lot to do…………..

Click………..

 Won’t make it to SES Chicago this year. 🙁

I’ve done so much travelling in 2008 I’m hanging up my noise-cancelling headphones and staying in Blighty for December – right up until I fly to Seattle for Christmas that is!

One fellow who will be there is Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR. Greg is one of the nicest men in search. His warm and steady charm creates the perfect atmosphere to teach what can initially be quite a complicated – and dry! – form of marketing.

He’ll be giving the SEM Master Class for marketers new to the channel on the second day of the conference.

As someone who has been in the industry for eight years, I sometimes find it difficult to articulate the basics from a beginner’s standpoint, so I caught up with Greg in Vegas to ask three very simple questions…..

MelC – With the economy in such turmoil right now, I guess you’d have to work harder to encourage marketers to invest in a new channel. So how would you go about persuading newcomers to SEM that their time and energy will be well spent?

GJ – A recession is both a challenge and an opportunity.  The challenge is obvious: Marketers need to do more with less.  But the opportunity to is persuade marketers that investing in a new channel or technique will increase their marketing ROI.  For example, I recently spoke at the 2008 PRSA International Conference in Detroit. 

My topic was: What’s the ROI on Your Press Release?  And I shared some case studies of press releases that generated a measurable ROI. This includes optimized press releases that generated $200 million in qualified leads for Symmetricom’s chip-scale atomic clocks, more than $2.5 million in ticket sales for Southwest Airlines, and almost 1.3 million searches for “florists” on SuperPages.com. 

I also explained how combining blog outreach with press release optimization generated a record 450,000 unique visitors to The Christian Science Monitor, more than 88,000 entries into Parents magazine’s cutest kid in America photo contest, and a record 1,100 attendees to the Wharton Economic Summit. 

The most effective way to persuade newcomers to SEM that their time and energy will be well spent is to show them the money.

 
MelC – Getting started is always a tad daunting so what advice do you have for folks taking their first steps in search?

GJ – Start by taking baby steps. 

You need to build a case that the ROI of search engine marketing (SEM) is significant.  So, start with a modest pay-per-click advertising campaign on Google, Yahoo! and  Microsoft adCenter. 

You’ll see measurable results in a month.  That can be leveraged to build the case for investing in search engine optimization (SEO), which may take a couple of months before you see a measurable ROI.  Then, you can build the case for press release optimization, blog optimization, and video optimization. 

But for all of these steps in search, measure results in website traffic, lead generation or online sales.  Ranking #1 may feel good, but it doesn’t make the cash register ring.

MelC – Once your campaign is live, what three things should one look out for, and concentrate on, in order to get the very best return on investment?

GJ – The first thing you should look out for is “clicks.”  How many clicks did I get? 

But, in order to get the very best ROI you need to concentrate on conversions.  What percentage of my clicks converted to leads or sales? 

Then, you need to move to ROI.  Where do I get the biggest bang for my bucks? 

Once you know which tactics or terms are generating conversions cost-effectively you can manage your entire marketing mix — from PPC ads, to SEO programs, to PR campaigns.

MelC – Thanks Greg and good luck in Chicago!