Integrated Web Marketing with Other Media

Integrated Web Marketing was the focus of this morning’s final session at the Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing East 2007 Executive MindXChange. The formal title: Search and Cross-Channel Integration: How Search Marketing and Other Media Together Drive Results

Our presenters were Patrick Garrett and Kristine Segrist from Outrider and Steve Dennen from comScore. Unfortunately I didn’t get to stay for all of Steve’s presentation because I had to leave for the airport, but what I heard from him was really helpful and interesting.
Patrick and Kristine started with some diagnostic questions, as they sought to “bring sexy back to search.”

Are you integrating Search and PR?

They started with the story of rats overrunning a Taco Bell in New York City. Here’s the YouTube video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su0U37w2tws]

ABC.com ran Google ads on rats Taco Bell and related terms right away to take advantage of the situation and drive people, and about 36 hours later Taco Bell bought ads to tell its side of the story. So Taco Bell did the right thing, but was a little late. For crisis management, any time you have a statement you want to get before the public, you need to buy ads on related search terms.
Are you supporting major promotions via search?

For example, Nationwide mortage and Pizza Hut did Super Bowl ads featuring Kevin Federline and Jessica Simpson, respectively.

Here’s the Pizza Hut ad:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM6bRf8h95s]

And here’s the K-Fed Nationwide ad:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDJs2F1nesY]

Pizza Hut did a better job of promoting its ad, with a branded YouTube channel.

Is your search campaign capable of reacting to external factors?

Example was Sears home improvement having its ad bids on air conditioning keywords go up based on localized rising temperatures.

Are you measuring the impact of other media on search?

Kristine identified four keys to effective search integration

  1. Alignment
  2. Engagement
  3. Measurement & Analysis
  4. Search as a Diagnostic Tool

The Alignment case study was PMDD (severe PMS), in which a pharma company ran an unbranded campaign to raise awareness. They had viral user generated content site, while understandpmdd.com was the site for learning more, tracking daily moods, etc.

The viral site featured a video by the Veronicas, which also was available on YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Qq-OxpSw8]

More highlights to come…

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MSNBC Dropping Windows Media Player

MSNBC is moving to all Flash and away from Windows Media Player in its video delivery environment. That’s one of the most interesting tidbits from the just-completed session, and it comes from Kyoo Kim, VP of Sales for MSNBC.comThat’s actually quite stunning when you consider that the MS in MSNBC stands for Microsoft. But that’s what the marketers and customers are demanding/accepting.

In the end, customers really are royalty.

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Rich Media Marketing

Notes on Rich Media Marketing from the Frost & Sullivan session moderated by Chris Young of Doubleclick, which was entitled “Brand Building: Engaging Your Target Audience with Rich Media and Video.” Kyoo Kim from MSNBC ad sales, Barbara Cerf from New York Life, and Craig Oldham of Allstate Insurance were the panelists.

Two different formats typically used include pre-roll ads and “in banner,” an ad within a page. Barbara is testing on-page ads because she finds pre-roll irritating. Kyoo mentioned heavy.com, which gave him his “aha!” moment, when he saw that it is possible to create rich media flash players instead of annoying users with the pre-roll. Craig uses :15 pre-rolls instead of :30s. He hasn’t seen video ads do better than the “dancing clown” so far, so it’s hard to prove that creating content specifically for online channel advertising is worthwhile. Most pre-roll is currently re-purposed TV :30s.

Kyoo says ads need to be proportional; a :30 in front of a brief YouTube video doesn’t make sense, but the same ad in front of a long-form documentary is a huge value for the customer.
Check out Spotrunner.

Scale (reach and frequency) is harder to get on the web than through TV advertising. On TV, for instance, you can reach several million people at once. There isn’t enough inventory for reach and frequency. Craig doesn’t think reach and frequency matters; what he cares about is how many people in his target audience see the ad, and whether they take action. Reach and frequency is putting an old media paradigm on new media.

For the B2B market, this tonnage really doesn’t matter. As Rick Short said (he’s in the semiconductor market), being on the Today show is irrelevant for his business: there might be three viewers who could possibly buy his product. But he can go to an industry-focused web site and reach 15,000 likely customers, for much less money.

I asked whether the panelists are doing anything to create ads that people actually want to see, instead of the interruptive, intrusive ads that annoy. Chris said DoubleClick is contracted with Digital Broadcasting Group, which produces original webisodes. For example, THQ has a video game called StuntMan coming out soon, and DBG is producing 3-minute episodes of a guy going around doing crazy stunts that THQ is sponsoring and is syndicating around the web.

rich media marketing
Jeremiah Owyang asked about whether they have pursued consumers creating advertising (He’s blogging the conference here), and how the marketers are defining and measuring success. Doubleclick is pioneering something with webcams that lets users insert themselves into ads, and forward them to friends.

Craig says Allstate is exploring how to make car insurance something that people would even be interested enough in to want to create user-generated content.

Objectives for Rich Media Marketing could include brand awareness, direct response or, in the case of film marketing, having 8 weeks to create instant brand awareness before opening night.

Measures include click-through rates, percent of video viewed, brand awareness. For entertainment 19.2 seconds of a :30 is viewed; cars are about 21 seconds. Click-through alone isn’t enough, because people who see videos but don’t click through to the site have still seen the branding message.

Kyoo is interested in finding a way to measure “engagement” because he hears a lot about that from ad agencies. Jeremiah says he is developing a formula in the videoblogging space; hopefully he will post it.

Chris says he’s looking at who clicked on the ad, who sent it to a friend, interaction rate, time spent with the ad. For example, they had a Tiger Woods golf putting contest ad that had an 89-second time spent. The Odwalla Ken Jennings spelling contest, which I mentioned earlier here, is another one that likely has a long “time spent” factor.

I really like the panel format that Frost & Sullivan used for this, as compared with the overly interactive brainstorming groups like this one. Certainly there is value in both formats, but I would have liked to hear more from Craig from Facebook yesterday, and the format prevented it. We got to connect after the session, though, which was helpful. The panel format was still really interactive, with lots of good give and take, but we had one group conversation instead of six separate ones.

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Taking a Dive

At a meeting this morning there was some talk about Miss USA falling from her high-heeled perch during the Miss Universe competition.

We wondered whether it was getting lots of traffic on YouTube. I guess so…there are several versions, and this one has 171,000 views as of now.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=WQ_Iiz0moxk]

It’s also number one on the viral video chart, with more than 806,000 views.

I haven’t been watching, but I guess it was getting beaten to death on TV, too.

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