Agencies have known that the days of a monolithic creative idea are dead, spending 99% of the pot on one idea, was ironically, how the clients were used to working….all your eggs in one basket, anyone? It’s taken a while, and a lot of work from digital agencies and industry folk such as Mark Earls, for clients to catch up.
The fact is, digital work is far harder to pre-test than more traditional work because it often involves a new set of behaviours and a deeper, more active experience that the effect of which is much harder to gauge if it’s on a smaller scale. How do you test if a viral is viral on a small sample? How would Whopper Sacrifice work if you disabled its ‘pass-on’ mechanic?
Brands who are doing digital best such as Burger King, Penguin Books and Diesel are au fait with creating many cheap, scalable ideas and launching them all, conscious that not all of them will stick. At £50,000 a pop, you could launch 4 ideas for the cost of a TV ad production budget or 4 full page inserts in the nationals.
You light 4 fires, you pour petrol on the ones that take, and then you remember what works for next year
This is the year you must undersand the impact of Social Media, Dominos did one of the best campaigns I have seen in awhile and man did it change their brand, customer relationship and increase sales – you can check it all out on You Tube, but remember these days “hurry up” step back and re-evaluate your companies brand perception and get digital asap before it leaves you and your company behind, stay focussed and if you ever need help drop me a line – Gino
Last month we pondered how Google search results can harm brands. Now Google’s aiming to help top brands surface at the top of its rankings.
One catch: before Google can be a brand’s best friend, the brand must first cozy up to DoubleClick.
When Google purchased DoubleClick for a little over $3 billion in 2007, it was seen as a strategic move to give the search giant new capabilities and influence in online advertising. It didn’t hurt that it was also a competitively smart salvo against rival Microsoft.
Ever since the acquisition, Google has honed DoubleClick and made it a more integrated service. Now Google is offering top brand advertisers the ability to cherrypick the top 1,000 largest sites on the web for their ads to run.
By using DoubleClick Ad Planner, a free media planning tool, advertisers can identify the top-ranked sites and, in effect, targets ads to the largest number of users at any given time.
Ironically, however, this doesn’t guarantee that a brand advertiser is reaching the sites best-suited for its particular product or service, since the Ad Planner does not take performance statistics into account. In fact, a brand advertiser may be filtering out sites that are relevant.
But the “shock and awe” strategy could be suitable for large brand advertisers who want to make a big splash fast, to as many online consumers as possible.
The DoubleClick Ad Planner also offers advertisers the opportunity to define an audience with multiple criteria, including keywords, use ranking methods to find targeted sites, set filters to parse sites by various criteria, such as specific categories, and add sites to a media plan for comparison.
Gino Meriano asks “Have you experienced this? Tell me about it”
the role Social Media can play in politics – instant democracy
You know, I have been glued to the elections and while i was listening to some selected media people who have been clearly in the game far too long, crass Social Media and have poor understanding behind the power of the likes of Twitter and Face book it made me come up with the concept “ iDemocracy”
Great Britain’s election in May 2010 resulted in a hung Parliament. So what, some of you may be saying but wait here’s an opportunity to make profound and positive change to how democracy could operate in the near future.
With no clear majority, the Government has to form as a coalition which by definition means political parties and elected politicians have to cooperate and agree on substantive issues in order to govern and make law.
Ok, so currently we have elections that effectively mean we (the people) typically have to compromise on some or many of the policies of any political party.
If during a Prime Minister’s term, there’s something that the Government of the day feels it needs to check with its people, it can call for a Referendum. Elections and Referendums take a lot of planning, a lot of public resources and a lot of time!
What’s my point – well it starts with the definition of democracy:
democracy [Gr.,=rule of the people], term originating in ancient Greece to designate a government where the people share in directing the activities of the state
What if…
… the public could ‘direct’ its Government more easily, less expensively and much much faster that currently?
Actually, this is exactly what brand managers and marketers have realized are the benefits of Social Media. Getting messages out there and more importantly having people participate are facilitated by platforms like Facebook, Twitter and social networks.
Introducing iDemocracy
Let’s use Social Media directly to voice opinion and guide the political policymakers.
Politicians ask the people and the people instantly respond – voila! Instant democracy.
So the iDemocracy has the three ‘i’s of SMA – SocialMedia Marketing Approach:
Now for governing a country, there are admittedly a few wrinkles to sort out but that’s what technology geniuses are for:
Not everyone can participate – well the previous Government had plans to introduce a tax to fund the reach of the internet to every household in the UK.
Multiple voting – ok digital security is robust already and I’m guessing there will be a solution moments away if there’s not one already.
Join me in making this a reality!
Share your opinion, let’s start iDemocracy right here, right now