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TV advertisers try to play down their online nemesis

Posted by Christopher Tate September 30th, 2009

On the day that it is announced that Internet advertising has overtaken the Television sector in the UK, questions have been asked about whether or not the term ‘Internet advertising’ is fair to its TV competitor.

In the first six months of this year, a record £1.75 billion was spent on online advertising, compared to £1.6 billion in TV, breaking the stranglehold that television had enjoyed for close to fifty years as the main advertising medium in the country.

So should the numerous types of online advertising income spends (affiliates, paid search, email etc) be lumped together under the umbrella of ‘Internet advertising’? Thinkbox, the UK television marketing body, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not of this opinion. It’s view is that the maturation of the Internet, along with the diversity of advertising methods, means that it is inaccurate to treat all of these types of advertising as a single entity.

Talking to Mark Sweney, Thinkbox Marketing Director, Lindsey Clay, plays down today’s figures and points to the argument for recording spends separately:

“It is interesting but meaningless to sweep all the money spent on every aspect of online marketing into one big figure and celebrate it. Online marketing spend is made up of many things, including email, classified ads, display ads (including online TV advertising) and, overwhelmingly, search marketing. They should be judged individually.”

However, if this is the case, then surely you would have to treat different types of Television advertising such as commercial breaks, product placement, DRTV and programme sponsorship as separate mediums? One can’t help but feel that this is purely a damage limitation exercise from an industry that is facing major competition and fears that it may lose the battle.

Tags: marketing, online advertising, tv

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Mirror launches 3am Girls site.

Posted by Caroline McGuckian August 20th, 2009

As print newspapers change their attitude towards online content delivery, we take a look at one of the classier of the latest batch of web offerings.

On from the launch of the relatively impressive if not entirely unique Mirror Football website earlier this month, recently launched is the digital version of the “famous” 3am Girls- Trinity Mirror’s latest attempt at a vertical for which they possibly hope to charge in the foreseeable future in order to help stave off the UK’s largest newspaper publisher’s plummeting share price avoid laying off more journalists and closing down more newspapers.

http://www.3am.co.uk/

What can we say about the SEO of this site by looking at it for 2 minutes? The URL structure looks ok, they seem to have a hierarchical system that uses hyphen to separate words. But I can’t say the actual words they want Google to spider are too impressive. I am not sure what they will make of “Ooh”, “Gasp!” and “Phwaor!” as the links on the main navigation. All the page titles are the same as well and there is no RSS feed, but I don’t want to be too picky.

Does it have any meta data then? What are those CTRs going to be like?

Let’s Google [3am] … here they are down at number 6.

Well, I don’t know about you but to me the snippet’s not exactly an incentive to learn more. But we all know newspaper companies hate Google so maybe they’re not interested in traffic from search engines, which might start 80% of internet journeys but let’s not let facts get in the way of the truth.

Oh but hold on. Trinity are paying for PPC rankings for both [3am] and [celebrity gossip] so they are at least acknowledging that search exists in some form. Oh dear.

To be fair, it is early days for this site. With a decent amount of marketing more people will come and visit what is an established brand in the celebrity world and as a result the site will attract some high quality links that will push it up the rankings to a point, despite Trinity making it as hard as possible for Google to understand what the site is about.

But if they want to rank for [celebrity] (450,000 exact match searches on average per month) or [celebrity gossip] (368,000 exact match searches on average per month), which I am pretty sure they do as they are bidding on PPC for both, and compete with Heat, Perez Hilton, Spike and *whisper it* The Sun then they had better smarten up their act. Because currently they are, sensibly, not charging for content so all cash will come from ad revenue which is reliant on traffic and impressions and as far as Google, the biggest traffic driver of them all, is concerned they are merely a blip on the horizon.

Tags: Google, keywords, marketing, online advertising

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Microsoft’s IE8 "Get the Facts" campaign backfires

Posted by Ian Macfarlane June 29th, 2009

Microsoft has launched a new “Get the Facts” campaign, this time promoting Microsoft Internet Explorer. The marketing teams may have been a little *too* enthusiastic – the campaign has gone viral for all the wrong reasons.

Microsoft has launched a marketing campaign to promote the latest incarnation of its web browser, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). The campaign is branded “Get the Facts”, a tagline which Microsoft previously used for a marketing campaign to try and demonstrate that Windows Server was a cheaper server platform than Linux.

This new campaign compares IE8 with competitor browsers Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome (although notably not with Apple’s Safari browser, which currently has many more users than Chrome does, or Opera, which has been around for a long time and is a major player in some markets).

The part which has attracted the most attention is this comparison page, which attempts to provide a point by point comparison against the other two browsers using check marks. Whilst the use of check marks for comparison is not necessarily bad – they provide a very accessible visual method of comparing features of multiple products – when you move beyond concrete features to more nebulous concepts such as usability, check marks may no longer be capable of presenting claims in an objective manner.

Dissecting the claims

Let’s look through some of the claims – or more precisely, how they are presented. Here are the first three rows in the table, covering the issues of security, privacy and "ease of use" respectively.

This chart suggests that the other browsers are insecure and hard to use.

The use of check marks here seems to imply that Internet Explorer 8 “has” all of these three things, whilst the other two browsers simply “do not”. The oversimplification of using check marks to “prove” the superiority of a product on such broad, multifaceted categories as these is almost inviting ridicule (regardless of the company producing it).

In a similar vein, further down the list is the issue of “reliability” – again, according to the check marks, IE8 has “got it” and its competitors don’t. Here Microsoft has reduced the complex concept of "reliability" to two features which it has – like the first three bullet points, this is a broad oversimplification.

U-turns

Let’s have a look now at some of the areas where the other browsers were given check marks by Microsoft.

For web standards, the initial version of this page declared “a tie” – stating:

It’s a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser, but Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards.

However, Microsoft failed to mention that it wrote many of these test cases. Unfortunately for Microsoft, on the Internet little details like this rarely get missed, and apparent conflicts of interest quickly turn into conspiracy theories and help fan the fires of bad press yet further. You might remember I said “initial version” – today, it now reads:

Firefox and Chrome have more support for emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS3, but Internet Explorer 8 invested heavily in having world-class, consistent support for the entire CSS2.1 specification.

Now that’s decidedly less positive than the earlier statement, isn’t it?

Another marketing U-turn happened in the "developer tools" category. Initially, Microsoft claimed a win here as IE8 comes with a number of such tools built-in, rather than having to download them separately. Again, the marketing piece disingenuously focuses on something which is technically correct whilst ignoring the wider picture. In addition to re-writing this comment as well, the change here was particularly glaring – Microsoft added another big green tick beside one of the other browsers.

There were further examples of somewhat dubious claims in the piece, but you get the general idea. From an Internet marketing perspective, what we’re really interested in is what happened after Microsoft published this marketing campaign on the web.

What happened next

So a high profile company runs a major marketing campaign filled with dubious claims – in a virally-friendly, accessible infographic format to boot. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what happened next.

Yes, unsurprisingly, people read it, laughed, and then sent it to their friends. And their friends sent it to their friends. And that, of course, is how things go viral. It went massively viral in an incredibly short space of time, hitting the homepage of Digg in no time at all. The Digg summary cheekily sums the entire article up with the comment “it’s amazing what you can conclude with checkmarks”. It didn’t stop there – two different satirical versions of the checklist and yet another critical article about it also made it to Digg’s homepage over the following two days. Imagine having four items on the Digg homepage which are critical of your new marketing campaign, in the space of a few days? Ouch!

The mainstream technical press weren’t kind either – the headline on ZDNet is "Microsoft’s IE8 "Get the facts" campaign – heavy on propaganda, light on facts", PCPro took the effort to give an in-depth point-by-point rebuttal of the claims, and PCWorld’s article, titled "IE8′s "Get the Facts Marketing Gets It Wrong", starts with the summary "If Microsoft wants us to take IE8 seriously, the company should treat our intelligence with some respect."

What does this mean? Honestly, I don’t think that the people who wrote this have a firm grasp on the brave new world of online PR. This piece was never going be taken at face value, and the events following its publication were completely foreseeable. It’s been a complete PR disaster for Microsoft. I mean really – what were they thinking?

Unless Microsoft’s PR team really are geniuses and already expected this to happen. All publicity is supposed to be good publicity, right?

Before I finish, I feel I must add an important note – Internet Explorer 8 is a massive leap in both web standards support and performance from its predecessor, Internet Explorer 7, and Microsoft should be commended for developing it. However, this marketing campaign was, quite simply, never going to be anything short of disastrous. The lesson is quite simple – in the age of the Int
ernet, dodgy statements and half-truths will be picked apart and, if the target is high-profile enough, will spread like wildfire. Just ask your MP.

Tags: browsers, fail, marketing, Microsoft

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Search marketing rejoins the mainstream?

Posted by Manley February 1st, 2008

I had to give a presentation to a non-technical marketing team on the loose subject of ‘Search Algorithms’. There seems to be a reluctance amongst many traditional marketeers to embrace search, but old-school marketing is still one of the most powerful elements of search PR.

Search marketing is not the dark art that it is often perceived to be. The technical side of ethical SEO mostly involves avoiding mistakes, rather than clever tricks using smoke and mirrors and, as long as you have a good technical team who listen to your search consultant and do not fall foul of the many pitfalls of duplicate and obfuscated content, it is the marketing department who will make the difference between a good campaign and a great one.

To give you an idea of my audience, I used a PowerPoint presentation and included a ‘Top 10 on-page tips’ section. This was not difficult to write, but it forced me to think about ideas which I would normally take for granted. Search is changing, search engines are better at recognising and compensating for the mistakes and nuances of a CMS, recognising canonical pages and perceiving context. Attitudes to search are changing as well; on-line marketing is no longer lumped in with the classifieds in the budget as the ROI is too great to ignore.

There was a time when I would find myself giving advice to people who would nod and go away to the comfort of their existing systems, with a couple of new ideas which were soon to be swamped by the incoming tide of wistful thoughts regarding tea and biscuits, for the dunking of.

Thankfully that time has passed and the senior executives know about duplicate content, ask intelligent questions about reciprocal linking and social bookmarking and make sure that the changes suggested are implemented. The tea grows cold and the biscuits break off and float around disturbingly, whilst the poor techies are whipped into action.

The next step has to be recognising that search PR is still PR. Every major search engine bases the majority of its algorithmic bias on link analysis. Getting your message out and, perhaps more importantly, choosing the right message to put out, is absolutely necessary. The most spider-friendly site in the world is never going to rank if it has no value-adding content, if nobody has heard of it or if nobody wants to link to it.

The divide between the on-line and off-line world has become blurred for marketeers – I have had clients who refused to put their URL on print media as they did not want to detract from the impact of the print. This is, in the tone of Gerard Butler, madness. The majority of searches are performed by users who know what they are looking for. The top 10 industry-wide search terms for October 2007, as reported by Hitwise can demonstrate this far better than I:

1. myspace
2. ebay
3. myspace.com
4. craigslist
5. youtube
6. www.myspace.com
7. mapquest
8. yahoo
9. facebook
10. yahoo.com

Now, there are many reasons for this, including the laziness of users, but whatever the cause, the fact remains that these searches are performed by someone who already knows precisely what results they want returned. This is not about SEO, this is old-school marketing. Do a search for [badger] and the first result is for Jonti Picking’s superb Badger Badger Badger cartoon. Search for [kitten] and up comes Fraser Lewry’s kitten war. Neither of these sites has much in the way of content, but they have thousands of inbound links and huge volumes of traffic. These are not huge corporations, they are young men from publishing backgrounds who are making things that they love and marketing the results throughout the internet.

The moral? Make sure that your site follows best practice, research and target the right keywords and then go back to basics. Building links the ethical, organic, lasting way is about getting people to want to link to you and that is not done by computer wizardry, it is a matter of good, old fashioned PR.

Tags: marketing, search

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