It’s official. You can now buy TV advertising through the Google Adwords interface. Here’s how it works. There are auctions held everyday after 5 PM PST where spots are auctioned off. When you build a campaign you are basically setting a bid price for those spots and you will not believe the bargains that are available. It is a mere fraction of the cost associated with going the traditional route.

Here are a few examples: A :30 spot on The Biggest Loser this week is going for between $5 and $10.60. Another popular show Wife Swap has spots for $3.83 to $4.50. The Celebrity Apprentice has spots for $3 to $5.50.

I plan to test this platform in the near future and I’ll keep you posted with results. My guess is that it is unsold inventory and they’d rather get something than nothing. This could potentially pose a HUGE opportunity for personal injury attorneys that are or want to advertise on TV.

Here is a very interesting video about this opportunity.

The New York Times Hires Their First Ever Social Media Editor. Below is the actual email sent from the head of the newsroom to his staff at the Times regarding the new position. I loved what he said at the very end… “because of course we all need to figure this out together.”

There is no blueprint for the ever changing and evolving new media landscape and world of social media and user generated content. We are all figuring it out as we go. I happen to love that kind of an environment. Whether or not you love it as well, I think it’s pretty clear to all of us that the landscape is changing rapidly and those who fear and resist change will struggle to compete.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [...]
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:00 AM
Subject: [NYT Newsroom] From Jon Landman: Jennifer Preston to be Social Media Editor
To: [...]

To the Newsroom:

One of the bracing things about this topsy-turvy media landscape is that you can wake up one morning and find yourself actually doing something you never thought you’d even think about. Take Jennifer Preston. In 25 years in the news biz, she’s been plenty of things: Reporter (cop shop, City Hall, Albany, etc.), editor (political editor, section editor, administrative editor, etc.) and even circulation marketing manager (at New York Newsday). But still, did she ever think she’d wake up one morning as “social media editor”?

No, she didn’t but yes, she did. That morning was this one.

Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

Think of Twitter. Did you know that The New York Times is No. 2 on the Twitterholic.com Top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers? (Behind Ashton Kutcher but ahead of Ellen DeGeneres.) Don’t care? OK, but the point is that an awful lot of people are finding our work not by coming to our homepage or looking at our newspaper but through alerts and recommendations from their friends and colleagues. So we ought to learn how to reach those people effectively and serve them well. At the same time, more of us are using social networks to find sources, contacts and information. Like this guy.

Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it. She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond.

A big part of her job will be keeping everyone up to date with the rapid developments taking place on the social media front. She will work closely with social media whizzes in the newsroom and other departments, including Soraya Darabi in marketing, Jake Harris in software and Heather Moore in comment moderation, on how news feeds work and how best to be part of the online conversation. She will also work closely with Dawn Williamson, Derek Gottfrid and others involved in building our own social network, Times People, as we continue to use crowd-sourcing techniques to increase the reach and quality of our work. She will work with Craig Whitney and others to ask and answer the many tricky questions that arise in this context: What is the proper balance between personal and professional? What best practices should we adopt or adapt? How can we do the new stuff in a way that honors the old stuff? Etc.

In a significant way Jennifer will apply the collaborative techniques of social-networking to her own job, because of course we all need to figure this out together.

Jon

I happen to be from Philadelphia so there is a rather special fondness in my heart for the Wharton School of Business, which is located in our great city!  They recently posted an article and a 12 min audio discussion on the topic “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Don’t Skimp On Their Ad Budget.”  You can read and listen to it here:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2101

My colleague Mark Wahlstrom, over at the Legal Broadcast Network presents his own commentary on this article in the video below:

Mark Wahlstrom at The Legal Broadcasting Network posted an excellent video regarding the recent Findlaw controversy.

Last month I held a teleseminar for my Inner Circle group of attorneys on the web.  One of the hot topics that we discussed was pay per click advertising.  I believe pay per click can be a very effective strategy when done based on careful research, ongoing testing and tweaking.

Today I want to share a video with you that gives detailed steps for an optimized pay per click campaign.  You will learn how to determine decisions such as:

1. Do I turn off the content network or not?
2. How do I decide how much to bid?
3. What position is best for my ads?
4. Do I use standard delivery or accelerated delivery of my ads?
5. What do I do about ad scheduling?
6. Should I enable position preference?
7. Should I rotate my ads equally?

This video was done by an online marketing organization called Stompernet that I have been involved with and think very highly of.  They are a real quality organization and I think that this video will be valuable to you if you are involved with pay per click advertising or intend to be in the future. 

The meat of the video starts at 8 minutes.   Here is the link:

 http://www.stompernet.net/goingnatural3/vid1_adwords_triangulation_method

Enjoy!

The “curse of knowledge” is that when you know something, it’s extremely difficult to put yourself in the state of mind of someone who doesn’t know it.  This psychological tendency consistently blocks our ability to create ideas and messages that stick in the mind of our target audience.  We assume that they know things that they don’t because it’s common knowledge to us.  This “curse of knowledege” can make us miss the mark on our messages.

In the business book “Made to Stick” the authors identify 6 principles at work whenever an idea or message breaks through the clutter and really “sticks” in the mind of the audience.

1. Simplicity – stripping ideas/messages to their core so they’re easy to remember.
2. Unexpectedness – avoiding predictability in your statements.
3. Concreteness – using specific details to help people understand and remember ideas/message.
4. Credibility – doing what’s necessary to make your ideas/message believable.
5. Emotion – ensuring that others care about your ideas/message by making them feel something.
6. Stories – getting people to relate to and act on your ideas/message.

To communicate your message, simplicity is better than complexity.  Concreteness provides the details that resonate in the brain.  Credibility is essential to making people believe your message.  Unexpectedness jolts listeners into thinking in new ways.  Emotion makes people feel why your idea is important.  And a good story can move others to action.

A recent study of more than 20,000 online shoppers resulted in some key research findings about the effectiveness of various tools for acquiring customers.  As you read them you will see that they provide great insights that can easily be adapted to our industry.

• The #1 reason that a shopper visited a website online was because of familiarity with the brand.  This group also had the highest satisfaction score – 77%.
• Promotional e-mails are an effective marketing tool:  24% of shoppers came to a site because of promotional emails from the company.  This group is more satisfied than those who came to the site because of a search engine and is 16% more likely to buy than those who came through a search engine.
• Search engines and shopping comparison sites bring more first-time visitors, who are significantly less satisfied and less likely to buy.  While the largest group of first-time site visitors came via a search engine or shopping comparison site (29%), this group was less satisfied than first-time visitors who came the site because of familiarity with the brand or promotional emails.
• Word-of-mouth recommendations are more effective at driving desired future behaviors than offline advertising.  Satisfaction for online shoppers who came to the retail site based on recommendation enjoys a slight advantage over that of shoppers who were prompted by offline advertising.  But word of mouth has a significant advantage in driving the future behaviors of recommendation, online purchase and loyalty.

In light of these findings there are several best practices that can help us improve customer satisfaction with the site experience, relative to the acquisition source.

• Ensure complementary messaging between the acquisition source and landing page on the site.  When a prospect comes to a Web sites based on a paid search ad, the page they land on should be closely related to the ad they clicked on. 
• Analyze needs and perceptions of first time visitors.  They have no prior experience with your Web site and they often struggle to understand the organization of the site.  You want to make sure that you understand their greatest concerns so you can do a better job of creating a satisfying first visit that will keep them coming back, time after time.
• Explore what’s driving word-of-mouth recommendations.  One of the most certain and powerful reasons to recommend a Web site is to deliver a highly satisfying experience during the site visit.  The only way to do this is to analyze the high priority areas for improvement, based not only on satisfaction scores, but on projection of the relative influence of improving one aspect of the site experience over another.  Delivering a highly satisfying experience will gain you recommendations as well as future business and ongoing loyalty.

Total ad spending fell slightly in the first half of 2007, down 0.3% to $72.6 billion from the same time last year, reports TNS Media Intelligence.

“For the first time since 2001, media advertising expenditures have declined for two consecutive quarters,” says Steven Fredericks, TNS MI CEO, in a statement.  “The results reflect weakness across a range of industries and advertisers.”

The biggest loser was newspaper advertising, losing a full percentage point in share, to 17.8% of the whole.  Local television ads were next, slipping 0.6%, yet 10.8% of the total.  Not surprisingly, Web advertising jumped to 7.6% of the ad share from 6.4% in 2006.  Magazine advertising also grew to 20% from 19.1%.

But, “given the uncertainties about near-term economic growth and consumer spending, we expect core ad spending will continue to face challenges,” the report says.

What is most interesting for our industry, however, is that direct response advertising increased 11.3% in early 2007 – more than any other of the top ten advertising categories.  I think we’re seeing the evidence of that with the growing number of attorneys advertisng on television. 

Viral marketing campaigns are less effective than the buzz about them would indicate, says a new report from New York bases Jupiter Research, which surveyed 3,580 marketers for their opinions.  Per the report, viral marketers plan to decrease use of this tactic by 55% within the next year.

While they effectively increase brand awareness, only 15% of viral campaigns in the last year actually achieved the marketer’s purpose of getting consumers to buy into and promote the company’s message to others.  And if a consumer doesn’t repeat the message to another, is a campaign really viral?

According to the report, the biggest problem viral marketers face – other than tracking campaign performance – is general ad clutter.

My Space allows members to customize their individual profile and in the process they have an opportunity to learn a great deal about their members.  So it just makes sense that in the very near future My Space advertising will be targeted based on the members profiles – just like we saw foreshadowed in the movie Minority Report a few years ago.

In today’s New York Times there was an article entitled “MySpace to Discuss Latest Efforts to Customize Ads for Members.”  According to the article “MySpace, the Web’s largest social network and one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, says that after experimenting with technology over the last six months it can tailor ads to the personal information that its 110 million active users leave on their profile pages.”

 Currently when I visit My Space I see mass-market pitches for mortgages, online dating, etc.  But, if the future unfolds as anticipated, we may soon be presented with customized pitches during our online experience.  If and when that happens, the response will undoubtedly increase significantly, but the cost of the advertising will be greater as well.  Sounds like a win win to me!