In Advertising Bigger isn't Always Better

If you have been following the recent advertising news you will notice that more and more major advertisers are looking to smaller ad agencies to handle their campaigns.

Is it because they feel bad? Is it because they are cheaper? Or is it because they see the level of creative talent of smaller agencies?

Lets take a quick look at why this is happening and how this is good for the consumers and the advertisers. When I use the term smaller it doesn't mean that it's a one-man show, but that they aren't part of the "BIG 6". Now with that said lets continue, smaller agencies have a hunger to succeed, they have a need to be customer service oriented, they have a desire to be more creative without the fear of upsetting upper management. Take these points into account and you have an agency that will be tenacious and with the number one goal of showing their clients results.

At New Age Media Concepts, we believe that major advertisers deserve better results from their campaigns, don't get me wrong there have been great campaigns launched but who are going to be the new creative minds to develop the next memorable moment in advertising history?

If advertisers like General Motors, Ford, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Microsoft, Burger King, Toyota, Home Depot, Wendy's, ConAgra Foods, Wal-Mart Stores, American Express, Colgate Palmolive, Intel and the many others are looking beyond what agencies they are accustomed to working with and are looking towards connecting with their consumers in a big way, then they have to look beyond the brick and bring in a creative team that can help them do that.

Consumers today aren't ignorant and in this age of reality television and the shock factor mentality, advertisers need to step up to the plate and shed their skin to be able to reach the new age of consumers, the ones that are their core audience, the ones that will have brand loyalty.

By Louis Victor - New Age Media Concepts, August 31, 2004
info@namct.com

Louis Victor has been involved in the investment, advertising, marketing and public relations indutries for close to two decades. Through various articles he looks to give some insight on various topics as it relates to these industries.

Understanding Internet Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is an effective way of getting your advertising message seen on the Internet. Banner ads should not be your only online form of advertising, but they are an essential part of your online advertising mix.

This article assumes that the reader knows what a banner ad looks like, but do you know how they work, and how you can derive benefit from them? Let's define a few terms before answering these questions.

1. "Page views" or "page impressions." These terms are interchangeable and they refer to the number of times that a page within a website has been displayed on a website.

2. "Banner view." Like a page view, a banner view is the number of times that a banner has been displayed on website.

3. "Click through." A click through is the number of times a website visitor has "clicked" on a particular banner ad and was transferred to the website of the banner advertiser.

4. "CTR." CTR is the acronym for "click through rate," which is the ratio of the number of banner view versus the number of times visitors have "clicked through" to your website. CTR is expressed as a percentage, so a click through rate of 1% means that for every 1,000 banner views, 10 visitors have clicked through to your site.

5. "CPM." CPM is an acronym for "cost per M," where "M" is the ancient Roman numeral for 1,000. Translation: CPM is the price your business will pay to have its banner advertisement displayed 1,000 times on a website, e.g, the cost of 1,000 banner views. So, for example, if the CPM to advertise on a site is $80.00 your business will pay $80.00 for every 1,000 banner views.

6. "ROS." ROS is the acronym for "run of site," which simply means that a banner ad is displayed on every page in a website, as opposed to being displayed only in a particular category of a website or only when a particular keyword is entered into a search engine.

Everyone who is in charge of a advertising or marketing department (that's you if you're the sole shareholder of the company) knows that advertising is, in large part, a numbers game. The more frequently your message is seen or heard, the more likely the consumer is to purchase your service or product. Take Mattress Mac with Gallery Furniture , for example. If you live in the Houston area, or if your radio can pick up the signal of almost any Houston area radio station, you cannot go a single day without hearing or seeing an advertisement for Gallery Furniture. Peppering your senses with constant reminders that "Gallery Furniture Saves You Money!" has enabled Mr. McIngvale to build his single location furniture store into an empire. (Of course, advertising alone won't do it; you still must have a quality product or service). I have no scientific data to support this assertion, but I'll make it anyway: I'm willing to bet that Gallery Furniture is known to more people in the greater Houston area than any other single business. How did that come to be? Mattress Mac understands the advertising numbers game and plays it better than anybody else.

Banner ads are a numbers game. The industry standard click through rate for online advertising in general is around .5%. Not 5%, but .5%. Doesn't sound very encouraging for your banner ad campaign, eh? Well, there are ways to significantly increase the CTR of any given banner. The best way is by targeting a particular banner ad to a narrow audience, an audience that is looking specific for a product or service just like yours. Highly-targeted can boost your CTR to as much as 2%-3% or higher and significantly increase the traffic to your website.

Another valuable purpose of the banner ad is branding. Intertwined with the messages Gallery Furniture delivers about particular sales events or types of furniture is the company's consistent and recognizable logo, color scheme, and tag lines. Your banner advertisements can, and should, perform the same function; they should be designed using your company's logo and colors, at a minimum. Sometimes incorporating the tag line is the way to go, but other times you may want to advertise a particular special offer, product, etc. The important thing is that you take advantage of the numbers game by continually displaying your name, logo, and colors. The more visitors that see you, the more they will come to associate your name with your type of product or service, and the more likely they will be in the future to buy from you.

Henry J. Fasthoff, IV
Principal & General Counsel
HoustonBusiness.com

Localized Advertising - Door-to-Door Ad Distribution on the Fly !

Have you ever had to distribute door-hanger advertisements for your business?

Have you ever employed door-to-door sales techniques to increase your brand awareness?

Have you ever had to walk mile-after-mile repeating the sales pitch, over and over?

Have you ever had to stand outside of an arena event and pass out flyers to exiting patrons?

If you stop to think of the cold calling technique of door-to door advertising, you would discover how sometimes humiliating it is to have a disinterested and irritated individual slam the door in your face, yell insulting things toward you, or be escorted off of their property. To combat this instantaneous humiliation, the idea of door-hanging advertisements gives the sales person a means of getting the word out to more people faster than before but more importantly, it saves the person the anguish of the advertised becoming irate over the interruption. Having been in situations were I have used these techniques either selling for other companies or trying to gain customers for a newly opened business, I came up with the idea of trying a door-to-driveway or door-to-doorstep advertising campaign to build brand awareness for a national car sales corporation that needed grass roots advertising for the local area around their dealerships.

Basically, I was a car salesman that was responsible for bringing in customers to buy cars, and my pay was determined by how many people actually came in and bought. Since I have leg injuries from an auto accident, I needed to find a way to cover the same amount of territory as my competing sales people. The company already supplied a few thousand door hangers; however, the advertisement brought awareness to all of the local 11 dealerships and I wanted to build awareness just to the dealership that I was at, and more specifically, I wanted the traffic created to come specifically to me.

Keeping in mind the flyer campaign I was apart of at a professional basketball game in which the sales team handed out 7,000 flyers to build awareness of a local college basketball season, I designed a half-page flyer text advertisement-therefore, two ads can be printed on every page-that put emphasis on my name, my contact information, and schedule. You can substitute any advertising design on this half-page ad.

I chose a colored card-stock weighted paper for printing because I needed paper weight for the distribution method used and a lower cost than the cost of printing in color. Printing black and white on colored paper is easier and cheaper than printing expensive color ads, unless you can afford it. But for the purpose of this campaign, you do not need to spend a fortune making your company look good in print.

Once the printing is done, cut the full-page printed page in half, which produces two half-page ads. Next, take the ads and roll them into a cigar shape and secure with small rubber bands. Tiny rubber bands can be purchased at the local office supply company, but the best bet for the appropriate size can be located at a local beauty supply company-ask for small hair braiding bands, usually kept in 500 and 1000 count. Keep a large box handy to place the rolled ads in until it is time to distribute.

Now it is time to distribute. Normally, door hangers would take about 2 ½ hours to distribute 500 hangers and would receive a few inquiries for the effort; so being limited to the amount of walking I could do, I decided to drive a car and throw the ads onto the edge of the driveway at peoples houses. I wanted the advertisement to be in the same placement as the local newspaper so the ad had the best chance to be noticed, picked up, and acted on by the potential customer.

As a homeowner, I myself have had numerous advertisements thrown in my driveway, and as the homeowner I am responsible for picking up the ads in my yard. I have seen ads for grass cutters, electricians, Avon sales, donations to thrift stores, and many more, so any kind of message can be placed on these ads.

Now with the new way to distribute, I could get 2000 ads out in approximately 1 ½ hours and had responses before I returned to the dealership. It makes me wonder how many people really do watch the front of their house and wonder what a slow moving vehicle was throwing at their house. After seeing the instant results of my effort, every sales person at the dealership enacted the same door-to-driveway campaign for the shear fact of the number of ads distributed for the time distributed was achieved with far less effort than before. Results we quicker and slightly higher; but, I do not know the exact increase numbers because I did not do any kind of analysis on exact number of responses for the number distributed. I do know that I got a lot out a lot quicker than before and I didn't have to walk anywhere except to the car.

A few things to keep in mind:
? Make sure it is NOT going to rain on the day that you distribute.
? Try NOT to distribute after 2:00 PM because of children being released from school and them walking and playing in the streets.
? Try NOT to distribute during the weekend because that is when you want people to be acting on the ad that has been delivered, and the kids are in the streets again.
? The perfect time seems to be between 10 AM and 12 PM, a two-hour break in morning commute traffic and the beginning of lunch hour traffic.
? Keep a map and mark the streets covered as to not deliver in the same area too often.

Written by eRix © 2004-08-28 Permission to Reproduce in Entirety.

Webmaster to:
www.aimhockey.com
www.avonbymaki.com
www.quality-gifts-galore.com

eric b smith tampa, fl
b.a. marketing usf tampa, fl
a.s. information systems hcc tampa, fl

Advertising For The Long Haul and Not the Short Term Gains

New Age Media Concepts issues its first article of many that will focus on the advertising and marketing industry.

"If a young man tells his date she's intelligent, looks lovely, and is a great conversationalist, he's saying the right things to the right person and that's marketing. If the young man tells his date how handsome, smart and successful he is -- that's advertising. If someone else tells the young woman how handsome, smart and successful her date is -- that's public relations." By S.H. Simmons.

Welcome to New Age Media Concepts, Inc. where we understand your needs and how to maximize your marketing dollar.

Marketing is your strategy for allocating resources (time and money) in order to achieve your objectives.

People have their own unique perceptions of the world based on their belief system. The most innovative ideas, the greatest products, or a superior service succeed only when you market within the context of people's perceptions. This is true from something as simple as the pet rock craze of the 1970s to the marketing muscle of Wall Street and the Internet boom of the 1990s.

Context can be many things, singly or simultaneously. To name a few, you may market to your customers within the context of their wants, needs, problems solved, or situation improved. Current and potential advertisers need to be aware of many other contexts, such as social and economic trends or governmental regulations.

People don't just "buy" a product or a service. They "buy" the concept of what that product will do for them, or help them do for themselves. People just don't "buy" a laundry detergent, they buy the perceived notion of what that laundry detergent brand says it can accomplish for them. Otherwise every brand in the supermarket will be a no-frills. This is not to say that if a product fails to meet the customers' expectations that product will be successful in the long haul. No amount of advertising and marketing will help a failed product succeed in that scenario.

To have a successful campaign a product or service must understand that they need to start out with something a consumer needs, wants, or improves their situation and that product or service actually does help the consumer for the long haul.

The New York Times said it best in a recent article, "Companies can't Buy Love with Bargains" Building brand loyalty is more than just hyping the consumer into buying a product, it's gaining their trust and the trust of their family both today and for years to come. One example of great brand building is H.J. Heinz, (NYSE: HNZ) they have been around for decades and they gained the loyalty and trust of the consumer spanning generations, now that is great brand building.

Anyone could hype a brand for short term gains but that doesn't accomplish the goals of the advertiser or the consumer. It looks good initially but what happens when the product isn't flying off the shelves any longer and the consumers have lost trust in the product or the company?. Of course you need new and innovative ways to get your message to the consumer but this message has to be geared to building consumer loyalty and not just hype. Even the largest companies make this mistake and pay for it with decreased sales and profit margins.

So whether a consumer is buying a car from Ford (NYSE: F) , a can of beer from Anheuser Busch (NYSE:BUD) or software from Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT), the advertiser needs to cater to the needs of the consumer.

Louis Victor has been involved in the investment, advertising, marketing and public relations industries for close to two decades.