The Hall of Shame

http://www.revista.espiritolivre.org/category/artigos

It can be tricky to navigate the web without infringing on the rights of others in regards to their property, especially since it is so easy to copy and paste or share content. I was intrigued by our lecture this week during the section dealing with copyright. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Takedown Hall of Shame caught my eye. If you have not visited the site yet, it is a list of cases in which people or organizations have petitioned others who they believe have improperly used their content.

One case in particular deals with the Miss UniverseOrganization, Perez Hilton, and the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). In this instance, the NOM was used a video showing Perez Hilton slamming Miss California Carrie Prejean and her comment on same-sex marriage. They also utilize a clip of Miss California Carrie Prejean saying she opposes same-sex marriage. NOM used the clips to make a political statement on the issue.

Both the Miss Universe Organization and Perez Hilton claimed that NOM had infringed on their copyrights, yet it was clear that both video clips were being used within fair parameters. In the end, it was decided that NOM could keep their work and that they had not misused the content.

Although this is an example of where fair use was utilized, there are many instances in which content is misused by those that do not have rights to it. The lesson that can be learned here is to ensure you are always within the law when using someone else’s content. It can be too easy these days to infringe upon someone else’s copyrights. 

What's My Mystery Offer Worth?!

When we talk about email marketing, a popular thought is that this avenue is dead; however, I strongly believe that email marketing still is powerful, given it delivers a clear and relevant message to each individual. Meaning, the generic email blast may be dead, but email marketing as a whole is just evolving. With that in mind, I wanted to do a search of some of the best email campaigns.

The ROI Factor assembled a group of eight campaigns for their “Best of the Inbox Awards.” Each of the eight email campaigns was awarded specific recognition, i.e. the best user experience, best open rate, strongest message, and the humanitarian award, to name a few.

Napoleon Won "The Strong Message Award"

The campaign I connected with the most was Rent the Runway’s campaign, which won the award for “The Best Open Rate Ever.” The company sent an email promising a mystery offer of either 10%, 20%, or 30% off. In order to discover what your award was valued at, you had to click on the email. With this strategy, Rent the Runway was hoping to get a high open and click through rate (CTR), as well as many conversions.

I thought this was an excellent way to interact with customers, since from experience, I have followed the instructions for another company’s email in order to discover what my offer was worth. As a consumer, I was highly motivated to discover what my offer was. It prompted me to read the email and click on the link – which doesn't often happen. I also found out my offer and proceeded to browse their website for products. I can guarantee you that I would not have browsed the site that morning had I did not received the mystery offer email.

To me, this is an excellent lesson in email marketing. If we can entice our subscribers and offer them a reward for clicking through to our landing page, we may get the conversion we are hoping for! To truly be effective, this strategy must be used in conjunction with individualized emails as I mentioned above. 

Cure for Banner Blindness

Every year around this time I am responsible for developing the next year’s advertising strategy. This involves decisions on who to advertise with and how to best deliver our message. Of course there is the usual suspects – print ads, banner ads, sponsored text ads, etc. Depending on the publication, we sign up for a variety of these advertising methods. I am always trying to ensure we use our advertising dollars most effectively and frequently question which method is the best to portray our message.

I was never a huge fan of spending a great deal of money on banner ads. Based off personal experience, I rarely spent much time looking at them myself. When we read the lecture notes for this week, it mentioned banner blindness, which is exactly the experience I have had. Constantly being bombarded by banner ads is something I have learned to quickly ignore. I wondered, now, if my company should not pay for banner space for 2014.

I did a little research, thanks to Google, and found that there are many resources devoted to the topic of banner blindness. The best I found, though, was this infographic from bannerblindness.org. 

While it gave some facts that I really wasn’t shocked to see, like low viewing levels and retention rates of banner ads, one thing that did catch my eye were the suggestions to avoid these problems: go native; stay relevant; and decrease clutter.

Finally, some insight into how to make our banners more effective! Let’s place ads in uncommon places and shapes than are normally seen. Make sure the content is formulated so that it is relevant to the customer. Last, choose websites that are not already cluttered with other banner ads. Ours would easily get lost in the shuffle.

Next month we start discussions for 2014, and I can guarantee you I’m taking this new found information into consideration when determining whether or not to use banner ads. 

Creepy Or Really Good Marketing?

Awhile back I heard a news story about Target and their incredibly perceptive advertising – so perceptive that Target new a father’s daughter was pregnant before he did. If you haven’t heard the story before, I highly recommend reading this article in Forbes. In a nutshell, Target sent a flyer for discounts on maternity clothing to a high school aged girl. Her father was furious upon seeing the advertisement and went directly to the nearest Target to speak with a manager. He later discovered that his daughter was in fact pregnant.

Target knew the young girl was expecting based on a predicted pregnancy score they utilize. When certain products are bought in a designated time frame, the possibility the shopper is pregnant is determined.

So is this creepy or really effective marketing? My first thought is creepy. Target is able to know so much about me just by tracking purchases to my credit card without me knowingly giving permission. Now that we know Target has the capabilities to target its customers so well, this could encourage many shoppers to avoid the store all together.

On the other hand, I think this is incredibly effective marketing and it really doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. I certainly have not stopped shopping at Target after hearing this story. In a way, I can see this as actually being beneficial for the consumer. I appreciate receiving relevant discount information for items I would need to purchase. I would actually get annoyed if I received marketing from a company that was not relevant to me at all. For instance, if I were to receive mailers from Target saying their video games were on sale I would immediately disregard it as junk mail; however, if I received a mailer with discounts on beauty items, I’d be more likely to make a purchase with it.

Bottom line is that Target really has developed a powerful tool for understanding the purchases decisions each customer makes. This is something that will definitely help to grow the business. If they can manage to keep their advertising more subtle, they will avoid creeping out their customers. 

The Logo That Went Viral

This week our lecture revolved around several different topics, like gaming and mobile marketing. We also spent time learning more about social media and innovation. While thinking about what this week’s blog post should focus on, I received a LinkedIn update with links to some recommended articles. Coincidentally, one link caught my eye – “3 Spot-On Social Media CampaignsEvery Brand Can Learn From.” To me, the campaigns highlighted in this article demonstrate effective use of social media in combination with innovative messaging and ideas.

The first campaign listed here is the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) red equal sign logo. If you were active on any social media platform in the Spring of 2013, this image should look familiar to you. 

According to the article, there was a “120% difference in the amount of Facebook usersthat changed their profile pictures on Tuesday, March 26th than onthe previous Tuesday. The logo received 10 million impressions, 189,177 shares,95,725 likes and appeared more than 18 million times in News Feeds.” Apparently, this campaign made an incredible impact. Without social media, I do not think the HRC’s red logo would have made such a powerful statement in a short amount of time.

There is a quote from Chris Heatherly, Vice President of Technology and Innovation at Disney, which, in my opinion, begins to explain why I this campaign is innovative. Innovation is “a simple, clever idea well executed that makes things better for people” (Classnotes Week 4 pg 28). The HRC’s red logo is a simple, but obvious depiction of equality using an equal sign. They used a bright color, which easily grabs the attention of someone scrolling through a News Feed. It was also well executed in the sense that the timing was perfectly in sync with current events, and it was meant to educate people. I also think the campaign became viral because the logo was easily manipulated using other images; yet, people still understood the meaning behind each variation. The Mashable article referenced above, used this image to give readers an idea of how the equal sign became a meme.

I’m really happy I stumbled upon this article today. It gave me a chance to do a short analysis on why a particular campaign was successful. In my first blog post I mentioned that I need to stop and smell the roses more, a.k.a. read into things and think about them, not just gloss over. In this case, I did just that and I learned a lot! I am definitely going to remember the reasons why the HRC campaign was successful and see how I can apply this to my current work. 

Change of Heart

Before reading the lecture notes for this week’s discussion, if someone had asked me what I thought about Paid Search, and I would have told you that as a consumer I thought they were annoying and as an advertiser in my particular field they were unnecessary. We were asked to discuss what value Paid Search may have as part of our homework this week, which at first I would have said not much; however, I started digging deeper into the material and made some conclusions which told me my initial inclinations may have been slightly off.

Some products or services are a good fit for Paid Search. For instance, a widely demanded product, like clothing, would extract a higher value from Paid Search. Why? Paid Search would be advantageous for that company if their organic SEO is not great (leaving them further down the results page) and if they are competing against a wide range of other companies. Paid Search is also good because it offers actual metrics to measure ROI, something that print advertising cannot. The most important advantage that I discovered this week, is that people are finding your ad because they are actively searching for your product. Jeremy Hull pointed this out in his article titled “What’s the Value of a Paid Search Impression?” 

It has been difficult for me to accept that Paid Search is truly a valuable tool, but Hull’s point that this is a way to connect with people who are actively searching for your product has made me switch my viewpoint. I agree that print advertising not only can you not measure true ROI, but you are also working extremely hard to get the attention and inspire action from a passive consumer. With a Google search, for instance, a person is specifically looking for the product or service you offer, therefore, it makes much more sense to use a Paid Search.

So, although I don’t believe Paid Search should be the only avenue to market a product or service, I now see that it can be valuable in certain situations. One company that is relying on Paid Search, though, is Google. During my research I found this chart by Dan Frommer at SplatF.  Dan researched which companies most heavily rely on one particular product. It shocked me to see that Google receives 97% of its revenue from Adwords. Even though it may not be the best marketing strategy for a company to put all its “eggs in one basket” with Paid Search, it is seemingly working well for Google to rely on for revenue!

Hoping To Never Lay a Flower on Gmail's Grave

This week, as we talk about search engines and Google, most specifically, a thought occurred to me…

“What did I do before Google?!”

Pulling from recent memory, I could not immediately come up with that answer. So, I decided to Google it – because I cannot think of a better way to get the answer I’m looking for. My initial search of “what did we do before Google” brought up a long list of editorial articles in which other people have asked the exact same question. I started to see names like “AskJeeves” and “MSN Search” that jogged my memory. I remember they were hard to work with, but the best I had access to at the time. As I continued to read through various editorials, one sentence caught my attention – a blog post titled “Do We Rely on Google Too Much?” 

In the post, the author Gordon says, “their sudden and surprising decision to axe Google Reader, throwing RSS fans across the globe into chaos, it makes you wonder if we’re starting to rely on their services just a little too much for our own good.” My answer to that question is yes, absolutely. I rely on Google not only for daily searches, but also for personal email service and driving directions.

It is hard to imagine what I would do if Google decided that Gmail was no longer relevant. I have years of information stored within my Gmail account that would need to be relocated. Not to mention updating every subscription I have used my Gmail username to receive notifications (i.e. school, banking information, personal contacts, etc.). In addition, how would I know directions to drive somewhere without Google Maps? Sure I could find another map site, like MapQuest, and I could create a new personal email with Yahoo, but the time to switch these behaviors and use a new service that may not be as good is not something I want to do.

I have come to terms with my reliance on Google. I do not plan to use a different provider until Google decides they will no longer offer the services I regularly use. And just in case they do decide to get rid of Gmail or Google Maps, I know I can join other mourners at the Google Graveyard and leave a flower in the application’s memory.