How samosas helped me to be a better marketer
Not everything should be advertised with cupcakes.
In my travels around the interwebs lately, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in online advertising: Cupcakes.
Today alone I counted 14 different online ads, for 14 different products (none of them cupcakes or even bakeries, by the way), which featured brightly coloured images of cupcakes.
How to choose the right ad network
Not all online advertising networks are created equal.
There are hundreds of ad networks in Canada (or serving the Canadian advertising marketplace); thousands (and even hundreds of thousands) around the world. Some are huge and focus on a specific target audience, like Intergi; others, like Redux, focus onniche content with a broader range.
Going beyond the YouTube video + Superbowl ad
It happens every year: A huge amount of hype about all the fantastic Superbowl ads, one or two that get ‘banned’ (frankly, my advice to a client with a limited media budget would be to simply produce a spot that was so totally over the line that it got banned, like, ASAP – virtually guaranteeing a zillion views online without having to spend the GDP of Micronesia to put it on air) – and then…meh.
Sure, the Volkwagen Darth Vader spot was pretty good – I admit I liked the ending – and you can’t beat 24+ million views in under a week. But the Kim Kardashian Skechers spot was just painful.
At first, this Snickers spot wasn’t grabbing me, either:
I don’t mind the premise of these Snickers ads – where a whining celebrity turns out to be a real person who’s just a little ‘hangry’ (that’s ‘hungry’ plus ‘angry’).
Credibility Shift: The halo effect of online ads for big brands
Remember when ads ‘cheapened’ your website? Now they can actually help build credibility.
The other day we talked about how marketers are leveraging YouTube celebrity and how the relationship between YouTube celebrities and their fans is much different – and much more personal – than their relationships with A-list movie and tv stars. When YouTube celebrities take a few thousand dollars to promote something, the YouTube community gets angry and calls them ’sellouts’; when Beyonce takes a few million dollars to promote something, fans don’t think twice about it.
Okay, fine: We all know the internet has changed the way people think about their relationships with brands – remember The Cluetrain Manifesto? But if you’re over 40, you probably don’t realize just how dramatic the shift has been. Here’s a comment thread I saw on YouTube on the subject:
Continue reading Credibility Shift: The halo effect of online ads for big brands
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Chris Patheiger is a Vice President of Business Development at Redux Media, a leading international online publisher network of top-quality, specialty websites and media representation firms. Chris is responsible for Communications, Sales and E-Publisher of TheMediaPath.comonline advertising Blog. He can be reached at chris@reduxmedia.com
Will Agencies "Exchange" Networks and Go to the Market?
I used to think “nexus” was a word I would only use in conversation with my Trekkie friends. But now, it seems we’re fast approaching a nexus point for online ad networks, and William Shatner is nowhere in sight.
Over the last four years, we have seen the birth and rapid assimilation of the advertising exchange across the industry. The ad exchange model, for those of you who are new to this, is a marriage of an ad serving solution for networks with a marketplace. This enables all advertisers and publishers connected to the marketplace to share both inventory and sales, thus increasing their reach and eliminating unsold impressions. The major players in this arena are Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange and Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange.