In short what this means in the online advertising world is that it is OK to embark on a strategy that just looks at promoting your business brand. Actually, it’s more than ok, it is a must.

You see the habits of off-line purchase decision making and online purchase decision making are very similar in many ways. I think we need to get out of our heads that off-line and online advertising are at 2 different ends of the spectrum. We also need to stop thinking about online advertising as clicks on ads.

A recent study performed by ComScore (adage N.Y) studied 139 online ad campaigns by marrying data from its panel of U.S. internet users with shopper data, found online ads, even when they didn’t result in a click, increased a consumer’s likelihood of making a purchase at an advertiser’s retail store by 17% and increased visits to a marketer’s website by an average of 40%.

What they are saying here is that your awareness of brands you spot as you travel the web stay with you long after you leave the computer and go about your daily life. What you want is for your clients to have brand recall of your products and services over that of your competitors. They can’t do this if they are not seeing you online.

Yes this means get your site optimised and increase traffic to it – but it also means think laterally. Where can you brand appear online. This can be in the form of banners, rich media advertising, contributing to social sites or the standard Google Ads. What works for one company may not work for another.  Test analyse and re test – there is no secret here.

Just on a side note to those that say banner advertising is dead ….. yeah to a degree I think that the popup ads and misplaced “in your face” style has no place online. What I do love is a well thought out ad on a relevant site.

To give you an example – I drive a 1976 Kombi – I love this car and it is completely restored.

I visit the Kombi Forums often to chat and find new and better ways to keep her hummin along. It’s a very Niche site with a VERY niche market. On this site I found a well placed banner ad that wanted me to look at some amazing kombi parts on sale. …….. so I do  …….. and I find a small site that just does that, and very well I might add.

So I keep going back, and again to purchase online and have stuff sent to me within a day or 2. This business is now full-time for the guy that started and growing.

I get stopped everyday by other kombi drivers and just people wanting to buy one and everytime I tell them about the Bus Stop …… so whats my point!  – Advertise, get out there and test, analyse and build your business. No different to how it has always been.

Was reading a lead from one of our Twitter Followers about the issues facing the US newspaper industry.

I won’t go into detail, however it is an interesting read that outlines the following (quoted from The Boston.com site).

“Newspapers have been hit hard by the loss of readers and advertisers to the Internet, while the national economic slowdown has intensified the advertising slump. In recent months, the Rocky Mountain News has closed, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has significantly reduced staffing and moved entirely onto the Web, and several major newspaper companies have filed for bankruptcy protection.

The New York Times Co. threatened earlier this month to shut down The Boston Globe unless its labor unions agree to $20 million in cost concessions, including pay and benefit cuts. The Globe is on track to lose $85 million this year, executives told labor representatives.”

Personally  I like to read a newspaper from time to time, however I can’t really get the global coverage in all the areas that interest me in one paper – I guess it’s for this reason that I love being able to read online news stories from tech to business in all parts of the world. Also in another article discussed earlier here – we spoke about the new emerging market … the kids of today. They just don’t read the paper at all – that blog post here

2 things fascinated me with this article.

The first was the thought that with advancements in wireless technology and the ability to weave this into everyday life such as clothes, opens a massive door to future marketers. Already they are saying that consumers are struggling to adopt the technology that marketers are building campaigns around.

So what about the ability to have a T-shirt that you decide which logo to wear for that day, or even to choose to show a series of logos transmitted at intervals in which you receive money from the advertiser similar to that of adwords in the content network – that’s trippy.

The second thing that I found incredible was in this statement from the article;

“Within 20 years, computers will match human intelligence and pass the “Turing test,” in which they will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. But this will not be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to compete with us and displace us.

We will use these machines as we have always used our tools — to extend our own reach. We will put these machines inside our bodies to keep us healthier, and in our brains to make us smarter. We will send these computers, which will be the size of blood cells, into our brains noninvasively through the capillaries.

If it sounds futuristic to put computers in our brains, I would point out that Parkinson’s patients do this already, and the latest generation of this FDA-approved neural implant allows new software to be downloaded into the computer in the patient’s brain from outside the body.

That’s today, and in the future we will all be doing this with millions of such computers in a noninvasive fashion. So we will need to merge with our technology in order to keep up with it.”

Love this idea or hate it – the reality is that we are not going regress and that evolution is a part of life. What I struggle with sometimes is that I am living in a time where evolution is happening in front of us. Rather than read about evolution in text books like we did in school – we are now in present time with it, and I will get to witness or even take part in the fact that a small blood cell size computer may be placed into my body to make me smarter, stronger, faster …

Wasn’t there a guy called Steve Austin that  had all of this about 30 years ago?

This post is about “How to screw up your Brand Power”. We have several companies here in Australia that deal in electronics, whitegoods, furniture – so they are the bare bones of retail if you will. These companies obviously push their brand heavily in the traditional media such as TV, papers and mail drops.

Now there is nothing at all wrong with this (all businesses need to push their brand in areas that give them that brand recall over a competitor), however it is the way they do it.

Let me give you an example. Harvey Norman is one of these large companies that run loads and loads of ads in prime time TV spots, I think they offset the cost in the ad placement by producing the worst ads possible . The ads they put on have to be some of the cheapest and most annoying. Now before anyone says “ah ha – but see you’re talking about them in your blog so it must be effective”……..  keep reading. Bad publicity is not always good publicity.

So these ads are basic primary colours with incredibly cheap graphics and VERY loud screaming about how you MUST go and buy from them. (It’s kind of like when your parents would yell at you I guess) . So we have Loud, Ugly and Offensive.

Now in this house (my home) these ads get muted and we all talk to each other (quite nice really). No one in the family engage these ads. I have 3 kids 15, 10 and 7 and they hate these ads (if you’re not sure on the implications of upsetting this lot then read this post – Your market in 2014

These ads are so disliked that I know I never bother with the company when I need anything and I know my kids (their future market) think they are worthless and don’t relate to them at all.  On top of that – this generation  really network. And one of the most talked about topics by this generation is ….. anything that is cool (check out Tumblr if you want to see a young generation micro and reblogging ) You could say that this is the “Wisdom of the gen Y crowd”. They all listen to each other and their opinions of, and about each other matter incredibly.

OK so that is the TV – as for the mail drops there is another interesting area. The graphics ! They’re ugly and again with the primary colours blah blah – but also not a hint of green (as in environmental). Not recycled paper, or commitment to helping anybody but themselves. This doesn’t go down well with the next gen.

They are not happy we have been screwing the planet up and they DO relate to companies that show a commitment to helping fix the balance.

I talk with and watch how my 15 year interacts with her friends and what I find incredible is that if they like the way a company does business they actually back it. Of course this is subjective, however that’s the point – if your business is targeting the next gen that are environmentally conscious (and there are loads of them) then think about how you can improve in this area. If they are tech savvy then how do you do this so they want to talk about you.

By the way – these are not easy areas that you can fake – they smell that a mile away. Start by making the changes now, bit by bit and you will find a very loyal following and strong client base in the years to come.

Just a quick hats off (so I’m not all negative) to Target for one of their latest ads. Beautifully shot stop motion techniques with fantastic colours utilising bed sheets and products that look almost like a real life animation. As a result – that target ad  was discussed lots by my daughter and friends and the company has become one step closer to becoming cooler in my 15 year old eyes.

{steps down off the soap box and packs it away}

We are very close. Each day we test we realise we can make the interface and ability to purchase ads easier to use.
The irony is here that the simpler we make it for the user – the more complex the back end and code needs to be. It’s all for a good cause though!

Just to recap – the one thing that has bugged us over the years is the ability to understand exactly what it is worth to advertise on any given website. Many of you will have found a great site that really targets your precise demographic, only to find that you can’t get a reply on the advertising prices, they don’t know what it is worth, don’t offer any advertising or just price themselves out of the markets (YES … $10,000 is too expensive for 10,000 impressions).

I love the saying that if something bugs you, spend 5 minutes on how to improve it. If you can come up with a way to improve it in that time then you could be onto a good thing. Well here t WSM we ahve spent 12 months on it, so you know it is going to be great.

The short of it is that we have developed a score for each website that want to participate in the ad network. Each website that want to show ads on their pages (relevant ads mind you – not the crappy bingo type * sorry bingo guys) will receive a score out of 100. This score is known as an AQR™ – advertising quality rank™.

So the higher the AQR™ the more it will cost to advertise, but at least you also know how many visitors, the stick time, page impressions ….. even a score for how well a site is designed.

These factors plus dozens more make up the AQR™ which in turn allow you to browse our network and effectively benchmark sites at a glance BEFORE throwing money at them. Obviously we will provide weekly reports on how many impressions and click throughs etc just to make sure you understand the ROI for each campaign.

You can book the ads direct through us and even organise the creation of your creatives (if you don’t have any). We would like to think that any company looking to increase their brand recognition, promote a new service or sell products can spend 15 minutes in our network and spend a percentage of their online ad budget without any guesswork.

Your right ….. this is not new – in fact the IAB has reported here that Internet advertising revenues reached $5.8 billion for the first quarter of 2008, showing that advertising online will become the norm for most businesses. What we are doing is trying to simplify things to make your adplacements as profitable and effective as possible for you organisation – transparency, that’s what we are going for here.

Stay tuned….. just a bit longer

Here at White Space Media we find ourselves needing (and wanting) to stay updated on all the latest happenings in the search engine world and online advertising industry. When compiling our research we often find useful slices of information that may help you make your business decisions or formalise a market strategy. This is where we plan on posting all of this information – on the WSM ad Blog.

As far as we are concerned there are 3 main areas to the online ad world.

• SEO – search engine optimisation/ marketing
• Social Media Management
• Media Buying and creative advertising

Obviously you can then break each of these down into hundreds of sub categories, but the purpose of this we will try and categorise as much as we can into one of these three areas.

If you find something that you think we need to talk about then by all means shoot us an email by visiting our contact page.

Thanks for visiting and we look forward to keeping this area full of helpful information.