Adam’s Blog

SUMMARY:

Point-of-sale advertising is a well-established tactic in retail stores. Now, some ecommerce sites are bringing this strategy to the digital world.

See how Expedia Inc. uses its Web reach to offer several display ad options to brands that want to target Expedia site visitors when they’re researching a trip or booking a hotel.

When shoppers visit supermarkets and large retailers, they’re bound to see in-store displays featuring certain brands. The brand hopes to stand out from the competition, and the store owner receives another revenue stream beyond transactions.

Why not apply this concept to ecommerce websites and offer online ad space to brands looking to target the same demographic?

That’s just what Doug Miller, Global VP, Media Solutions, Expedia Inc., and his team have done with several Expedia Inc. properties, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com and Hotwire.com. When Miller joined five years ago, the team began developing ad programs that made the most of the company’s reach into the consumer travel market.

To quantify this reach, Miller cites a few stats from a study his team conducted last year:

• In the U.S., about 188 million unique users visited a travel-oriented site between April 2008 and March 2009, representing approximately 85% of the total Internet population.
• About 114 million, or 61%, of those users visited an Expedia property.

“They are very few places – probably nowhere else – where you’re going to be able to reach an online travel audience in such a concentrated way,” Miller says.

The team felt brands would want an opportunity to advertise to this high-volume, highly-qualified audience at the point of sale. In response, they designed several advertising solutions that account for 10% of Expedia Inc. revenues. On-site advertising is now one of the company’s fastest growing segments.

Here are four of the team’s advertising programs:

StorePoint Ads

The team’s first program offered display ads that reached several Expedia Inc. sites.

The banners are shown:

• Adjacent to search results
• On the homepage
• On browsing pages
• On content pages for various destinations

“This is where Hawaii or Mexico or American Airlines will call out to you and say they have a special opportunity for you at the point of sale,” Miller says.

Impact

The team recently compiled research showing that display advertising on their sites improved performance for hotel brands.

For example, one national hotel chain noticed that about 7% of Expedia visitors visit the hotel’s site within 30 days of a visit to an Expedia Inc. property.

Adding display ads to Expedia.com lifted this number to 12.8% — an 82.8% increase in visits. And conversions lifted 191%, Miller says.

Expandable StorePoint Ads

The team later updated the StorePoint technology to offer marketers interactive, rich-media ads.

The Flash-based ads expand over content on the site when clicked, and retract to their normal size when visitors move away.

Once expanded, the ads can offer a range of functionality, including:

• Audio and video
• Data capture fields
• Interactive animation
• RSS feeds
• Calendar
• Slideshow
• Send to a friend

Miller has seen these ads perform very well for marketers. This year, his team worked with marketers for a San Diego location to host expandable ads emphasizing a 24-hour sale offered through Expedia.com.

The sale was planned for a Wednesday. The team created a benchmark by tracking six weeks of Wednesday sales, and noticed that on the day they advertised, there was a 159% lift in bookings over the benchmark, Miller says.

TravelAds

The team also offers marketers a bid-for-placement, sponsored listings program specifically designed for hotels.

Many hotels operate without large budgets. By bidding for sponsored listings in their specific regions, smaller hotels can buy affordable placement on Expedia for only the most relevant site visitors. These ads are sold on a cost-per-click basis.

The ads are featured at the top of search results pages on Expedia.com and Hotels.com for location-based searches bid on by marketers. These marketers can bid on specific locations and time periods, and set a maximum budget to control their spending.

Passport Ads

This year, the team launched a behaviorally-targeted ad format that reaches Web users after they’ve left an Expedia site.

For example, an Expedia.com visitor might search and browse for hotels in Venice, leave the site, and later see ads for Italian vacations elsewhere on the Web.

Many visitors to Expedia.com do not purchase directly from the site, Miller says. This program is about targeting advertising to visitors who’ve shown interest in travel information.

The team works with several ad networks and companies to make the program work across a wide range of websites – some in the comScore top 100, Miller says.

For this program, the team does not limit itself to only working with travel-oriented sites.

“It’s less about the context and more about the audience and reaching them no matter where they are on the web,” Miller says.

Doug Miller spoke at ad:tech New York 2009 in November.

USEFUL LINKS RELATED TO THIS ARTICLE:

Email 2.0: Travelocity Takes It Up a Notch — Improvements & Results
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=29912

comScore Media Metrix Ranks Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for July 2009
http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=404321

ad:tech
http://www.ad-tech.com/

Expedia.com
http://www.expedia.com/default.asp

Hotels.com
http://www.hotels.com/

Hotwire.com
http://www.hotwire.com/

Expedia Inc.
http://www.expediainc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=190013&p=home

SUMMARY:
Display ads that can be customized on the fly to be more relevant to the viewer are more likely to be clicked than generic ads. But customization is not always an option in every marketing plan.
You don’t have to sacrifice reach for customization any more. Find out how an advertising network is helping advertisers create localized ads that can be shown on a national scale.
National brand marketers are in a challenging position, as the power of localized marketing shows positive results. Some marketers need to reach large audiences through nationwide advertising, which makes it hard to localize the ads.
Alistair Goodman, CEO, 1020 Placecast, and his team strive to overcome this challenge–particularly for driving traffic to nearby brick-and-mortar stores. They help marketers run campaigns that are able to detect a consumer’s location and customize the ads to include localized elements.
“An advertiser can run a national campaign but actually create a large amount of local relevance,” Goodman says.
Below, we look at how 1020 Placecast’s localized campaigns work, and how they’re performing for advertisers.
> Identifying Local Targets
When building a campaign, Goodman’s team first asks marketers for a list of the physical store addresses to which they want to drive traffic. The list tells his team which regions to target and localize the advertising for.
The team also asks marketers to profile their target audience for the campaign. Then, the team examines the target regions and pools multiple sources of data to get a better idea of where exactly the target audience likely lives.
Next, given the goals of the campaign, the team can create an ad. The ad will likely have some consistent elements — such as a product image — and some interchangeable elements — such as a city name, local imagery, or the address of a nearby location.
> Location-specific Publishers
Knowing which regions they need to target, the team finds publishers that have localized content for those regions.
“We create a network of publishers that have what we call location-specific content, where we can apply our approach to targeting,” Goodman says.
These publishers might be local classified, news or events websites. Other publishers, such as travel, weather, and real estate sites, operate nationally but deliver localized content. Visitors to these sites identify themselves as either residing in or interested in certain areas.
The team works with these sites to kick start the ad-delivery for the campaigns they build. A visitor to one of the sites could identify themselves as a member of the target region by:

• Entering a departing city on a travel site
• Checking the weather of a certain city
• Accessing any type of region-specific content
• Entering a zip code
• Visiting a site that’s only relevant to one region

Once the publishers pass on that initial piece of data, Goodman’s team is able to infer the person’s location, supplement that information with their other data on that area, and deliver the most relevant ad possible.
- Mobile campaigns
Goodman’s team also works with publishers who have mobile visitors. This allows them to create campaigns for the mobile channel, and it gives them other data about a person’s location via GPS coordinates or cell tower triangulation.
> Building Local Profiles
Goodman emphasizes that his team is taking a different approach in its research. Rather than focusing on building profiles on consumer’s locations and travel habits, they are building profiles on locations.
The more information the team can gather on a specific location, the more they understand certain regions, and the better the can localize the ads.
For example, the team may discover that a site visitor is from a certain neighborhood. Neighborhoods have opaque borders and naming conventions. However, if the team had enough information to correctly determine a person’s neighborhood, its title could be used in the advertising.
> Example of Impact
Goodman’s team recently worked with Avis Rent A Car. The campaign was designed to drive people to Avis’ off-airport locations. The target audience was not frequent travelers, but people who needed a rental because their car was at the mechanic, or who needed a car for the weekend.
They were able to create a national campaign that connected ad viewers with the nearest Avis center. Ads displayed on regular websites encouraged viewers to click to see a map or book a car. Ads displayed on mobile websites encouraged viewers to click to call the nearest Avis center.
The team did A/B testing of the localized ads vs. localized ads. They saw a 50% higher clickthrough rate on the customized Web ads and an 124% higher click-to-call rate on the customized mobile ads, Goodman says.
“When you’re able to develop a relevant message, you’re able to achieve much stronger results,” Goodman says.
Alistair Goodman is speaking at ad:tech Chicago in September.
USEFUL LINKS RELATED TO THIS ARTICLE:
ad:tech
http://www.ad-tech.com/
Avis Rent A Car
http://www.avis.com/
1020 – Placecast
http://www.1020.com/

SUMMARY:

The explosion of advertising and marketing channels has increased competition for the consumers’ attention. Breaking through the noise and conveying your brand’s message has never been so hard.

Read a brand marketing expert’s take on the three factors that are essential to a well-rounded branding strategy.

The world of advertising is a noisy place. Thousands of brands compete for attention in every media channel and on every store shelf. Consumers have a multitude of choices for every purchase they make.

The marketer’s job, of course, is to break through the noise and convince consumers to buy their company’s products. Brands are used as simplifiers to quickly communicate what consumers can expect from a product without doing much research.

“People are living their lives in a very complex media, product and retailing environment. And they’re living their lives in personal rituals that help them simplify living their lives,” says Joel Rubinson, Chief Research Officer, Advertising Research Foundation. “A brand is a simplifying heuristic.”

Convincing consumers to purchase your product requires what Rubinson calls a 360 marketing strategy. The strategy’s goal is to reach consumers in whichever formats they prefer, which will vary with each brand’s audience. Each advertising channel is used to fulfill a specific role in the brand and customer relationship, and each moves customers closer to purchase.

Below, we outline three key factors that Rubinson sees in effective brand marketing in today’s cluttered market place.

> Factor #1. Brand meaning

Rubinson ran a small experiment to see the world of brands from the eyes of a regular person–not an experienced marketer. He kept a journal of every brand he encountered in a single day.

While making coffee he had to write down the brand of the coffee filters, coffee maker, and the coffee itself. When he sat down with the coffee and turned on the TV, he had to write down the brand of the couch on which he sat, the carpet on which he walked, and the television he watched.

Halfway through the day, Rubinson had a list of over 75 brands, and he decided to call it quits. The point had been made: Consumers interact with hundreds of brands each day.

However, looking over his list, he noticed that only about five brands had any meaning for him. He could not recall the attributes of any others.

– Meaningful brands are comforting

Meaningful brands tell consumers something about the product. Without brands, shoppers would have a harder time determining which products best suited their needs.

For example, Rubinson recalls that his daughter recently spent a summer in London and found that grocery shopping was more laborious because she was unfamiliar with the brands in the stores.

“When you find a brand that’s familiar, even if it’s a brand that you don’t buy that often in the U.S., you’re going to almost want to give it a hug and a kiss because you’ve found a brand that you finally understand,” he says. “And that’s because the brand has meaning to you.”

– Television is a leader

The way many brands convey meaning to their customers is through advertising, Rubinson says. Ads that reach a target audience where it’s likely to gather are effective ways of instilling brand meaning.

One of the most effective channels for this is television. Over 95% of video viewing still happens on the boxes in our living rooms, Rubinson says.

“The chances are that all of your consumers are aggregating to watch various TV shows. A smart media plan will enable you to reach them with messaging, and that messaging is important to brand meaning.”

> Factor #2. Accessibility

You must make your brand available for consumers to reach out and get more information or to ask questions. This allows for deeper, more meaningful connections with customers.

Being accessible and building meaning forces marketers into a 360 marketing strategy, Rubinson says. That’s because meaning and accessibility require two different types of marketing — and therefore, different marketing channels.

– Building meaning is a way of reaching consumers when they’re passively consuming your information — such as in between segments on their favorite television show.

– Accessibility requires being available when consumers want to find more information, whether online, on the phone, or in a store.

> Factor #3. Activation

Roughly 50% or more of purchase are made from in-store decisions, Rubinson says. That means about half of consumers’ purchases are up for grabs when they’re shopping.

Activation is the concept of making your brand extremely easy to purchase while customers make their in-store decisions. In-store, shopper marketing can be a very powerful activation tool, Rubinson says.

“Shopper marketing is like recency on steroids. You’re providing the message right at the point of purchase, and it can make a big difference.”

– Partnerships to build activation

In-store placement and marketing can be difficult and expensive to achieve. However, companies without much experience in the area are not without options. They can work with their existing marketing assets and look for good fitting partnerships.

For example, a company with a strong social media presence might have poor in-store placement. By partnering with a major consumer packaged goods manufacturer, the company can gain better in-store exposure while sharing its online social media presence, Rubinson says.

Joel Rubinson is speaking at ad:tech Chicago in September.

USEFUL LINKS RELATED TO THIS ARTICLE:

ad:tech
http://www.ad-tech.com/

The Advertising Research Foundation
http://www.thearf.org/

The results of PC Tools global survey of 4500 users are in! While consumers are aware of potential sources of infection, 74% of people are not aware of the need for behavioural based protection against online threats. This leaves them at risk from new and unknown threats on social networking sites, instant messaging services and other online communication and networking tools. As many as one in five do not understand the potential impact of some of the more dangerous attacks like zero day threats, while 41% of respondents use only one or two passwords across all the sites they visit online and 8% use only one password for all sites, suggesting respondents are not so security savvy!

On the other hand, research showed that a significant proportion of people are aware of the need for some level of security protection for their PCs with 57% saying that they have a security suite installed and 64% having their security software configured to update automatically as new information becomes available. A savvy 84% will always take action when they receive a security alert from the software they’ve installed, while 37% will verify a received link before following it…great work people!

While it’s promising to see that most respondents are security aware and have installed security products on their PCs, it seems users may be bloating their systems by installing too many security solutions.

Did you know that light or ‘point’ solutions like Spyware Doctor™ and Spyware Doctor™ with AntiVirus can help minimise the drag on systems while ensuring the level of behavioural protection necessary to keep users safe online? Point solutions also provide consumers the option of designing their own security suite by pulling together a range of must have point solutions that suit users’ individual security needs.  Alternatively, PC Tools Internet Security™ suite is an all in one solution that brings together the basic four core security functions – anti-spyware, anti-virus, firewall and spam protection for users that prefer to set and forget.

Don’t forget that even with the best security protection, the methods of cybercriminals continue to evolve every day so users should always be on guard. If you are unsure about what you need to do to protect yourself Ask Dr Greene