Mowing the Digital Landscape

Marketing to kids, especially young children between the ages of 2 and 12, is a necessity for certain companies such as breakfast cereal producers, toy manufacturers, and fast food restaurants. As a marketer I understand the need to reach a target audience with a relevant message that leads to an increase in sales. It’s part of the job. And the job pays the bills.

The question is how much is too much when it comes to marketing to children? A recent report by the Federal Trade Commission found that 44 major food and beverage marketers spent $1.6 billion to promote their products to children under 12 and adolescents ages 12 to 17 in the United States in 2006. The report also cited an increased use of “integrated advertising campaigns” featuring traditional media (radio, television, magazine & newspaper) along with packaging, cross-promotions and sweepstakes. Upon release of the study, FTC Chairman William E. Kovacic called “on both industries to deploy their talents to promote healthier choices for children and adolescents.”

So how have the food and beverage companies responded to the call of Mr. Kovacic?
Burger King, on their kid targeted Web site Club BK, now features the tagline “Hey kids, this is advertising” on the home page. Apparently, Burger King believes the issue is not that they are marketing too aggressively to children, but that kids are just too dense to understand that they are being marketed to. By making their tactics more obvious five year olds will finally realize that it is just advertising and begin to make intelligent choices about their viewing and eating habits. They might even subscribe to The Wall Street Journal while they’re at it. Or take up jogging to lose those last few annoying pounds of baby fat.

My suggestion is that you do the opposite of what BK did and take the high road when it comes to marketing to children. Be prudent in how you present your product and with whom you cross-promote it. Trust me, there will be plenty of opportunities to reach them again as adults in the no-holds barred marketplace of the 21st century. But until they reach an age of consent, let them hold on to their childhood with their innocence and allowance intact.

Looking for a way to attract the attention of male consumers between the ages of 18 and 34? Try a “simulated live response mechanism.” What’s that you may ask. Let me inform you. It’s a viral marketing piece that looks and feels like a voyeur site, in which viewers type in commands and then watch the actors on screen fulfill those wishes.

Sound like a gimmick? Check out two viral marketing campaigns that leveraged simulation videos to successfully attract over 10 million viewers in less than a month. The first is the Subservient Chicken by Burger King. 

Image courtesy of www.subservientchicken.com/

The second is the Virtual Bartender by Beer.com. Both viral videos allow the viewer to ask the chicken/bartender to do things from dance, pour a drink, or something a little more risqué.

http://www.beer.com/virtualbartender1/

Take a look at both pieces and then decide for yourself if this could work for your company’s marketing communications plan. Type in something odd and see what happens. Both are prepared to handle even the wildest requests, sometimes with action, other times with humor. Regardless of your opinion of the content, there’s no denying that they provide at least a few minutes of entertainment.

While men 18-34 are the target here, you can imagine a tamer piece for children that allows them to control Sesame Street’s Mr. Noodle; or a virtual housekeeper that fulfills the wishes of a homemaker that could use an extra hand. Think about ways in which you could feature your product or service using a simulated live response mechanism. It doesn’t have to be as irreverent as the scantily clothed Virtual Bartender; but then again if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Have some extra time on your hands?  Then crowdsourcing may be an exciting option for how you can fill it. Coined by Wired Magazine’s Jeff Howe in 2006, the term refers to “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

Image courtesy of myskitch.com/carllens/crowdsourcing

In other words, if you run the research and development arm of a large pharmaceutical company, and are paying thousands (if not millions) of dollars on finding a solution to a problem, you can now post that problem on a site like InnoCentive and ask folks outside your company to take a crack at it for a much smaller price. The benefits of crowdsourcing to companies are obvious. Lots of qualified people send you solutions to your problems for a very low cost.

What I’m curious about is the return on investment for the members of the crowd offering up their skills. In Howe’s initial article on crowdsourcing, he describes a case in which iStockphoto.com was putting the pinch on professional stock photographers. The folks that submitted and sold rights to their photos on sites such as iStockphoto tend to do it as a hobby. Therefore they are happy to receive a few extra bucks in return for work they probably would have done anyway.  Professional photographers, on the other hand, are selling their photos for a living, so their price is much higher.  Online stock photo services that utilize crowdsourcing make it impossible for professionals to match the bargain prices.

Is crowdsourcing really a sustainable model for solving your company’s problems? I doubt it. Before long, the amateur photographers posting their pics on iStockphoto are going to want to get a fair price for their work. Once they sell a few pictures, ego comes into play. Well, if the professional photographer down the street is making $100 per stock photo, why should I continue to settle for $1?

Image courtesy of www.billcasselman.com

I predict the same will happen with the engineer or chemist that is currently exercising their brain in the evenings by working on a solution for a problem Procter and Gamble presented on InnoCentive. Smart people usually don’t get to be smart by accident. They do their homework. Soon they will realize that the $10,000 they received for helping a Fortune 500 company make a few extra million dollars is not the best they can do. I see the cost of crowdsourcing inflating over the next ten years and becoming less and less of a tactic for saving money. It may very well live on as a sound method for answering tough questions, but companies will have to start paying more for the answers.

As the media landscape changed over the past decade, one medium that has struggled to keep up with the emergence of the Internet is the newspaper.  What was once the sole method for millions of people to read about the news of the world, the newspaper is now being pushed aside by 24-hour cable news networks and real-time Web sites.  Why wait until tomorrow morning when you can visit CNN.com and find out what’s happening right now? 

An example of a company that is attempting to stay relevant in this rapidly changing market is Media General.  As a media company built upon the shoulders of their newspaper outlets in the Southeastern United States, change has not come easily. A rapid decline in overall revenues, including a 13.8% drop from August 2007 to August 2008, has forced the company to reinvent their business model.  It is a vivid example of the necessity for some traditional media outlets to make tough decisions regarding their core business in order to survive.

What Media General decided to do was adopt a strategy of convergence in which all of their properties (newspapers, television stations, and interactive media) agreed to share information, contacts, and stories. Another change they made was to post breaking news on their Web sites immediately, implementing a “Web-first” strategy, instead of holding their stories in order to sell more newspapers.

The result has been a continued drop in newspaper revenues, a break even on broadcasting revenues, and a 5.7% increase in interactive media revenues.  Media General hopes that someday their interactive media and local advertising revenues will generate a large enough profit to keep the company afloat, but so far the response from investors has been lukewarm.

Media General is not alone in trying to find ways to increase profits without completely abandoning the newspaper business from which they spawned.   One tactic that has been growing in popularity among media companies is transitioning from a model of providing free online news content to one that requires payment or proof of subscription in order to access feature stories.

Since 2004, the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington has been charging non-print subscribers $7 a month to read their content online. Over the course of a year, the paper attracted roughly 1,000 online subscribers and increased their Web traffic by 50 percent. 

The New York Times followed suit by offering “TimesSelect” for $50 a year. For the fee, readers were able to access the Times’ Op-Ed pieces and featured columnists, as well as download 100 additional articles per month. In two months, over 270,000 consumers signed up for the service. Over half of those consumers were not subscribers to the NY Times print edition (Robertson, 2006).  Unfortunatly, the initial success of TimesSelect did not last.  The media company shut down the service exactly two years after its launch. 

In both cases the newspapers were able to attract additional sources of revenue that had not existed before. In addition, advertisers were more willing to place ads on the subscription pages because of the amount of information they could gather about the consumers during the registration process.

I would not be surprised if other media companies began implementing a similar strategy in order to bolster their falling print revenues.  What do you think?  Am I way off on this one?

What is the last banner ad that you remember clicking on?  Having a hard time recalling it?  Then I’ll make the question even simpler.  What is the last banner ad you remember seeing?  I asked myself these same questions after reading about a 2006 eye-tracking study conducted by the Nielsen/Norman Group.  The results show that consumers have trained themselves to focus strictly on the content of a page, ignoring the banner ads that may surround that content.  This phenomenon is now referred to as Banner Blindness.  And I must admit that I’m suffering from it.  It’s a good bet that you are too.

Marco....Polo

Image courtesy of smallbusinessnewz.com 

What are the repercussions of Banner Blindness to marketing professionals?  Well, for those of us working on a limited or fixed budget, we need to utilize tools that provide as much bang for the buck as possible.  With click-through rates between .3 and .5 percent, the CPM for banner advertisements are dropping.  This means that more and more advertisers are able to afford to place a banner ad on a Web site.  Increased noise in the banner advertisement space, along with a low click through rates, makes it hard to justify using them as a way to build a significant customer list.  Brand building maybe, but not customer conversion. 

Should you decide to ignore the trends, there are a few ways to increase the return on your banner advertisement investment.  First, place your banner ad next to the right scroll bar.  A University of Michigan study revealed that banners in this position generate a 228% higher click through rate than ads placed at the top of the page.  Second, move your ad down the page, about a third of the way through.  The same U of M study noticed a 77% higher click-through rate when they are placed there instead of the top.  Finally, use a graphical ad featuring contrasting text and colors, ala Target.  Kara Pernice Coyne of the Nielsen Norman Group says that “I hate to sound boring, but (it is best) if you can make sure your ad is something simple, text or a recognized logo, and it needs to be relevant to the page.”

For my money, I’ll stick with paid search.  “People do look at sponsored links on search pages and images on search pages,” said Pernice Coyne.  “They really look for words that match what they are searching for.”  Duh!  In my opinion it’s always better to provide information to consumers that are looking for your information.  Banner ads rarely accomplish this task, but a paid search result puts your brand in front of the consumer right when they ask for it.  The more you can meet the needs of your target audience the more likely those consumers are to embrace your brand, buy your product, or patronize your service.  Now if only someone could develop a pay-per-thought marketing tool.