Can your prospects and customers sum up your product or service in a single word?
If not, your product or service is not a brand.
For each additional word it takes to describe your company’s products and services double the amount of competitors you will have to defeat in order to earn a share of your target audience’s attention let alone wallet.
Most businesses think their homepage is the single most important page on the web and rightfully so.
However, for any business other than those with a well established offline brand and a corresponding branded domain name, such is not the case.
The Single Most Important Place On The Web
Why?
What happens to those businesses without well established brands who’s prospects or customers don’t know exactly where to find them online?
They first ask for directions from Google, the single most important page on the web.
Watching a college football game for the first time in what seemed like years, I noticed an innovative brand advertising placement from Allstate Insurance.
Brand Advertising Impression Goals
Apparently field goal net advertising has been in use for several years but tonight was the first time I noticed a brand’s ad there.
With the price for the consumers attention at an all time high, will we soon see more innovative brand message placements in traditional media like those now appearing in college football field goal nets?
When will the NFL start leasing their field goal net “real estate” to brand advertisers like Allstate?
Surely NFL field goal advertising is imminent.
What other traditional media consumer attention zones could become potential brand advertising hot spots?
comScore has released a study in conjunction with dunnhumbyUSA showing online advertising to be on par with television advertising in growing retail sales of consumer packaged goods brands.
From the comScore release:
Over the course of twelve weeks, online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 percent of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9 percent. This compares to an average lift of 8 percent for TV advertising as measured by Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) and published in their seminal research paper “How Advertising Works.”
Offline Sales Lift
comScore Executive Chairman Gian Fulgoni had the following comments about the comScore/dunnhumbyUSA research:
“These early results confirm the ability of online advertising to successfully build retail sales of CPG brands on par with the impact of television advertising. It is likely that the more precise targeting ability of the Internet – especially in terms of accurately reaching the desired demographic segment — is a key reason for its effectiveness. That is meaningful in and of itself, but when you take into account the fact that online advertising is generally less costly than television, these results take on even greater significance.”
Hernan Lopez, COO, Fox International Channels and dot.Fox Networks commented:
“While there is no doubt that advertising can increase sales, measuring that effect is very hard to do. comScore and dunnhumbyUSA’s robust methodology has without question achieved that goal and puts online display in the select club of media that can generate measurable sales in the short-term and build brands in the long term.”
I expect to see more studies like this one from comScore/dunnhumbyUSA comparing the effectiveness of online display advertising to other major media’s display advertising counterpart – particularly television’s – from both Madison Avenue and the Online Advertising Industry over the next several years.
Online display advertising will eventually have its day – when that day will arrive still remains to be seen.
Last week, I wrote about how Microsoft’s was buying ads on Google to promote its new search engine Bing.
With Bing’s launch, Microsoft said it planned to target four distinct categories: shopping, local, travel and health.
Today while logged into my Gmail account, I noticed the following Google Adwords ad for Bing targeting local search.
Bing Local Search Decisions
The Official Bing site ad reads: Local decisions. Get Pricing, Maps and Reviews For Local Businesses.
Clicking the Bing ad takes visitors to Bing.com/Maps site where the Bing search box is prepopulated with the “Business, category and/or location” prompt.
Bing Business Category or Location
Upon entering a business name, Bing presupposes my search is for a local business and provides a list of results from my city.
Bing Local Business Search
Entering a business category produces search results from the same locale as the business name search.
Bing Local Category Search
A Microsoft brand search produces a list of businesses that apparently carry Microsoft branded products within the same locality.
Bing Local Brand Search Microsoft
Any predictions on how this search / search arbitrage will pan out for Microsoft’s Bing?
Google commissioned OTX, an independent marketing research company, to conduct research to better understand the impact of search impressions on travel brands, specifically the Air, Hotel, Car Rental, Cruise and OTA Travel Categories.
The primary objectives of the OTX project were to determine:
1). Whether or not a search ad can impact key branding metrics.
2). Whether or not a search result’s placement matters.
The study was conducted in an online controlled “laboratory” format that mimicked a real search experience. Subjects were exposed to 1 of 12 search engine results pages (SERP) each of which showed the same search results and differed only where the test brand’s ad or organic listing appeared.
The results of Google’s Brand Value of Search study are available on YouTube.
In what may be a first from a major brand, Skittles has begun experimenting with integrating community comments and inputs into its online presence via Twitter Search and RSS feed.
The Skittles.com website has become a mashup of the brand and its community’s Tweet stream.
I am not sure what the short term or long term implications will be for the brand, but one thing is for sure this particular mashup approach is innovative by any definition.
Skittles.com
In exchange for participating in the new Skittles.com website, visitors are asked to simply provide their birthday.
Skittles Audience
I suspect by day’s end with this simple request Skittles will have a more clear idea of who their online audience is vis-a-vis their average age.
Seems Skittles should have also asked whether their visitors were male or female – unless of course Skittles assumed the majority of their online visitors were going to be male.
The new Skittles home page still has a navigation box in the upper left hand corner where visitors can reach the brand’s website.
Taste The Rainbow
After being on the site for a while I received the following dialog box:
Return to Skittles Home Page
Unfortunately, I wasn’t ever able to reach the traditional Skittles.com home page from my Mac with Safari or Firefox browsers.
I guess I will have to Tweet my experience with the new Skittles.com website on Twitter.
Over the weekend I noticed some of my clients Google Adwords ads – not YouTube Sponsored Video ads – began displaying in YouTube search results.
I don’t recall seeing or selecting YouTube search as a distribution option in my Adwords dashboard.
However, I think distributing brand related keyword ads to YouTube search results is a logical evolution in both the Google Adwords text ad distribution platform and YouTube search.
According to comScore, if YouTube were to stand alone it would be the second largest searched site after Google itself.
Where will Adwords advertisers soon find YouTube as an ad distribution option in their Adwords account?
Will they find it under the Networks and Bidding options?
Google Networks Bidding
Or will we see it after learning about the Google Search Network?
Google Search Network
Its not yet in the list of Google Search partners today but I it soon could be…
Google Search Network Partners
Unless of course, Google’s ownership of YouTube doesn’t technically require them to identify and disclose YouTube as a search partner.
I guess Google’s considering YouTube an extended part of Google search would still be technically correct.
Won’t we soon learn which path Google has chosen?
I don’t know what to think of the following two brand images which appear strikingly similar to each other.
Barack Obama Twitter
Barack Obama
Pepsi
Refresh Everything – Pepsi.
Which brand has borrowed and blended their image from the other?
Search Marketing Communications 
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