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The Grand Unified Theory of Marketing(tm) – Digital String Theory

Just as physicists and mathematicians have been searching for the grand unified theory of the universe, I have been looking for a way to tie together the disparate disciplines of marketing and advertising, a way to correlate metrics from different industries that interrelate with marketing (e.g. market research, Nielsen, etc.), a way to put all past theories in context and perspective (Michael Porter’s Five Forces, Net Promoter, etc.), and a way to explain marketing successes and failures — all in one.

My method is the scientific method – which is simply put doing experiments and making observations that either support or refute hypotheses.

A grand unified theory will also need to be able to take into account phenomena such as social networks, etc. What are the organizing principles of such; what is the value? Why now?

Using digital tools — such as search volume trends — we can start to correlate marketing spend effectiveness across different forms of media and also different advertising and marketing techniques. The example below compares eTrade and Drobo. What is most embarrassing is that eTrade, a well known brand from the first dot-com heyday, spent lots of money creating and airing TV ads which it hoped would go viral. They even paid for Superbowl ads for the last 2 years to promote the “eTrade talking babies” as you see from the 2 spikes in search volume during February of 2008 and 2009. However, when compared to Drobo (a startup company that developed a very easily upgradeable back up hard drive array), it is shocking to note that Drobo spent NOTHING on advertising and relied entirely on word of mouth and an awesome product. And their search volume is not only larger than eTrade but also sustainably larger despite zero advertising and media cost. The “totals” even suggest that the volume under the curve of Drobo is 8X (EIGHT TIMES) that of eTrade.

So if you consider that eTrade spent millions of dollars to create the TV ads and even more millions of dollars to air them on TV in order to drive interest, demand, and hopefully new customers, then Drobo can be considered to have gotten the equivalent of 8X more dollars in advertising and media – for FREE using techniques and channels other than TV advertising. So what does that say about the relative value of TV advertising compared to these other, newer techniques?

godaddy vs megan fox

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Thursday, October 29th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Ad-supported photo books

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/Xq6w7UEmbTg/hotprints-prints-free-ad+supported-photo-books

Need physical copies of some great shots, but you’re a bit too lazy to order and pay for them? HotPrints mails you free 16-page photo books, with shots pulled from Facebook, if you don’t mind some non-intrusive paper ads.

In this case, non-intrusive means the advertisements aren’t watermarked or otherwise touching your actual photos. They’re inserted between the pages, and can be pulled out, kind of like magazine subscription cards. You’d also have to be comfortable with HotPrints using “contextual” data from Facebook to target some ads at you. That means the album style you choose, the content of your profile, and region information from your Facebook account are used to target the ads, but the company claims that no identifying information is given out to its sponsoring partners. You can read more about HotPrints’ do’s and don’ts at their privacy policy.

If you’re cool with that at the cost of free, even free shipping, HotPrints’ Facebook app makes it fairly easy to pull in tagged photos of yourself or any Facebook contacts for a quickie album, with a limit of one per month. It’s a free service, requires a Facebook account (and app authorization) to use.

HotPrints [via TechCrunch]

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Friday, October 9th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

How Megan Fox got the equivalent of $50 million of Superbowl ad spending – for FREE! — the marketing of Megan Fox

godaddy superbowl ad spending led to sharp spikes in search volume every February for the last 5 years straight. Other advertisers who spent on Superbowl ads have similar lift in search volume from the TV advertising.

Source: Google Insights for Search

If you believe that lift in search volume indicates interest and intent and if you consider that each 30-second ad cost $3 million in 2009 (WSJ: NBC Super Bowl Ads to Cost $3 Million) and assuming GoDaddy’s ad did not air more than once, they spent $3 million to get their ad in front of a TON of people and to get people’s attention. Those people who saw the ad and were interested enough to take action went online and searched for more information by typing godaddy into search (see lift in search volume during February of each year) .

If we assume that it took $3 million to generate a certain lift in search we can use multiples to calculate the media dollar equivalent of any lift in search — for example, if godaddy spent $3 million to get X lift in search, then a 2X lift in search would have required $6 million of media (in a very very simplified back of the envelope estimate; it usually would cost more than 2x to get that lift) — i.e. it would have cost at least $6 million in superbowl ad media dollars to achieve a 2X lift in search volume.

So, if we now compare search volume on megan fox side by side with godaddy search volume, we will see that in Feb 2009 Megan Fox was indexing at 21 while godaddy was indexing at 12 (this is normalized to a scale of 0 – 100). So search volume on megan fox indicates she was getting the equivalent value to $6 million of super bowl media ad spend – FOR FREE — roughly 2X the search volume of godaddy in the same time period.

At the peak of her search volume in June 2009 (corresponding to the release of Transformers 2: The Revenge of the Fallen), she was indexing at 100 and godaddy at 7. This is 8x the index of godaddy of 12 during the Feb 2009 time period when they were airing their superbowl ads. This implies that she was getting the search volume that would have required the equivalent to a $24 million super bowl ad spend to achieve — again for FREE!

If you want to research futher, use the following link to bring up Google Insights for Search to see relative search volume

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=godaddy%2Cmegan%20fox&cmpt=q

In February 2008, Megan Fox indexed at 8 and GoDaddy at 8. In 2008, Superbowl ad spots cost only $2.7 million — so she had the equivalent search volume as a paid advertising spending $2.7 million on a Superbowl ad.

In 2007, Godaddy indexed at 6 during Feb 2007 Superbowl. Megan Fox indexed at 43 during the July release of the first Transformers movie — this is an 8X multiple on Superbowl ads that cost $2.6 million — or $21 million

So the perfect “product placement” of Megan Fox in the two Transformers movies garnered her nearly $50 million worth of advertising based on search volume equivalency. This does not even take into account her sustained and increasing search volume, compared to most advertisers’ search volumes which drop right back down to pre-ad levels once the ad is finished airing.

Tags: 2009 superbowl ad rates, 6 million, account, action, advertisers, advertising, attention, Bowl, cost, cost of super bowl ads in 2007, cost of super bowl ads in 2008, cost of super bowl ads in 2009, dollar, dollar equivalent, envelope, equivalent, equivalent value, estimate, example, Fallen, Feb, February, fox, FREE, front, futher, godaddy, godaddy superbowl ad spending, google, index, information, intent, interest, July, June, lift, link, Megan, megan fox, Million, movie, NBC, online, peak, period, Placement, Product, release, Revenge, same time period, scale, search, search volume, search volume equivalency, side, Source, spending, spikes, Super, super bowl, super bowl ad, super bowl ads, superbow, superbowl, superbowl ad, superbowl ads, time, TON, transformers, tv advertising, use, value, volume, WSJ, X, year

Thursday, July 30th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Twitter marketing stunt gone wrong

A Comic-Con contest hosted by Electronic Arts, the “Sin to Win” contest designed to promoteDante’s Inferno, encourages attendees to “Commit Acts of Lust” and take photos with the so-called “booth babes” and Tweet the photos to the@danteteam Twitter account with the hashtag #lust.

In response to the Tweets, the team behind the promotion posted an apology on Twitpic saying the campaign is “tongue in cheek”. Opponents, however, seem unimpressed, and have combined their efforts using the hashtag #eafail.

marketing misconceptions

- “behavioral targeting” – the belief that people’s surfing behavior will indicate what they are likely to buy — of all my surfing, only a small portion of it is related to doing product research before I buy something, and it is usually limited to the few days or weeks just before the purchase. What advertisers don’t know is how to distinguish this finite surfing behavior which IS related to upcoming purchases from the rest of my surfing behavior which is NOT.

advertising misconceptions

- “targeting” – of course some targeting is better than no targeting (e.g. after-shave ads targeted to men vs women) but even with targeting (e.g. daypart, demographics, specific TV show spot) ads are still “shot” at large audience “buckets” and do not take into account the dozens of other parameters which come into play between the awareness of a product and its purchase (e.g. I just bought a mini van and no matter how many or how accurate mini van ads are, I will not buy another mini van.)

- “reach and frequency”- reach is “how many people you beat over the head with an ad message” and frequency as “how often you do so.”

- gross rating points – an approximation of approximations of estimates of round numbers of probabilities which currently guide the spending of billions of dollars on push advertising — that’s why they call it “gross”

social media misconceptions

- “social media” – thinking that people’s conversations are a form of “media” that can be purchased or “generated” by advertising; and that there is enough of it to achieve the “reach and frequency” advertisers are accustomed to in traditional advertising.

- thinking you can appoint or delegate either by an agency or an intern your precrafted voice in to people’s conversations. (it should be you or someone with a control over issues in the company, it’s not just talk)

- thinking its just talk

- thinking people are there to listen to your marketing pitch

- thinking if you spent enough time chattering you can start selling (you have to add value or no one will buy your product just because you have good bedside manners)

SEO (search engine optimization; organic search) misconceptions

- thinking you can buy links and rise to number 1 in no time

SEM (paid search) misconceptions

- thinking people search for your advertising (people search for information)

Direct Marketing misconceptions

Contributor: Tugce ESENER

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Friday, July 10th, 2009 Uncategorized 2 Comments

“brand jacking”

fake whoppervirgin twitter account
fake Dalai Lama

it used to be domain squatting, now “bad guys” are holding brand names “hostage” on twitter, facebook, myspace, flickr, etc.

for example

100% of the uses of the “maybelline” username is NON-official

Tags: account, bad guys, brand, brand health, brand jacking, brand names, Dalai, dalai lama, domain, example, Facebook, flickr, hostage, Lama, maybelline, myspace, NON-official, social networks, twitter, username, whoppervirgin

Friday, February 27th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

http://twitter.com/acfou
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Ad-supported photo books

How Megan Fox got the equivalent of $50 million of Superbowl ad spending – for FREE! — the marketing of Megan Fox

godaddy superbowl ad spending led to sharp spikes in search volume every February for the last 5 years straight. Other advertisers who spent on Superbowl ads have similar lift in search volume from the TV advertising.

If you want to research futher, use the following link to bring up Google Insights for Search to see relative search volume

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=godaddy%2Cmegan%20fox&cmpt=q

In February 2008, Megan Fox indexed at 8 and GoDaddy at 8. In 2008, Superbowl ad spots cost only $2.7 million — so she had the equivalent search volume as a paid advertising spending $2.7 million on a Superbowl ad.

In 2007, Godaddy indexed at 6 during Feb 2007 Superbowl. Megan Fox indexed at 43 during the July release of the first Transformers movie — this is an 8X multiple on Superbowl ads that cost $2.6 million — or $21 million

Twitter marketing stunt gone wrong

A Comic-Con contest hosted by Electronic Arts, the “Sin to Win” contest designed to promoteDante’s Inferno, encourages attendees to “Commit Acts of Lust” and take photos with the so-called “booth babes” and Tweet the photos to the@danteteam Twitter account with the hashtag #lust.

In response to the Tweets, the team behind the promotion posted an apology on Twitpic saying the campaign is “tongue in cheek”. Opponents, however, seem unimpressed, and have combined their efforts using the hashtag #eafail.

Read more: http://bit.ly/10gLSr

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