(by 1 person)
Corante Innovative Marketing Conference 2006
This session veered a bit off the "toolbox" topic to the interesting discussions that follow, especially the Pontiac marketing debate at the end with a representative from Pontiac's agency in the room.
Bill Tancer was especially engaging, with an enthusiastic presentation of his findings... I don't think I've seen somebody quite so excited about crunching data! He has some great data to work with; his company tracks the online behaviors of over 10 million people and can produce some great insights from that.
Bill Tancer, Hitwise
Online competitive intelligence firm
- Hitwise has a large body of traffic data (10 million users) and can trace traffic in any direction.
- About 75% of the top 1000 search terms are brand-related -- Bill can track these over a 15-month period, up to last week.
- There are a lot of issues in market research -- recall issues, congnitive dissonance -- that search query analysis gets around.
- Bill analyzed American Idol, then accurately predicted the results -- and he somehow got a lot of Clay Aiken fans reading his blog!
Dianne Hesson, CommuniSpace Corporation
CommuniSpace builds online communities for companies.
- "Marketing as broadcast is a declining industry."
- Harley-Davidson is a leader at building communities and getting customers to "act virally" -- they've been doing this for years.
- "Everybody should devote 10% of their marketing budget to experimenting."
- Not a fan of "fake" buzzmarketing. (such as BzzAgents, though she didn't mention it specifically)
Kevin Lee, SEMPO
Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization
- Search marketing's advantage is so relevant it doesn't feel like advertising (if done right)
- Power segmentation is increasingly important. New software can segment the market beyond keywords, bidding on different premutations (100,000s) of demographic segments and day-parts.
- "There are two kinds of marketers at the top of the search results -- brilliant marketers and total idiots." You don't know their back-end coversion costs, ROI, etc -- so they're at the top because they're very relevant, or because they're bidding way too much and their ROI is terrible.
- Kevin's blog
Heidi Lehman, Third Screen Media (mobile marketing)
Founder and VP of content acquisition
- Third Screen is like DoubleClick in the early Internet days -- selling ads on a cross-platform network.
- Immediacy is key -- the ability to reach people at the right time with the right message is crucial to the success of the mobile marketing industry.
- If the wrong message is delivered, it will be the downfall of the industry.
Hitwise blog
Fetching RSS feed... please stand bySearch ad relevance
Gripe: search engine ads that aren't relevant.
Kevin Lee: This is due to marketers not having the time/resources to do it right. Search engines do penalize bad ads... unless there are "lunatics" who overpower clickthrough scores with tons of money. In auction-based media, assuming everybody is acting rationally, it should evolve to greater relevance. As a result of this, brands get a "discount" in the paid search market -- they will rank higher at a lower cost.
Kevin Lee: This is due to marketers not having the time/resources to do it right. Search engines do penalize bad ads... unless there are "lunatics" who overpower clickthrough scores with tons of money. In auction-based media, assuming everybody is acting rationally, it should evolve to greater relevance. As a result of this, brands get a "discount" in the paid search market -- they will rank higher at a lower cost.
Debate: Creative Pontiac marketing
Max Lenderman: Pontiac ran a TV ad suggesting that viewers Google them rather than "taking their word for it." The #1 sponsored link was Pontiac, but #2 sponsored link was Mazda! Marketers are trying to experiment, but they're doing it wrong. This is "brave but foolish."Susan Hall, in the audience, is from the agency that did the Pontiac ad. They needed people to get the word that Pontiac has a fresh lineup, better quality than people think. Pontiac is a "younger" division, so they wanted wanted a more "contemporary" venue for people to look up than Kelly Blue Book -- they chose Google as something different. The result was a decent clickthrough rate with thousands of customers learning about Pontiac. They're looking forward to defining searches better in the future.
Bill's analysis of the Pontiac "Google us" TV ad
Susan's agency also did the Oprah Pontiac car giveaway.
Dianne: does the public know the 276 cars were Pontiacs, or just that Oprah gave away cars?
Bill analyzed the Oprah Pontiac promotion from a search perspective -- Pontiac got a definite bump. Then they got another bump from product placement on The Apprentice.
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