No Rush Jobs? How about getting a clue (or a process)

I had a call earlier in the week with Steve Hall from AdRants… Specifically, our PR firm wanted to introduce us as he wrote a great article on media optimization trumping creative optimization. During the call – I realized that our personalities and thinking were really right on the same line – and it was refreshing to hear that my thoughts and frustrations were not being felt alone. What was even better was the fact that Steve is a reporter now – and is no longer even active in the day-to-day “doing” that we do here at Media Two Interactive, but yet his thoughts and hopes were much in-line with ours. That all being said – I gather the excitement of the introduction had to do as much with the non-excitement of the earlier IAB call I sat in on that discussed Best Practices for Interactive Campaign Setups.

So for years I talked about how I didn’t think the IAB was doing enough to help out the industry, and now that we’ve joined as one of only 14 advertising agencies – I now understand why it is more and more important for agencies to get more active within the IAB. The presentation centered around everything from handling RFP’s to set up to whatever you would need to know to run a campaign if you were a publisher. The problem was – what stuck in my head the most was the comment that was made of “Do NOT do 24-hour rush jobs for media buyers.”

The point that was trying to be made was that when things are rushed, that’s when accidents happen the most, problems occur, etc… The reality of it is though, is agencies are typically rushed because a client is typically rushing them. Our firm tries to educate all of our clients on the benefits of having at least 2 weeks to do a media plan and buy, but the reality of it is, is sometimes the plan and buy MUST be executed within 24 hours. In which case, as part of Media Two’s “After the Buy” process, we have a set plan in place for executing these rush jobs so that errors and problems don’t occur due to time constraints.

As I now have a much greater appreciation for the IAB and their challenges of educating beginner firms as well as advanced firms, I would implore them to create a follow up series that discusses a best practice for taking the rush job… After all, everyone knows that a publisher isn’t going to turn away revenue – so let’s help them take the revenue and not mess it up. The procedure we go through here requires us to be fast and flexible, and if publishers can’t keep up, then the industry as a whole will suffer the same fate traditional marketers are going through now. Agencies - it's time to get involved so the IAB has a voice on both sides of the fence. Don't let publishers dictate all of the rules - or you may never get a rush job done again.

Search Account has “Hit its Limit”?

Some people will tell you that that can never happen…but anything is possible…and exhausting your keyword universe is definitely possible. People only use certain keywords…and only so many of them…and if you have a high enough budget to test ALL of them, you could find yourself at the end of your rope, not being able to drive anymore traffic (or should I say…relevant traffic).

If you have ever found yourself researching keywords that are as far-fetched as your budget or CPA goals can often be, here are a few initiatives you can test that will help in growing your search marketing campaigns, at the very least allowing you to increase visibility in the hopes of driving additional traffic and, in turn, conversions:

1. Create separate campaigns for content-network targeting:

This will place your ads on sites related to your product/service. You'll typically see a large increase in impressions, but as long as you use your best ads (from a CTR standpoint), you should generate an increase in traffic as well.

These campaigns should mirror your existing sponsored search campaigns and only use your top 30-50 keywords (based on conversion volume)

2. Create a separate placement-targeted campaign:

Generate a list of sites based on category, demographic, topic, etc straight from AdWords. Within this campaign, you are able to use image ads and video (depending on the site) for enhanced branding.

One campaign should target your demographic profile and the other should target sites relevant to your product “topic” or category.

3. Yahoo Search Submit Pro (aka. Paid Inclusion):

This is a cheap and relatively painless way to get your site indexed in the organic search results on Yahoo.

4. Ad Text testing:

I know this is like beating a dead horse, but if you can manage to alter your ad verbiage to garner more consumer interest, you will drive traffic and increase your spend without too much effort. Of course, there is no guarantee (as your new ads may actually turn consumers off), but it’s always worth a shot.

What's The Next Silo?

For the first 8 years of Media Two’s existence, I spent 95% of my time educating clients that interactive was truly a piece of the marketing mix. So as of about 2 years ago, I came to the conclusion that everyone now “got” that – as interactive ad dollars continued to spike while traditional budgets dwindled. The only problem was – apparently we (Media Two and the IAB and the rest of the interactive community) did too good of a job selling interactive’s benefits as everyone started throwing their money into the interactive “silo” and abandoning everything else…

When this happens, it’s great for agencies like ours in the near term, but the long-term prospect for this client is a nightmare… By putting all of your money in one silo, and ignoring the fact that people interact with multiple channels is a death sentence to your marketing mix. I think people just tend to forget that old adage that there’s always going to be a worst performer. If you remove one, the 2nd worst now becomes your worst… So how about not replacing any, but maybe just reducing until you can find the magical combination that they’re all successful? Nah – probably too much work. But seriously, by putting all of your money into one silo now means your best silo is also your worst… So what happens then?

Exactly what we’re seeing… Interactive now gets divided into it’s own silo with Search being labeled the best, and traditional banner ads getting labeled the worst. So the first thing clients start doing is looking to cancel traditional ads and only run search… Now we’re sitting on millions of dollars that have been allocated to interactive, but we can only spend it on search – and best yet, search seems to be “drying” up and we can’t spend millions anymore – we can only spend thousands… Hmm… Should we silo search now and maybe hire an agency that only specializes in 3-word key phrases?

The point is – we’ve silo’d everything, and by doing that we’ve accomplished nothing. Search is driven by other interactive exposure, and interactive exposure can also be driven by offline events such as a newspaper ad, radio spot, tv, etc… Don’t drop your marketing mix – add to it and expand on it – but do it with firms that understand marketing, not just firms that are jumping on the hottest trend and soaking up the most coin.

Thoughts on Media Optimization

I was glancing over one of my favorite Marketing & Advertising publications, Adrants, and I came across this article with an interesting perspective on media optimizations. The name of the article was Media Optimization Has Trumped Creative Optimization. The theme of the article spoke about how we, as online marketers, are forgetting the importance creative plays on the success of our campaigns with flaws in our campaign implementation, thus limiting our ability to gain learnings from a creative standpoint and act swiftly to optimize based on those results.

This brings up a good point, but before I give you my perspective on the subject, let's quickly define what it means to optimize an online campaign and some best practices. The definition of optimize means to "make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible". So, as direct marketers, we are responsible for driving desired actions as cost-effective as possible. We look at "Cost Per" metrics (CPA, CPC, CPM). We look at frontend and backend response rates (CTR, Conversion Rates). We also look at post click activity volume and traffic trends. As mentioned, based on these learning, we swiftly make adjustments.

Getting back to the article, technology has come so far to do some of the work for you. By setting rules within an adserver, the campaign will be delivered and optimized in real-time based on the aforementioned factors. This still does not cut out the manual aspect of going in and using your expertise to make the necessary tweaks.

In an ideal world, the online marketer can let the campaign ramp up and gain data to evaluate. Again, in an ideal world, the progression of optimizing a campaign would start on a creative level, then placement level (even certain creative on the placement level), and then if that fails, then the optimization would be done on a site level, which is another way of saying cancel the site.

Unfortunately, we may not have the luxury to follow this progression. A site is going from bad to worse, and your campaign goals are dots in your rear-view mirror as you head towards CPOutofcontrol. So, getting back to the question, Has Media Optimization Trumped Creative Optimization? Unfortunately, I think it has, and in many cases, by necessity to keep our promise to our clients. The promise as direct marketers to deliver conversions as efficiently as possible, and as a result, it requires us to skip steps one and two, and have the conversation that nobody likes to have with our new test partner. Let's face it, it's more work for us to start and cancel a campaign, then to start a successful campaign and let it run. But, if all campaigns were a success, then Media Two wouldn't need 48 hour out clauses.

Lastly, the article fails to mention two addition factors to rolling out a campaign with "10 or more versions of a creative unit" to go along with the incremental cost. Good design is time-consuming, which can easily become a bandwidth issue. The benefit of Media Two versus other shops is our ability to meet agressive deadlines, but creativity doesn't happen overnight. And once the concepting is done, getting your assets through the client's legal team is a full-time job in itself. My best advice is to plan ahead. Start concepting for Q3 now...sound crazy? Save yourself the headache and trust me.