Target is doing a nice job of creating consistent creative and messaging across channels (online and television). Here’s a screen shot of an ad from the homepage of CNN.com advertising the upcoming 2-day sale for Thanksgiving weekend:

Click on it and you see this page:

Target ads still recognizable even when fast forwarding on DVR

And while fast-forwarding through DVR’d TV shows tonight, the familiar red background and white stick figure running with the shopping cart flew by on a few frames. How often do you recognize an ad and/or brand name in just a few frames of DVR fast forwarding? I’ve been paying more attention to this lately and it’s difficult to recall anything…particularly in anticipation of getting back to your DVR’d show.

Here’s a clip of similar animation which it looks like Target is recycling from this 2007 campaign (found on YouTube):

Consistency is key with integrated, multi-channel marketing

The consistency of the creative of these ads enabled me to recall the Target campaign with HIGHLY passive viewing (browsing for news on CNN.com — which I do several times per day) and fast-forwarding through commercials on our DIRECTV DVR. I can’t think of any other ways where I’m less engaged than quickly scanning for the latest news on a website or sitting on the couch watching TV.

As marketers grow to accept a world where consumers can easily ignore their ads, it’s really interesting to see how Target is able to penetrate the barrier to recalling an ad. It begs the question: how does one test the “recall” and “effectiveness” of multi-channel marketing prior to executing the full media spend?

Traditionally, consumer panels are shown various ads and asked follow-up questions. The problem is this doesn’t simulate a real-world environment of cross-channel entertainment & news consumption.

Think big, start small, deliver quickly

Incremental releases of ads combined with analysis of ad performance in each channel are really the only way to truly optimize a campaign — especially across multiple channels. I’m still not quite sure if Target is at the level of being able to measure or test the effectiveness or recall of their ads if only a few frames of them are seen. In any case, this current campaign of theirs has worked on me to generate awareness. Now the question is: will I make it to Target for the sale and purchase something?

Apple has launched a clever new advertising campaign online and it occupied a larger-than-usual amount of real estate on the CNN.com homepage this week. I snapped a few screen shots (please excuse the headlines in the images below from CNN, but this was the current news at the time of the screen shots.):

The two ads, while physically separated on the screen, were designed to interact with each other as “PC” walks away from “Mac” from the right-hand ad to the top ad to destroy the customer satisfaction odometer:

As engaging as the ad was, I realize now that I didn’t even click on the ad — probably because I’m not in the market and already am a Mac owner (and thus fully aware of my satisfaction with the Macs I own).

After “PC” is finished breaking the odometer, the ads fade out and we see the Apple logo up top and the call-to-action on the right-hand side. Very interactive and one of the few ads I’ve actually wanted to toggle the audio ON for. Smart of Apple to default the audio to OFF as I’m usually scrambling for the pause or mute button when audio automatically starts playing when I visit a site.

An excellent way to leverage the interactive medium of banner advertising by utilizing characters originating from traditional television spots.

In a tough economy, advertising dollars are typically the first to go. On the flip side, in a flourishing economy, advertising dollars seem to be readily available without needing much justification or proof that the advertising will pay off. Why is this?

Many advertisers have no methodology for measuring the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In a flourishing economy, taking risks with a low probability for success is often encouraged in hopes of the big pay-off. In a tough economy, investing in anything (advertising, R&D, etc.) will require a great deal of scrutiny.

At SES NY in ’06 I attended an invite-only dinner with WebTrends with a group of about a dozen online marketers — some existing clients of WebTrends and some were potential clients they were wining and dining. One of the dinner guests I sat next to was Rex Briggs, co-author of What Sticks.

For anyone who thinks “advertising cannot be measured,” I would recommend reading this book. It covers concepts that online marketers should hold close to their hearts: Test, Learn, Deploy, Repeat. Many traditional marketers are used to deploying large budgets on print and TV advertising with no plan or budget to measure the effectiveness of the ad spend. They excel at developing the creative, but fail miserably when it comes to answering the simple question of “Did it work?” 

In the online world, measuring ad spend becomes somewhat easier with the various tracking technologies (particularly if you sell online). If you can definitively prove how advertising positively impacts sales (directly or indirectly), then you’ll most likely see your ad budgets remain flat in a tough economy, but not entirely eliminated like some marketers are experiencing this year.

AuctionAds.com (which we’ve been running on SuperMotors) was purchased by Media Whiz last week.

This makes me happy because we’ve been running AuctionAds for about a month and while initially we were receiving a 1.5% CTR, these days it’s down to a paltry 0.58% CTR. We are still serving the same amount of unique visitors and traffic to AuctionAds which suggests their caching system is drastically suffering. We dynamically supply keywords to the AuctionAds code to generate eBay ads that are closely aligned with the content being viewed on various pages of SuperMotors. The end result, when it works, is a highly-relevant ad which in the beginning, generated 1.5% CTR. In the display advertising world, this is quite high.

Media Whiz also owns Text-Link-Ads.com, which is a highly reliable service (albeit completely different technology) with great support. With 100% ownership over AuctionAds now, I hope they can take AuctionAds to the next level of service that it desperately needs to be a success. Right now, we continue to run the ads because they do not replace our existing ad inventory.

When AuctionAds can’t find a match, it displays the “most popular” eBay ads which typically end up being Coach handbags and designer purses — hardly relevant to our demographic of automotive enthusiasts. The continued success of AuctionAds will be an improved caching system first and foremost before any other bells and whistles. Once they nail the caching system down, then it will be almost like printing money.

This afternoon we received our beta acceptance (which we applied for a couple weeks ago) e-mail from ADSDAQ:

This comes at a perfect time for the ad networks we’re now involved with on SuperMotors. In the past week, we have signed on with Casale Media and CPX Interactive (on top of Tribal Fusion, AuctionAds, Google Adsense, and our own in-house ads).

What’s also interesting is experiencing the different interfaces each ad network has developed. Tribal Fusion’s is very, very outdated and lacks reporting and information that I’d really like to see. However, according to this article, it looks like a new campaign manager is on the way for Tribal Fusion.

I’m really excited to put the ADSDAQ system to the test and help it centrally manage all of our ad networks while simultaneously maximizing our revenue potential. I’ll post more feedback on ADSDAQ after the beta period starts as well as my experience with Casale and CPX after we have a couple weeks of traffic under our belt with these two additional ad networks.

Tribal Fusion continues to be our #1 performer to date. I’m looking forward to seeing if these other networks give Tribal Fusion a run for their money. Even if they don’t, we will have a much more diverse ad network strategy, which is always a Good Thing.