What’s Fresh?

Here at Geary, we like to cap off each week with an Innovation Session – an informal meeting with food, drinks and a presentation from the front lines of interactive marketing.

Last Friday, we chose to explore the various ways that Barack Obama and John McCain are marketing themselves online — with a particular focus on Web 2.0 strategies.

We tried to keep the presentation non-partisan, but it was difficult because Obama has made aggressive social media efforts his trademark. He has an active presence on MySpace, Facebook, and niche social networks such as Faithbase and BlackPlanet; active accounts on Twitter and YouTube; text message updates; an active social network at my.barackobama.com; and much more. McCain also has a social network on his main domain and presences on the big social networking sites, but his presence on Twitter and niche social networks is bare-bones compared to Obama’s, and he does not have a text messaging program.

We hypothesized that Obama’s aggressive efforts are primarily a function of the citizens he’s trying to reach — young people and first-time voters, as well as independent voters who spend time on niche online communities. We’re guessing that Obama has found that online efforts are a cost-effective way to reach new, disaffected and undecided voters — and he has the deep pockets to back up these efforts.

Here are some fun facts about each candidates’ online efforts:

• My.barackobama.com, Obama’s in-house social networking platform, is run by Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook.
• Obama’s various websites get about 20 million visitors a month, compared to 4 million a month for McCain-affiliated sites.McCain is much more active in paid search advertising than Obama. At one point, McCain was bidding on 226 keywords, compared to only 174 by Obama.
• Obama ran 17 negative paid search ads, while McCain ran only three – the opposite of their general strategies, where McCain’s advertising ran much more negative than Obama’s.
• At present, Obama’s infomercial has 1.6 million views on YouTube. This is significant reach, but it’s dwarfed by the 33.55 million people who watched the infomercial on TV.

To learn more about this topic, you can view the full PowerPoint presentation.

I also recommend “Obama’s Wide Web” from the Washington Post and this article from MediaPost, which gives details about the candidates’ paid search strategies.

As we recently mentioned two of Geary Interactive’s very own were sent to New York to compete against Crayon in a hotly contested agency shoot out at the iMedia Financial Summit.

Hot off the presses - Geary Interactive pulls off the win for their fantastic use of strategy and understanding of banking clients.

Check back for a video and write-up from iMedia about the event and congrats to the whole iMedia team for their hardwork.

On the drive to work this morning I heard a radio spot for the new Starbucks Vivanno smoothies.  The radio spot offered a very simple message that stated that the smoothies were now available.  The spot peaked my interest, however I had more questions that I wanted answered.  I was curious about different flavors and the nutrition information.  Once I got to work, I searched Starbucks to try and find the additional details I desired.  Sure enough, when i click on the Starbucks link all of the information I was looking for was conveniently located on the homepage which was wearing a Vivanno skin.  I didn’t even have to sift through the site to find out that the smoothie came in two flavors and was a healthy option.

The radio spot could have simply offered the information and taken out the interactive piece, but if it was a billboard or a poster in a bus stop the creative would be compromised to add all of the details that someone may require.  Not to mention that driving a consumer to the Starbucks site helped to engage the customer and possible cross-sell them on something else the company had to offer.  This piece showed a great example of how a company was leveraging all of their marketing assets to reach a goal.  Utilizing offline efforts to drive people online and vise versa is an important piece to any successful marketing campaign.  And yes, the smoothie was very tasty                                                                     

Veoh is known for breaking new ground in the online space, but their new advertising program could revolutionize the way advertisers purchase advertisements online and how consumers are exposed to them.  The program (being release out of beta today) will group viewers into buckets based upon their past searching, tagging, commenting, and viewing activities.

One could ask if a user watches videos online that fit into their true interests or if they primarily watch pieces that are considered viral (have you seen the water skiing chipmunk?!)?  For YouTube this may be true, but Veoh offers the largest library of online TV resulting in more interest based viewership.  Veoh is even claiming that during beta the program’s ads preformed twice as well as the non-targeted versions.

It will be very interesting to see how this technology develops and what it does to Veoh’s position in the industry.

Online advertising is all about targeting…behaviorally, demographically, geographically (you get the picture). The more ways that marketers can segment their audience, the better; so is there still a need to craft advertisements that appeal to the population at large? Does anyone still broadcast their marketing messages anymore?

Looking to TV outlets for a comparison, there seems to be a struggle between two camps about whether catering to segmented audiences is a wise marketing choice. Take CBS for example. This network has CSI in its arsenal–touted as the most watched TV show across all segments–and is starting to experiment with highly specialized/targeting programming with shows like Swingtown.  The network has a broad reach and is arguably a great route for a marketer to reach a wide consumer base, but today’s Advertising Age article reports that advertisers are shying away from placing ads within Swingtown for fear of being equated with the shows promotion of “unconventional” lifestyles. 

From a targeting standpoint, this should be a good thing because the viewing audience is more clearly defined. What if research shows that the consumers of your product are watching this show? Does the general perception matter if you are reaching your target market? I would say that the old adage is false; what is good for the gander is not always good for the goose. Target away advertisers for two reasons: you’ll be more effective and your consumers will appreciate your relevancy. 

Why cold call when you can reach someone who is predisposed to receive your message? 

Bankrate is a great illustration of the good that can come of maintaining budgets for organic and paid search marketing — even in a recession.

As the subprime crisis hit in the third quarter of 2007, Bankrate’s advertisers faced hard times.

Even during that difficult quarter, organic traffic accounted for 75% of Bankrate’s traffic. Meanwhile, paid search brought in 14% of traffic, and partner traffic brought in the remaining 11%.

In the face of the recession, Tom Evans, Bankrate’s CEO, didn’t just maintain his company’s search engine budget — he increased it. And he’s laughing all the way to the bank.

“We believe that organic traffic is less susceptible to competitive market dynamics, and is reflected in driving higher margins to our bottom line,” Evans explained. “Organic traffic continues to grow at double digits …[unique visits] for every single month this year have been higher than the same month last year.”

Furthermore, Evans remarked, “I think the reason we do so well in SEO is we have an enormous amount of content. We have an enormous amount of tools and calculators, and I think we have done a good job from SEO with, we have got literally millions of links into the site and out of the site, and I think that it really helps.”

In other words, rather than gaming the system, Evans recognizes the value of giving searchers — and search engines — lots of great content that naturally attracts incoming links. With its wealth of interactive content, Bankrate is in a great position to continue capturing a superior share of search traffic and qualified leads.

Even in a recession, sites like Bankrate can capture search engine marketing leads at a relatively low cost per acquisition. Realizing this fact is helping Bankrate survive and even thrive during the subprime crisis.

For more about Tom Evans’ take on the value of search engine marketing, visit SearchEngineWatch.

Geary Interactive continues to prove it’s ability to provide digital marketing solutions for a wide variety of clients. Geary Interactive was named one of the top agencies offering services to B-2-B clients by B2B Magazine, and our newly acquired search marketing firm Fathom Online was also named a top search engine marketing vendor.

With our announcement yesterday about our acquisition of Fathom Online, we at Geary Interactive thought we would share the top five reasons why excited about joining forces. 

1. Search engine marketing is growing part of the online marketing mix, and Fathom has industry-leading expertise in this field.

2. Fathom has well-established relationships with all the biggies:  Google, Yahoo! and MSN.  Additionally, they have developed proprietary tools to help track and forecast market trends (Fathom Analytics and Keyword Price Index).

3. With this merger we are undeniably one of the few indepedent, integrated digital advertising agencies.

4.  We now have an full-service office in San Francisco which expands our national reach.

5. Fathom Online is as equally excited as Geary Interactive to capitalize on the projected growth of the interactive industry.

To put it lightly, we are ecstatic about this new partnership, and we cannot wait to move forward and utilize our combined industry know-how to maximize our clients’ campaigns.

Geary Interactive has acquired award-winning Fathom Online, a next-generation search engine marketing and technology services firm.  The addition of Fathom strengthens Geary’s existing capabilities and produces one of only a few truly integrated, independent digital agencies.  Moreover, Fathom Online advances Geary Interactive’s position in the industry to one of the largest independent agencies in terms of annualized billings.

Launched in 2002 and headquartered in San Francisco, Fathom Online is an acknowledged pioneer in search marketing.  The firm’s advanced search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) services, as well as its comprehensive digital marketing technology suite, including its Keyword Price Index^® – a modeling tool, and Fathom Analytics – an on-demand marketing intelligence platform, optimize multi-channel, digital media advertising programs to cost-effectively drive business results for B2B, consumer and technology marketers. 

by Andreas Roell CEO Geary Interactive

For mobile video, the time is now.

Nielsen Mobile reports 2007 saw a 198 percent increase in mobile video revenue, and a 155 percent increase in mobile video subscribers. While impressive, the company also reports that this is only a 3.6 percent share of the entire mobile market. eMarketer projects mobile television subscribers alone will number 462 million by 2012. With better video delivery platforms, faster connections, and flat-rate mobile video plans, are we finally ready for mobile video?

To adequately answer this question, it’s imperative to investigate what’s required for a pleasant mobile video experience.

Mobile devices are everywhere; they’re in pockets and purses across the world. But when a user is experiencing downtime (en route, on-hold, waiting in line) it becomes obvious that cell phones are simply not entertaining. No one ever casually scrolls through their contacts to kill time, or changes their display settings when they have nothing better to do. That’s not entertainment. This downtime is when mobile video can easily fit into peoples’ lives.

MORE

 Article published on March 4 by ClickZ