Unequivocal Proof That No One Has Ever Clicked On A Web Ad

We sometimes enjoy role playing. Not the French maid kind of role playing, the business kind. Not

that we have anything against French maids...Today, I am going to role play.

I am going to pretend I am a web data analyst and use the mathematics and logic

of web analysis to prove to you that no one has ever clicked on a web ad

intentionally. Sound like fun? Here we go. Last week, several

trade publications reported on a study

by Webtrends that claims that click-through rates on Facebook ads have

dropped to .05%. To those of you who were not math majors, this means that for

every 10,000 ads served on Facebook, 5 get clicked on. This is described by

Adweek "abysmal." It is worse than abysmal. It is

mind-blowingly, incomprehensibly, abysmally abysmal. But that's not the

end of it. According to a Facebook insider, the 5-clicks-in-10,000 number is

actually a gross exaggeration. This person says that the true number is

actually less than half that -- 2 clicks per 10,000. You're probably not

as unstable as I am, but maybe you've noticed something. Every now and then, as

you're wasting your life away on the web, you accidentally click on something

that you didn't intend to click on. I call this Unintended Click

Syndrome. In my case, at least half the time I find myself facing a display

ad, I had no intention of clicking on it. I got there as the result of being a

victim of Unintended Click Syndrome. According to Google,

the number of these invalid clicks" may be as high as 10% of all clicks (they define "invalid" clicks as

those that are either unintended or fraudulent.)Let's be generous here

and say that only 5% of clicks are unintended. Now let's do a little math.

If the Facebook click-through rate is 5 in 10,000 (let's be generous again

and use Webtrend's number) , and the invalid click rate is 5%, then of 500

clicks in 10,000 are invalid. It is, therefore, quite possible that all

the clicks on Facebook ads are invalid and the actual click-through rate for

Facebook ads is zero. But this is not just true of Facebook. The

click-through rate for all web ads is 1 in a thousand. If the rate of

unintended clicks is 50 in a thousand (5%) then, once again, it is possible that

the rate of intended clicks on all web ads is zero.My conclusion

-- no one has ever intentionally clicked on a web ad.

More accountability: Being the results of one exposure to an interactive programme vs traditional (frequency and reach) advertising.





　


Client: S.J. Johnson & Sons.

Brand: Raid Cockroach Control System.

Research: AGB.

"The rate of increase in the level of awareness of Raid Cockroach Control System was dramatic (61.8%) among those who saw the Event. Seeing the Raid page within the Event dramatically increased scores for Past-Four-Week-Purchase (100%), scores among people who claimed to see the page increased Future-Purchase-Intent (DWB) by 60%. Advertising Awareness increased 83.4% among main grocery buyers."

　

Client: Reckitt & Colman.

Brand: Setamol 500 analgesic.

Research: AGB.

"Findings from this Post Event Survey show impressive increases in scores for those who saw the Event in comparison for those who did not. Results are consistently superior in all three key market measures; Prompted-Brand-Awareness +92.6%, Past-Four-Week-Purchase +47% and Definitely-Will-Buy +47%."

　

Client: Duracell.

Brand: Duracell Batteries.

Research: Martyn Research.

"Unaided-Awareness (Brand-First-Mentioned) of Duracell increased by 50% for readers who saw the interactive Event. Advertising-Awareness increased 200%, correct recognition of advertising message increased 19% and purchase increased 29%."

　

Client: Roche.

Brand: Rennie Duo.

Research: City Insights.

City Insights report "A very large increase in spontaneous awareness – Control 0%, Test 10%. They also report that "Rennie Duo is a small brand BUT it has encouraging purchasing in both % Last bought & % Most often brand bought, in both cases 4% for Test & 0% for Control, additionally there was an increase in intention to definitely buy – from 0% to 6%.

　

Client: Pfizer.

Brand: Plax Dental Rinse.

Research: AGB.

"Post-Event Survey results shows that the results of Pfizer’s participation with its PLAX Dental Rinse product has raised scores on key measurements of Awareness and Purchase for the brand ranging from 73+% to 200+%."

　

Client: Colgate Palmolive.

Brand: CP Anti-Dandruff Shampoo.

Research: AGB.

"The value of the Interactive Technique has again been evidenced in the findings of this Post-Event Survey.

Substantial increases in scores for the product on key market measurements of Prompted-Brand-Awareness, Past-Four-Weeks-Purchase and Future-Purchase-Intent (DWB) have been achieved amongst main grocery buyers with ranges from 42.6% for Brand-Awareness; 200+% for Past-Four-Weeks-Purchase and DWB 600+%."

　

Client: Kraft Foods.

Brand: Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

Research: AGB.

"The Pre-Event scores on this measure (Prompted-Brand-Awareness) remained static amongst those who who did not see the Event at around 82%. This percentage rose by 12.2% to reach 92.6% amongst main grocery buyers who saw the event, additionally there was a substantial rise of 69.3% on Past-Four-Week-Purchase and 42.9% increase in Future-Purchase-Intention (DWB)."

　

Client: Leggo’s.

Brand: Plumrose Leg Ham (Canned).

Research: Martyn Research.

"Unpromted-Brand-Awareness increased +14% amongst main grocery buyers who saw the Event, Bought Plumrose Leg Ham-In-Past-28 Days increased 60%, and Future-Purchase-Intent increased 64% (DWB). Among those who saw the Event Advertising Awareness increased by 400%."

　

Client: Stuart Alexander.

Brand: Moccona Coffee.

Research: AGB.

"Prompted-Brand-Product-Awareness among all main grocery buyers for Moccona Espresso’s was increased by 36% as a result of participation within the Interactive Technique Event. A net growth of 14.3% on the Past-Four-Week-Purchase – and Next-Four-Week-Purchase-Intent was also recorded. Further, the main claim made for the brand has shown to be more persuasive to potential purchase when it is presented in the Interactive format."

　

Client: Bush’s.

Brand: Bush’s Dog Food (Canned).

Research: AGB.

"Amongst those who saw the Bush’s presentation in this latest Event, growth over those who did not see the Event was in the order of 47% for all main grocery buyers. Once again, as following previous participation by Bush’s Dog Food, there was significant growth in Past-Four-Week-Purchase +22% and growth of 25% was recorded for Next-Purchase-Intent (DWB)."

　

Client: P&O Stena.

Brand: Cross Channel Ferries.

Research: City Insights.

"City Insights report a 21% increase in the spontaneous awareness of P&O Stena. Additionally there has been a positive shift in the usage of P&O Stena +12%. Additionally there was a substantial increase in preferance for P&O Stena from 37% to 67%. There was a positive uplift in intention to use P&O Stena in the future (DNT) from 32% to 67%."

　

　

　

Game Playing and Marketing Games Offer you a Unique Way to Entertain...




-- and sell at the same time!

Whilst experimenting with social networks, user-generated content and on line video,

marketers appear content to view games as little more than another

class advertising platform. The untapped potential of game

playing lies in their ability to tell stories, thereby more closely linking

brand benefits with game play and blurring the lines between brand and

entertainment. Games, properly structured, fundamentally alter the customers

perception to the presentation and content of your marketing messages thus

making the advertisements themselves a

source of meaningful information. Games allow Brands to become

engaging, and entertaining -- thereby providing something of value in exchange for attention.

Brands such as Persil, Birds Eye and Quaker Oats have relied on game playing to create

narratives that consumers want to be a part of. In the process, they've done

more than just break through the clutter, or better position themselves in

consumer's minds. Games remain one of the biggest untapped

opportunities for marketers, for the simple fact that they are, indeed, engaging

interactive and entertaining. Well-conceived games require users' active

attention and enable them to drive the story line as they experience a world

that can be entirely of a brand's making. Games represent a unique opportunity

for brands to be the entertainment rather than just sponsor it.

So what do original games get you? If you're Quaker Oats,

you get year-over-year double-digit sales growth, as well as a

marketing program that has generated significant

revenue. So what does this mean for marketers? It

demonstrates that there's a burgeoning mainstream audience increasingly

receptive to branded entertainment in the form of original episodic games and

willing to grant brands their attention in exchange for enjoyable

experiences. Games need to be implemented strategically.

As with any marketing approach, objectives and performance expectations for

game-based marketing need to be considered upfront. Here are some things to keep

in mind: A game tends to work best as a component of an integrated campaign

rather than an afterthought. Original episodic games can

counteract this imbalance by delivering a high level of play and replay value to

consumers while putting the brand at the center of the experience.

So does a brand need to be interesting or provocative in order to make a

good game? Absolutely not. All our examples show that basic games deployed and

used well were effective at making a low-involvement category more interesting

and engaging. And implemented properly, games could address many of the

challenges facing financial-services companies -- building involvement,

generating a prospect , creating a sense of community, even delivering a positive brand halo.

　

　

The 60s! Ah that was a glittering time, advertising people ruled the business world...





 nobody was being at all difficult about their profession, nobody was

questioning the fact that advertising works, or does not, as the case may be.

There was a sense that the men were brilliant. The problem was that these

men of action wanted to act, but certainly they did not want to tell the Client

that the advertising job could not be done.

Men of action want to act. They are paid very generously to act, they have

entered advertising to act. But they couldn't tell anyone how difficult things

were, that advertising was not as simple as it appeared. So doubts were, and

still are, excluded, and the facts were altered to suit the theory.

Advertising men don't just become prisoners of their Clients. They also become

prisoners of their errors. Advertising and Marketing people never questioned

the fact that advertising and marketing never worked they just chased the

illusion that creativity was the answer to all their problems and just followed

one expensive creative person with another as logic took over from common

sense.

Make the buying of media more important; Make the production of TV

commercials more expensive; hire the current "hot" Hollywood Director; and

so it goes on.

Now the lunacy has spread to The Internet, and so it goes on. Never once

admitting that we have all been led up a one way street of no accountability.

And however independent the men may have started off, soon these men

became owners of an error they cannot admit to, advertising doesn't work. And

now even years later they cannot even in a fairly limited way admit to that.

Enhancing the theory that advertising works requires staggering amounts of

research with staggeringamounts of money, the life of the current advertising

world suggests that that is easier wished for than achieved. Because of the

failure of advertising to understand the process of communication they have

damaged a totally good "old media" whilst, at the same time, rushing onto the

Internet not understanding at all that the Internet is most certainly not an

advertising medium at all! And now Agencies are rushing onto Social Media

ignoring thefact that, as in the past, people don't want their advertising in

whatever form.

The difference here is that they can easily move away from advertising, you

have only to look at the experience of Second Life, that was to be advertising's

salvation. That's why the early adopters have moved on! And be warned, they

still don't know how to monitize the Internet..but we do!

It is refreshing to hear more discussion around the shortcomings

of social media rather than the constant proselytizing of a still baby-fresh and

misunderstood communication channel. However, possibly a more constructive way

of thinking about those shortcomings is to consider the growing gap in

expectations of what social media can and should achieve for a brand.

The IBM Institute of Business Value just published a study

comparing the differing perceptions of business leaders and consumers regarding

social sites. The most interesting find from the study was the ironic business

misperception that consumer's would rank discounts and purchase opportunities at

the bottom of their list of reasons to engage with a company's social site. It

actually ranks at the top of their list.

Companies need to design experiences that deliver tangible value in return

for customers' time, attention, endorsement and data. -IBM Institute of

Business Value.

Time and attention really are the currencies of our customers. Those expenses

are precious for them and they want something in return for it. Simply providing

conversation's will never be enough. No brand is interesting enough to entice

just by being available. Although the social space is cheaper, quicker, and

ever-present, a brand still needs to provide those nuggets of material value to

drive significant engagement.

And Interactive Communication does all that...and more! To discover more contact:

Paul Ashby on (UK) 01934 620047 or paulashby40@yahoo.com. Cell 'phone 07586259605.

Our marketing world balances on a sea of mediocrity!

There is a name for what advertising agencies do, " rubbish ", and our

predecessors appreciated much better than us its ultimate destination: ruin!

Almost all of what advertising agencies do is best summed up in one word

parasitical. By creating advertising out of thin air we have reduced the

purchasing power of more deserving members of society. What would happen if

everybody behaved just like advertising agencies?

Marketing and Advertising is a classic example of the term "the fallacy of

managerial expertise",an attempt by experts to blind us with science to

justify their overpaid existence.

The experts will tell us that the present advertising and marketing crisis

are simply the result of abuses and excesses in a system that is basically

sound. All that is required is for some faults to be corrected. Do not

believe them! The reality is that the problem is systemic and a little

tinkering here or there will achieve nothing in the long term.

What is needed is a root-and-branch re-evaluation of that most curious of

inventions, marketing and advertising, and how it can be used to serve the

interests of the community. To start with the experts must explain in the

simplest terms how advertising actually works together with supporting

evidence! The truth is that advertising and marketing have not suddenly

become useless but that they were never really useful in the first place!

Yet it is a fact that that the key to understanding how international

marketing and advertising operates and why the world is in such a mess is

discussed virtually nowhere in mainstream circles.

The picture has become a great deal more complicated, the huge problem of

clutter, otherwise known as meaningless noise. Together with the gibberish

that has become the new marketing speak, IT jargon...utterly meaningless and as

far away from communication than ever before. And still no one has produced

one iota of real evidence that advertising works at all!

The role of advertising has been diverted by new expertsto media buying,

sales promotion, computer speak, direct marketing but in essence they are mere

variations of the same basic three-card trick! With the advent of the PC all

sorts of marketing emerges, again devised by those same experts who did not

know what they were doing from the beginning. Moreover, the illusion becomes

self-reinforcing. Those involved in the process sitting behind their computer

screens, no longer control the beast they have created.

Advertising breeds more advertising and the only people who win, in fact the

only people who have ever won, are the media owners which is precisely why the

media owners desperately do not want the system to change! But the system

relies entirely, as do all Ponzi schemes, on two assumptions, 1) That

advertising works, and 2) the assumption of continued growth, hence its inherent

instability. Once that growth is threatened the whole edifice collapses.

Marketing...a very simple and devastatingly effective swindle, but largely

invisible because it has become so deeply embedded in our culture. The

consequences of that swindle, the desperate need for economic growth together

with the environmental and cultural despoliation it engenders require some

radical thinking that one encounters nowhere in any of our Business Schools...or

elsewhere for that matter!

OK, so some people have question my assumption (?) that advertising doesn't

work, fortunately there is enough evidence supporting my claims and I will

commence to detail that evidence in future articles. For example:June 2005

issue of Harvard Business Review reporting on the effectiveness of 500 various

consumer and B2B marketing programs: 84% resulted in less market share, not

more Most customer acquisition efforts did not break even Fewer than 10% of

new products succeeded Most sales promotions were unprofitable Advertising

ROI was below 4% Doubling advertising expenditures for established products

increased sales just 1% - 2%

THE NEXT BIG THING...

...FLOGS

　

Be careful what you believe on the internet: there’s a growing chance that you re being hoaxed by a cynical PR firm. Just as the blogging explosion was teaching us about "vlogs" (video bloggs) and "moblogs" (mobile blogs), along comes yet another trend that is far more pernicious.

A "flog" is a fake weblog that purports to chronicle an ordinary consumer’s passion for a business or a product, typcally without the company behind it declaring an interest. It is a scandalously dishonest practice.

Take Laura and Jim, an ordinary couple who recently drove a camper van across America and stopped over for free each night at their nearest Wal-Mart car park. Their likeably amateurish travel journal, Wal-Marting across America, chronicled all the decent, hard working Wal-Mart employees they encountered during their stopovers, all of whom seemed to have been stories about the company.

Lo and behold, the couple turned out to be a professional paid by Wal-Mart’s PR firm, Edelman, and folksy Jim was revealed to be a professional Washington Post photographer. Last month, Laura used the blog to come clean, admitting that she "should have done a better job" telling her story.

Since then, Edelman’s fingerprints have been found all over other related flogs. Working Families For Wal-Mart claims to be a grassroots advocacy group focusing on "the positive contribution of Wal-Mart to working families"; the PaidCritics.com blog sets out to "expose" union employees paid to "smear" the retail chain. Typical postings attack activists for denying "working families" cheap Wal-Mart prescriptions of half-price baby food.

Use Interactive Marketing Communication and know exactly what your getting!

The Need for Interactive Marketing Communicatiom!

Put simply, because there is a human desire for interaction. We have created a media society during the past 40 or 50 years where there is an extraordinary reduction in interaction because of the one-way and more passive form of information retrieval that exists.
People desire to be taken account of, to affect change, learn and personalise their relationships with their environment. There are a phenomenal number of reasons, which cause people to interact, which go far beyond just giving them things.

When people participate in interactive marketing communication they are told that their efforts and feedback are of positive help to the advertisers. Moreover, by participating, they then learn and understand the message from the advertiser, personalise their relationship with the advertiser and their products (or services).

Consumers tend to filter out information they do not want to hear and this alters the effectiveness of advertising in quite a dramatic way. The purchaser’s decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of anxiety. The worry that perhaps the purchase decision was not the best or right one. In order to minimise this anxiety the purchaser seeks to reinforce his choice and begins to take more notice of his chosen product’s advertising. And, at the same time, the purchaser deliberately suppresses data, which might challenge his decision by ignoring the advertising of competitive brands.

People are often loyal to a brand simply because they do not want to readdress a decision. The opportunity to screen out undesired data always exists when media advertisements have to stand on their own and fight for attention.

Interactive Communication takes the consumer through the barrier of not wanting to address change; and this is the ultimate market the advertiser is after – the people who use his competitors’ products.

Now the consumer can say ‘Yes, I will change my behaviour and I have a very good reason or series of reasons why", and have a well-informed opinion or image in mind.

If someone goes into a product purchase decision with a very specific image of the product and its reason to exist and why they have decided those reasons are worth its purchase, the test in reality, the use of the product, will tend to confirm that premise, and therefore conversion will be enormously enhanced.

Interactive Marketing Communication turns passive advertising into active advertising and actually alters behaviour during the communication and learning process.

Interactive Marketing Communication increases sale.

And there’s more!

It enhances relationships and dramatically improves consumer knowledge, understanding and loyalty.
1. Strong Company or Brand Values.

To be effective communication has to be single minded in choosing a specific proposition which by definition cannot appeal to all. Yet every product, service or retail outlet can offer several attractive benefits and in some cases these can be numerous. Interactive Communication presents consumers with a ‘menu’ of powerful benefits, both rational and emotional, and asks them to choose the one which they find most relevant and appealing to them.

This allows them: -

a) Personalise their relationship with the communicator.

b. To absorb and retain the majority – or even all – of those extra benefits while making their choice.

WHAT DO I NEED TO MAKE MY BRAND MORE SOCIAL?

Firstly make your Social presence a conversation because your message and mechanics of how it's deployed are the things that really count.
And above all else...USE SHOPPERS VOICE