July 11, 2000
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** MarketingSherpa.co.uk **
Practical News, Gossip & Tips for Internet
Advertisers, Marketers & PR Pros in the UK
July 11, 2000 - Vol. I, Issue 8
Note: Yes please forward this to your friends --
as long as you tell them to get their own FREE
subscriptions at http://www.marketingsherpa.co.uk
1. NEWS & GOSSIP: Servista.com, The Industry Standard
Europe, BT Payphones, and The e-Envoy
2. CASE STUDY: Motorola's WAP Site (sociallifesupport.com)
3. PRACTICAL HOW-TO: MarketingSherpa.co.uk’s Guide to
Marketing with Email Signature Files
4. EVENTS
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NEWS & GOSSIP
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* Crossing the Pond: Internet Business Bible ‘The
Industry Standard’ is Coming to Europe
Oh goody! The Industry Standard’s new European version
is launching sometime in late October... and its News
Editor is a London-Based Brit you can set your PR people
on right away. Tell them to contact Mike Butcher
(sometime Editor of New Media Age) at
mbutcher@thestandard.com. Just a quick reminder though
– as its name suggests, The Industry Standard is all
about ‘the BUSINESS,’ says the man himself. ‘This is
not a tech title!’ Got that?
The Industry Standard Europe: http://www.thestandardeurope.com
(Site is “supposed” to be up this week.)
The Industry Standard: http://www.thestandard.com
* Spotted: E-Envoy Alex Allan’s Home Page (Be Scared)
A friend of a friend recently heard, on very good
authority, that Alex Allan doesn’t reply to emails
because ‘he isn’t very comfortable with computers’. We
refused to believe it. He is, after all, the ‘e-Envoy’,
the man whose job it is to ‘co-ordinate the Government’s
drive’ towards its goal of ‘making the UK the best place
in the world for e-commerce’. So says the official
‘Office of the e-Envoy’ site, which also points out that
he spent a WHOLE YEAR working as a computer consultant
in Australia... 17 years ago. So, when we found a link
on the very same site to Mr. Allen’s own home page, we
jumped at the chance to disprove what was surely a
vicious rumour...
We’re not usually lost for words at
MarketingSherpa.co.uk. Check out
http://www.whitegum.com, though, and we think you’ll
understand why, on this occasion, we’re absolutely
bloody speechless!!
Office of the e-Envoy: http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk
* Media Buy: Outside Phonebox Advertising from BT
Have you noticed the appearance of adverts on the
outside of phoneboxes recently? No wonder BT were so
keen to outlaw the phonebox adverts we’re rather more
familiar with: little postcards surreptitiously
positioned by ‘masseuses’ and, erm... escorts. Yep,
they’re the new thing in UK cities, and they’re
spreading – phonebox-sized ads, transparent from inside
the box, but not from outside. Costing between £140 and
£230 per site per month depending upon location (£300 in
the City of London), there are 64,000 ad sites to choose
from, occurring every 50 yards on average.
We’re starting to see a few Net-based companies having a
go. No points for label clothing e-tailer
Brandshop.co.uk, though - their ad, which offered Levi
501s at thirty quid to customers ringing from the
Payphones themselves, was still being spotted on
phoneboxes in Greater London two weeks after the
promotion ended on June 16th...
BT Payphones: http://www.payphones.bt.com
Brandshop.co.uk: http://www.brandshop.co.uk
* Campaign Review: Servista.com on the Underground
There was a high incidence of strange people on the Tube
last week (probably tourists), so we found ourselves
paying even closer attention than normal to ads above
people’s heads. Immediately striking, thanks to its use
of the face of Noman Lovett (the actor who portrayed
Holly the dour computer on the cult TV hit “Red Dwarf”)
complete with his trademark downtrodden expression, was
the series of ads for Servista.com, a provider of
utilities and telephone services. The ads are simple –
Norman looks overworked and pathetic, and the caption
tells us why: Servista.com takes on all the hassles of
bill payment, saving the customer time and money. You
may have noticed that Servista.com uses exactly the same
format for its online banner-ads.
But you know what? Servista.com’s not the only ones who
think Norman’s enough to grab people’s attention.
Because three or four of the ads we saw on the tube had
been rubber-stamped with a London band’s URL
(www.aquilina.co.uk) – right across Norman Lovett’s
furrowed brow. We only wish we’d had a
MarketingSherpa.co.uk stamp handy to slap our URL on
there too!
Servista: http://www.servista.com
Aquilina: http://www.aquilina.com
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CASE STUDY: Motorola (sociallifesupport.com)
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* How Motorola Got 20,000 15-24 Year Olds to Visit
the New V.2288 WAP Phone Web Site SocialLifeSupport.com
Motorola have just begun a TV advertising campaign
heralding the launch of their new V.2288 ‘Shark R’ WAP
phone across Europe. Interest in the phone has been
growing since April, however, thanks to a specially-
designed Web site...
CHALLENGE
To create a brand new site for the V.2288
which will become, in time, a ‘hub’ for all lifestyle
Motorola WAP phones, and to reposition the Motorola
brand as cool and trendy in the eyes of 15-24 year old
ABC1 aspiring males and females.
OFFLINE CAMPAIGN
Motorola opted for a ‘teaser’
campaign: a pan-European series of print ads
(billboards, poster, press) was designed purely to
direct traffic towards an accompanying Web site. The
ads pictured hip and happening young folks (like
‘Millie’, shaking her ‘booty’, and ‘Sophie’, who’s ‘got
all the moves’); they did not mention Motorola, or the
phone. Even the printed URL (www.sociallifesupport.com)
was designed to suggest not what the product was, but
what it could do for its target audience’s street cred.
ONLINE CAMPAIGN
More teasing. Initially, although it
was clearly for a mobile phone of some kind, the Web
site made no reference to Motorola, or the phone’s
specifics. Instead, designers Real Time Studio included
games in order to provide site ‘stickiness’. The key
element was, of course, a page where site visitors were
encouraged to enter personal information. Motorola
intended to use entered email addresses as the basis for
a direct marketing campaign, scheduled to take place in
line with the phone’s launch in June (at which point
specifics would finally be added to the Web site).
COST: The Web site, including regional versions for
Europe, cost £80,000 to produce. The teaser ads cost a
small part of the £16m that Motorola will have spent on
TV and print advertising across Europe once the current
campaign comes to an end. TV advertising is expensive.
Email costs practically nothing.
RESULTS
During the two month teaser campaign, there
were 20,000 unique visitors to the ‘sociallifesupport’
Web site, one in four of whom were interested enough to
provide their email addresses. All 5,000 have, of
course, received an email since the phone’s launch
telling them just how wonderful it is, and how they can
get one. The phone itself was just released last week.
MarketingSherpa.co.uk will follow-up to bring you actual
sales results later.
NOTES: Although we have poo-pooed campaigns in the past
that didn’t describe what they were actually trying to
sell (you know who you are), when appealing to this
particular demographic Motorola may have it right.
Details don’t matter; cool rules.
Motorola: http://www.motorola.com
The V.2288 ‘Shark R’: http://www.sociallifesupport.com
Real Time Studios: http://www.realtime.co.uk
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PRACTICAL KNOW-HOW
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* MarketingSherpa.co.uk’s Guide to Marketing with Email
Signature Files (with Congratulations to FireFly.co.uk)
At MarketingSherpa.co.uk we like to think of every email
we send as a marketing opportunity. It really doesn’t
matter where it’s going. Because, at the end of the
day, you really never know how many people will end up
seeing an email, thanks to that little ‘Forward’ option.
That’s why we add a signature (sig) file to each
outgoing email – even the ones we send to each other.
We expect that sounds like common sense to a lot of you,
but you’d be amazed how many people, although they do
use sig files, don’t make the most of them. Here’s a
quick guide to what you should include:
1. Name:
This is the really obvious part, right? Well, we get
emails from non-entities all the time, and we think
that’s kind of impersonal. In an electronic age, it’s
often comforting for a recipient to know that the email
you are sending actually originated from a real person.
So sign it with a real person’s name. You might want
to add your job title while you’re at it – that way
people will know who they’re dealing with.
2. Contact Details:
You’ve sent an email, so the recipient can always
contact you by hitting ‘Reply’, right? True enough, but
what if your dream client of the future happens to be
reading a copy of your email that somebody printed out?
You’re best to put your addy right up there with your
name and job title, nice and noticeable. And for those
folks who’d prefer to speak to you in person (you can’t
do EVERYTHING by email you know), a phone number or two
wouldn’t go amiss. Finally, since the ultimate goal of
your email is to increase site traffic (isn’t it?), all
of this can be rounded off nicely with a lovely hotlink
to your Web page.
Note: Only include your snail-mail address if you
undertake a lot of correspondence by post. You don’t
want your sig file to be so large that it takes over the
whole email...
3. Hook Line (and Sinker):
Okay. So far you’ve told the lucky recipient of your
email who you are, what you do, and how you can be
contacted. Great. But there’s still something missing,
and this is where most folks fall down on the sig front:
you need to tell people WHY they should contact you.
It’s very simple: all it takes is a short corporate
slogan, or a brief promotion – something that takes up
no more than a line or two of text. Much more
impressive if you’re Fred Bloggs from NotReal.co.uk,
voted the UK’s No. 1 imaginary company 1999-2000,
instead of plain old Fred Bloggs from NotReal.co.uk.
Common sense? You would think so, wouldn’t you? Thing
is, though – we were going to include our Top 10
favourite marketing sig files at this point in the
article, and we spent hours trawling through old emails,
and looking at postings on e-marketing discussion groups
trying to find sigs that met ALL THREE of our criteria
above. You know how many we found? One.
Congratulations, all at Firefly Communications
(http://www.firefly.co.uk) for including the simple
phrase ‘Communications for the Digital Economy’ in your
email signatures, as well as plenty of contact
information.
Finally here’s one of our own sigs in full, just so you
can see what we’re driving at. It works for us – why
not try a similar one yourself, and see how it works for
you?
Andrew Mackie, Editor
editor@marketingsherpa.co.uk
07092 031411
_________________________________________________
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Practical news for Internet marketers & advertisers
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EVENTS
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* E-Law Essentials
You are invited for the launch of NMK's latest
publication "e-Law Essentials", a guide to the major
legal issues relating to e-commerce and new media. The
launch will feature a presentation by author John
Warchus, with free copies of the guide and refreshments.
July 17th, London
New Media Knowledge: http://www.nmk.co.uk/elaw.cfm
* The Future of Multimedia Production
As someone with more than 15 years experience in the
multimedia industry, Frank Boyd will be hosting a
workshop exploring the future of interactive media
production. Exploring changes in technology, creativity
and business, Frank will outline the major trends that
producers should be aware of in the years ahead.
New Media Knowledge: http://www.nmk.co.uk/futures
* E-Commerce Boot Camp
Round Table Group, in association with First Tuesday,
cordially invites First Tuesday members to attend an E-
Commerce Bootcamp in Westminster, London at the historic
One Whitehall Place.
July 24th – 25th
http://www.firsttuesday.com
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MarketingSherpa.co.uk INFO
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editor@MarketingSherpa.co.uk
07092 031411
Publisher:
Anne Holland
anneh@MarketingSherpa.com
202.232.6830
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