February 13, 2001
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ConsumerMarketingBiz formerly eMarketingtoHer
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February 13, 2001 - Vol. II, Issue 1
Please forward! Free subscriptions http://www.consumermarketingbiz.com
1) NEWS: Style.com Seeks Partners, Groceries Online
2) CASE STUDY: Streaming Audio/Video Ads Beat Traditional Banners
on Click Throughs, Conversions AND Cost Per Acquisition
3) PRACTICAL KNOW-HOW: Will Wireless Advertising Be a Practical
Way to Reach American Consumers Anytime Soon?
4) More MarketingSherpa Headlines
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NEWS
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Sponsor: Office.com ======================================
Advertise on Office.com, the #1 online business center
to reach an unparalleled audience of engaged, driven business
professionals! Whether you are interested in targeting your
message by industry, profession or topic, Office.com offers
you a full range of programs to help you meet your goals.
Visit us at http://media.office.com/mediakit today.
============================================================
Publisher's Note: As you may have noticed, we took a hiatus over
the Holidays, and changed our name from eMarketingtoHer to
ConsumerMarketingBiz.
You'll still get a new Case Study every week, plus exclusive news
about inspirational marketers in every issue. And you'll still
get a lot of news about female consumers because let's face it,
this past holiday season, women spent more online than men did!
However, now you'll also get info on consumer marketing and
advertising campaigns that may have not been specifically
targeted to women, but could still apply to your job.
As always, it's quick and easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to
this newsletter at http://www.consumermarketingbiz.
And, feel free to contact me directly with your comments,
suggestions and ideas at any time! Looking forward to continuing
to serve you,
Anne Holland, Publisher
anneh@marketingsherpa.com
* Style.com Seeks Additional ecommerce Partners
Rather than build its own ecommerce store, CondeNet's Style.com
decided to offer visitors links to Style.com offerings from a
very limited number of other name-brand online fashion stores.
Senior VP & Managing Director Goli Sheikholeslami explains, "The
reason is from a customer's perspective. Our goal is to have one
easy store experience. The more partners you have, the more
difficult that experience becomes."
So far Neimanmarcus.com and Doubletake Consignment Boutique hold
the monopolies on Style.com's high-end fashion and consignment
auction stores respectively. Sheikholeslami plans to add a store
from a "mid-tier" fashion partner sometime in 2001, but says, "we
don't map to the lower market." Store merchandise is selected
by the retailer with input from Style.com's in-house team.
Sheikholeslami says, "It's a collaboration. For our holiday must-
haves there were a couple of vendors that were not part of
Neiman's regular vendor list."
Style.com is itself a collaboration between W and Vogue
magazines, both of which feed traffic to the site. Site traffic
rapidly grew to 12 million impressions during the very first
month after the site went live September 18, 2000.
http://www.style.com
* Groceries Online: Farmer Bob Delivers
As Webvan, Peapod and Homerun.com spend millions duking it out in
the online grocery-sales marketplace, Maine's Farmer Bob reminds
us what it's all about. Forget stock prices, VCs, and
infrastructure conundrums. The fact is consumers are definitely
willing to use their computers to order groceries, if you can
make it easy for them. Robert Sessums, an organic farmer in
Falmouth Maine, has proven this quite handily without a fancy Web
site, or advertising beyond word of mouth.
Sessums' tactics are simple -- every week during the fresh
produce season he sends customers who've signed up at his farm
stand a quick email telling them what's in season. Then dozens
of Falmouth homemakers rush to the computer to get their orders
in for delivery.
As Sessums sees it, the question is not whether online grocery
sales will work, but how well you can manage the business.
In the Falmouth area email rsessums@maine.rr.com
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CASE STUDY: Streaming Audio/Video Ads Beat Traditional Banners
on Click Throughs, Conversions AND Cost Per Acquisition
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Sponsor: eFinanceMarketing =================================
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marketing, according to Robertson Stephens. Can you do the
same? eFinanceMarketing helps companies of all sizes map out
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============================================================
CHALLENGE
Measurecast, a company which measures streaming
audience size and demographics for online advertisers, media
buyers and broadcasters, needed to recruit a broad panel of
50,000 streaming media users for research purposes. Program
Marketing Manager David Giacomini gave us the details.
CAMPAIGN
Giacomini explains, "We were building a broad panel
that had to represent the overall streaming media universe, so we
couldn't optimize recruiting campaigns. For example, 2% of our
panel needed to be over 65, while the average streaming media
user skews predominantly younger and male." To get that range,
Giacomini needed a broad reach. He says, "We literally
advertised on hundreds of sites - individual sites, 24/7,
Doubleclick and most major music sites, including the StreamAudio
network of 740 radio station sites."
Giacomini tested a wide variety of online ad media including,
200x200 streaming audio/video ads, 468x60 traditional banners,
and 250x250 pop-ups. He also tested several different offers,
varying from a non-incentized "join a panel and make your opinion
count" offer to sweeps for MP3, $1000 cash, a dream vacation and
Porsche Boxter giveaways. The specific action desired was to
get consumers to register their streaming media players and very
basic demographic info (age, gender, zip code, country and home
vs. work PC used.)
RESULTS
200x200 streaming audio/video ads achieved higher click
through rates, higher conversion rates and the lowest cost per
acquisition of any other media by far. The numbers varied
between art and offer, but here are some averages:
200x200 streaming audio/video
Average: CTR 9.45% Conversion 14.7% CPA $3.26
250x250 pop-ups
Average: CTR 3.5% Conversion 6.85% CPA $6.61
468x60 traditional banners
Average: CTR .52% Conversion 6.99%% CPA $19.72
The top performing media buy was StreamAudio online radio station
network. Giacomini says, "Their Channel Start rich media gateway
ads uniquely combined the undivided attention of streaming
listeners, a compelling rich media message and the ability to
click to our site without losing the radio station's streaming
content or disrupting the user experience."
The top performing traditional banner was a free MP3 player
offer, which won handily over the Porsche, dream vacation and
even $1000 cash. Giacomini says, "People psychologically felt
they had a better chance of winning. They'd rather enter a
sweeps with 1-100 chances than 1-million chances."
The worst performing banner -- at a lousy $73.09 per registered
user -- was the "Help make a difference" banner which appealed to
people's (apparently non-existent) altruistic sides.
NOTE: Interested in learning more about online radio station
usage? Visit MeasureCast's site to download some free reports
that are full of fascinating metrics and demographic details.
(For example, even Giacomini was surprised to learn that only 31%
of his panel members used their work computers for streaming.)
Also the site features a free weekly Top 25 listing of the most
listened to online radio stations. Guess what? This week Jimmy
Buffet's Web-only Radio Margaritaville is at #4.
http://www.measurecast.com
http://www.streamaudio.com
http://www.radiomargaritaville.com
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PRACTICAL KNOW-HOW: Will Wireless Advertising Be a Practical Way
to Reach American Consumers Anytime Soon?
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Barry Peters, Lot 21's Director of Emerging Media, created his
first wireless ad campaign back in April 2000 when the media hype
around wireless was just barely beginning. Since then he's
become such a well-known expert that the FTC asked him to speak
at a workshop on the topic last December.
Q: You've done successful wireless campaigns aimed at high tech
biz execs. Do you think wireless ads will work for general
consumer products?
Peters: I'm not sure we're ready to sell Tupperware (R) on a
wireless platform right now. The stuff we're talking about with
clients is more intranet sort of stuff -- getting information out
to sales reps as opposed to selling. They are a pretty good
audience for wireless devices. For example, Oracle might need to
use wireless to get pricing changes on their breadth and depth of
products out to the field force.
This is not an application that's targeted to the average
consumer. Anything larger than an 18 digit name or number is not
that appealing to read on a WAP enabled phone. So short bits of
information, like company telephone listings, are all we can
really find as an application for now.
Q: There must be some ways marketers can use wireless ads to
reach consumers or the hype wouldn't be so strong these days!
Peters: There are some effective WAP sites out there -- sports
scores, weather updates....
There's also a difference between the PDA space vs the wireless
phone space. I read news regularly off AvantGo on my PDA during
my half-hour train commute just to see what advertisers are
doing.
The next level of discussion with WAP sites is who's going to use
these things. If you're mobile, you're most likely driving, and
you can't use a mobile phone on a plane. You can use them as a
passenger on a train or walking around but that audience is not
quite there yet. And the small screen is a nightmare anyway.
If you take this through voice, it's a huge application.
One of my developers loves WAP phones and screens. He challenged
me the other day to find the show time of Charlie's Angels at a
local theater online vs. WAP. He beat me by about 13 seconds.
The irony was if either of us had called 888-Film, we would have
gotten the information about 30 seconds faster.
Q: What about the retail applications we've heard about -- stores
or stuff at the grocery store that make your phone ring when
you're nearby?
Peters: There's a lot of interest in the classic story of how
Starbucks could use WAP ads to promote say a 20% off sale by
making your phone ring as you go past one.
It's a very annoying privacy violation. You don't want your
phone ringing every time you go past a Starbucks! Instead
Starbucks should invest in a thing called signage outside the
store.
The better application would be to put Starbucks locations in
GPS. But don't beep at me or vibrate at me.
The other irony is if I go to Starbucks' site and opt-in, they
would be foolish to give me a 20% off coupon. I'm raising my
hand saying, 'Hey I'm a Starbucks fan!' Don't try and lose money
with me because I've said I'm a big spender with you guys.
Q: Ok, so what will work in wireless advertising?
Peters: I think the type of wireless advertising that's going to
be prevalent is more of a customer retention tool as opposed to a
customer acquisition tool. You'll have access to your flight
schedule or your dry cleaners. Companies can build an auxiliary
communication schedule to allow continued communication.
If I'm a United Airlines customer and I buy my flights online,
they're not going to ring my phone and try to push a flight to
Boston to me because they've got excess inventory. These big
brands -- the Uniteds and the Nikes -- are going to take wireless
ads very cautiously. They know if they screw up, they are
screwing up the brand that they spent lots of money to build.
Q: We've all heard wireless ads are a big hit in parts of Europe
and Asia. Why wouldn't that happen in North America?
Peters: What's happening over in Holland and Japan is completely
different than what could happen here. The vast majority of
citizens on those two continents don't have land line Internet
access. 60% of the US does; in Japan only 10-15% do.
The other reason is there's a monopoly, for better or for worse,
over there. They have standards they are all using. In the US
we have 30-40 different standards. So the fact that it's taking
off overseas is correct, but that doesn't necessarily mean you
can translate it over here as easily as you might think.
Another thing to consider is the fact that the users of those
devices in Asian countries are teenagers gaming and playing
around. There's a tremendous market for giving away free or even
subsidizing your cell phone bill by receiving ads overseas. Even
in the US markets that's a realistic scenario. But for you and
me, if I get a cell phone to make calls and I'm getting it free
it doesn't work, because I'm using it as a solution to be more
productive. So slamming ads on it won't work. Also, my company
is paying the bill and I don't ever see it.
Q: So what's your take on reality vs. hype for the WAP ad
marketplace?
Peters: The hype is getting a little toned-down what with market
conditions recently. You look at Kelsey and Ovum, they are
projecting $16-17 billion in wireless ads by the year 2005.
Forrester released numbers at $800 million. So there's a huge
disconnect. Wide disparity. I'll take a stand in the group
that's definitely between $800 million and $16 billion.
http://www.lot21.com
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Check MarketingSherpa's Other News Channels for Marketers at:
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