Taking Down Goliath

Digital Marketing Strategies for Beating Competitors With 100 Times Your Spending Power

Kevin Ryan, Rob "Spider" Graham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349495580, 9781137444202
• eBook ISBN: 9781137444219
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Advances in software, auction-based media, analytics, and big data have made it possible for the average marketer to compete with marketers with 100 times the spending power. Taking Down Goliath profiles the ways in which digital marketing can level the playing field, if you know how to use it.

CHAPTER 1

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THE DIGITAL ADVERTISING BIG BANG

It’s incredible how the simple idea of connecting computers together changed the behaviors of people all around the world.

The slow progression of the Internet came from very humble roots. Initially created as a defense initiative so that military minds around the world could quickly get on the same page at the same time, the Internet then evolved into a useful tool for the scientific community to be able to share research and ideas.

The first pass at bringing the Internet to the mainstream was limited by a UNIX-based operating system that very much mirrored early DOS and relied entirely upon a command line interface and on people knowing many arcane terms. It was not what you would have called user-friendly.

Then in late 1992, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign released the first web browser (Mosaic) based on a graphic user interface (GUI) and ushered in the modern age of the World Wide Web.

For the first time in history, consumers armed with a personal computer and a modem could log into computer server locations and gain access to a web of computers around the world that was quickly being linked together. This ushered in a technological boom that spurred the growth of personal computers, modems, Internet service providers (ISPs), and led to the ability for anybody connected to the web to access and share information with anybody else.

Most early websites left a lot to be desired. In most cases, they represented little more than brochures for the companies that talked a lot about themselves and really didn’t offer much reason to stick around or return to their sites. Because the bandwidth that the average consumer was working with was so narrow, the use of graphics on most early websites was kept to a bare minimum in order to make the page load quick and easy. As a result, most early websites contained plenty of text but not much eye candy.

Then in 1994 something truly revolutionary happened. The designers of the site hotwired.com placed a rectangular graphic at the top of one of their web pages as part of a promotional effort they were working on with AT&T. This graphic was basically a large button that when clicked on took the site visitor off to the AT&T website. It was the first web banner ad ever used and first appeared on hotwired.com in October 1994 (see figure 1.1).

While web developers had been able to attach links to graphics prior to that time, the seemingly simple act of doing so for commercial purposes was truly a remarkable breakthrough. Click-through rates for this first ad surpassed 30 percent. It’s fair to say that the majority of those clicks were from people who had read about this incredible breakthrough and visited the hotwired.com site to check it out for themselves. The clicks were not necessarily from a contingent of consumers suddenly intrigued by what AT&T was offering. Still, it was an important milestone.

Figure 1.1 The first online ads were simple and effective

What this event also drove home was the understanding that web publishers were now in a position where they could start to monetize their sites by working directly with advertisers looking to reach the “eyeballs” of the rapidly growing audiences who were flocking to the web.

It was a fairly simple formula: advertisers wanted to get their messages in front of consumers, and consumers were voluntarily visiting websites they found interesting. By taking advantage of this traffic, both advertisers and publishers could meet their business goals.

This new approach also allowed advertisers to step away from more traditional mass marketing models in which all consumers were subjected to the same ad at the same time regardless of their personal needs or interests.

The new development also meant that publishers, many of whom had created their web properties more as a labor of love than as part of any solid business practice, were able to start running their sites like real businesses; the publishers now had greater control over the quality and quantity of what they offered site visitors.

This new model also created a massive paradigm shift in how consumers were expected to interact with advertising. At that time, most consumers had grown accustomed to a diet of broadcast and print advertising. These ad models were created to push a common message toward as many people as possible as often as possible, and consumers were never expected to do anything with those ads other than see and remember them. This model was sometimes referred to as a lean-back advertising approach.

Now consumers were expected to get involved in the advertising process by interacting directly with ads. These new lean-forward advertising models were based on the idea that consumers were now in the driver’s seat.

Unlike traditional broadcast or print models, in which a programmer or an editor was responsible for making the fundamental decisions over the content to be shared with consumers, the new web model allowed consumers to pick and choose the information they found most interesting and useful. This meant that consumers were totally free to create their own information paths based on what they wanted, and at the same time they could also avoid what they didn’t want. And often what they didn’t want included advertising.

And this has brought us to a very interesting place.

THE DIGITAL ADVERTISING UNIVERSE

Not long ago, effective marketing was based on reaching the most people with a message. Today it’s about reaching the right people.

For years, marketers and advertisers focused on ways to attract consumers’ attention so they could promote their brands and share a message. They then created ad units using common broadcast or print formats and then bought media to get those ads in front of as many people as possible. The success of a campaign was often based on how many people it could reach, and reaching a lot of people cost a lot of money.

For the Davids in the crowd, necessity was often the mother of innovation. Because smaller advertisers and businesses were unable to afford the mass communications channels in their markets, they relied instead on guerilla marketing approaches, such as printed flyers, direct mail, the yellow pages, and small classified ads to tell their stories. Their limited budgets forced them to be careful with how they used their limited resources and to be more selective in who they delivered their messages to.

Then the universe changed.

As digital marketing channels came into being, savvy marketers recognized that effective advertising was no longer based on reaching everybody but instead was driven by the need to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. Trying to reach everybody wasn’t possible online because of the enormous number of new channels that were being created daily. Instead, to advertise effectively online meant first knowing who you wanted to talk to and then figuring out which web sites these people were most likely to visit.

Suddenly the advertiser with limited resources had the same opportunities for market exposure as the Goliath advertisers with deep pockets. Success was no longer based on how much money a marketer had to throw at the market; instead, the new media gave innovative marketers better ways to connect with individual consumers.

It also gave advertisers new ways to tell compelling and engaging stories to their prospects and customers in order to grab and hold their attention. It meant that to be successful advertisers needed to think differently about how to approach new ad channels and formats and how marketing worked within these new digital channels. Before long, businesses of all sizes were starting to explore this new realm and quickly learning that the secret of success in digital advertising has little to do with getting the same message to everybody.

Today, the level playing field is giving marketers of all sizes extraordinary marketing tools to work with. The time to market for many campaigns has shrunk from months and weeks to days and hours. The cost of participation has dropped from thousands of dollars to absolutely free in many cases. It’s no longer a case of whoever has the most money owns the market. Today, it’s about innovation, finesse, and understanding who you most need to talk to and what those people want to hear.

It’s a brave new world.

EXPLORING THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM

The way that information flows online is very different from how it flowed in most traditional media.

Traditional media, such as television, radio, and print, are channels that offer only one-way information flow. The consumer is expected to access this information through a central and controlled source. Consumers are also expected to do very little with that information other than to see and remember it.

While there are direct response campaigns that rely on toll-free numbers or envelopes that need to be sealed and returned, the bulk of advertising through these traditional channels is about achieving a higher level of brand awareness. The channels tend to do that well because they are based on the idea of reaching as many people as possible as often as possible. This is a great formula for branding success.

But at the end of the day it’s very difficult to measure the overall effectiveness of most traditional media channels. For example, when a TV spot runs, it’s an easy task to measure what time it ran and on which channels. What’s difficult to measure is the branding impact that the commercial had. How many people watched the commercial and what did they do with that information? Did they understand the value proposition? Was the message the consumer took away understood the way the advertiser intended it, and what did the advertiser really expect consumers to do with that understanding?

The reality of traditional advertising campaigns is that it’s difficult to measure the impact of those ads because there are so many variables that need to be factored in. Even if advertisers could get an exact count of the number of consumers who watched a commercial all the way through, they would still not know which consumers found the ad relevant and meaningful.

We’re not here to bash traditional media channels but to point out that they have limitations. Because these channels were never designed to be interactive (apart from the occasional direct response campaign), they generally lack meaningful feedback loops.

But the strength of traditional mass media marketing is also a large part of any successful online campaign. Today, most broadcast and print ads include features that drive traffic to online landing pages. Traditional publishers, such as the Wall Street Journal share lists of their most popular online articles in their newspaper. Magazines like Bloomberg BusinessWeek actively promote their online properties through print ads, and web sites like mentalfloss.com start creating printed magazines to extend their audience reach offline. The reality is that today’s consumers aren’t just sitting in one place. They are watching television both online and off. They read printed magazines and newspapers and also get information online. It’s not either/or for how they find information or entertainment. It doesn’t need to be either/or for advertisers either.

For a number of years, as digital advertising was cutting its teeth, a number of traditional agencies created ancillary digital agencies to help them take advantage of this new influx in advertiser needs. While this seemed to make sense on the surface, it quickly became a point of frustration for many advertisers because it created a totally separate campaign approach between broadcast and print campaigns and online campaigns. This disconnect not only created extra work for the advertisers, but it often meant that the campaigns that ran on traditional broadcast and print channels were completely different from those that ran online. It also meant in many cases advertisers had to go through different channels of media buying for each campaign.

Today, most agencies have figured out how to get the traditional and digital channels back under the same roof. In fact, most advertisers and agencies have learned how to take advantage of the interrelationship between the media channels. For example, most TV commercials today include a URL or link to a social media channel and are being used to drive additional traffic to these online properties. Print ads almost always include a URL that will lead readers to more information and special offers.

The bottom line is that a solid digital strategy often includes a traditional component. When it comes to beating Goliath, the secret is in how effectively you can communicate value and benefit.

THE ART OF ENGAGEMENT

If you can’t get the attention of the people you most need to talk to, then nothing else you do in advertising matters. Period.

Getting the attention of people isn’t easy. It’s definitely not easy online mostly because there is already a lot of noise online vying for the attention of site visitors. But it goes deeper than that; even if you can get people to pay attention to you by doing something dramatic or even a little obnoxious (quivering banner ads anyone?), can you hold that attention?

Web site designers refer to it as making things sticky. The goal is to attract consumers’ attention by giving them a fair value exchange—their attention in exchange for what the publisher or advertiser is offering. As yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1  The Digital Advertising Big
• Chapter 2  Setting and Measuring Digital
• Chapter 3  Defining Online Audiences
• Chapter 4  Creating the Perfect Online
• Chapter 5  Digital Display Advertising
• Chapter 6  Tactics and Strategies for E-mail Marketing Campaigns
• Chapter 7  Search Engine Advertising
• Chapter 8  Understanding Search Engine
• Chapter 9  The Social Media Universe
• Chapter 10  The Mobile Marketing Conundrum
• Chapter 11  The Level Playing Field
• Appendix: What’s a David Profile?
• Index