Ad research group explores value of new advertising media
Because new forms of advertising like streaming video present an unclear value proposition to many advertisers, the Advertising Research Foundation is exploring new ways of defining marketing strategies. Last week it released “The Online Advertising Playbook.” It shows, for example, how Sprint and Procter & Gamble have used online word-of-mouth to introduce products to consumers.
“Many advertisers are uncomfortable with new forms of advertising,” says Bob Boracci, CEO of the Advertising Research Foundation and a former president of the ad agency Leo Burnett International. “We can take a TV commercial from ‘Desperate Housewives’ and stream it on Yahoo, but we don’t know if it will give the same results. But we want to know if we’re engaging anyone, and how effective that is.”
The 300-page “Playbook” covers multiple online advertising channels and strategies, including behavioral targeting, different aspects of search marketing, rich media ads and relationship-building through e-mail marketing and word-of-mouth campaigns.
The book shows how Procter & Gamble’s Tide brand developed an effective word-of-mouth campaign to introduce its Tide Coldwater product as an environmentally positive detergent that would appeal to energy-conscious consumers. P&G started sharing information on the benefits of cold-water washing with the Alliance to Save Energy, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental advocacy group, which e-mailed that information and favorable mentions of Tide Coldwater to its members.
The e-mails helped to drive consumers to a microsite at Tide.com, where P&G offered information on the benefits of cold-water washes, let visitors register to request product samples, and offered an online calculator, designed like a washing machine dial, that invited visitors to estimate how much energy they could save by washing laundry in cold water.
At the same time, P&G also donated $100,000 to the National Fuel Funds Network, an organization that works with state and local governments to help low-income families in different regions of the country cut the cost of energy bills. It allocated funds to regions in proportion to the percentages of people from each region who had registered at Tide.com, a tactic that encouraged visitors to use the microsite’s “send to a friend” e-mail feature.
Within two months, P&G reached its goal of distributing 1 million samples of Tide Coldwater.
“P&G broke new ground, adding a social networking touch,” the authors of the “Playbook” write. “Friends received personalized e-mails, with site links and opportunities to take the Coldwater Challenge themselves and request product samples.” The book’s authors are Barocci, Joe Plummer, Steve Rappaport and Taddy Hall, all executives of the Advertising Research Foundation.
The book also covers how Sprint Nextel, the cell phone and wireless communications company, elicited the participation of bloggers covering a variety of industries including advertising, media, marketing and information technology in a product promotion. Sprint provided the bloggers with full use of a Samsung A920 cell phone for six months and simply invited them to write what they thought of it on their blogs, which they did. The campaign generated nearly 400,000 Google searches for the phone, meeting Sprint’s goal of spreading the word about it.
But attempts to use new marketing channels and strategies don’t always work, Barocci warns. “There is so much to be done in emerging media, every time a new medium attracts people, the assumption is that it’s a new advertising medium,” he tells InternetRetailer.com. “But that’s not necessarily true.”
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