Advertising to the Masses

Sometimes search engine marketing, e-mail campaigns and affiliate networks just aren’t enough to drive online sales for pure-play e-retailers. That was the case at Bluefly.com in 2005. The retailer spent years building a reputation for selling in-season, trendy designer clothing at relatively low prices. But while market research showed Bluefly customers were getting the merchandising message, only 14% of the consumers likely to become Bluefly.com customers were even aware of the site.

“That gave us a challenge,” says Bradford Matson, chief marketing officer. “How do we go out and create awareness, what do we do? And the question then is can you create that kind of awareness online only or do you need to use some general advertising techniques?”

Instant response
For Bluefly.com mass media advertising proved to be the answer. After launching national ad campaigns on TV and in print in September 2005, the e-retailer watched as site visits and sales steadily climbed. In the first six weeks of its most recent campaign—fall 2006—traffic to the web site increased 60% over the previous six weeks, CEO Melissa Payner reported during Bluefly.com’s third-quarter earnings call. The number of new buyers increased by 25% and sales from existing customers grew about 35%. Bluefly.com daily sales on Dec. 11 hit the million dollar mark for the first time.

Bluefly also was able to gauge the effectiveness of the TV commercials almost instantly, Matson says. “What we found out was that people were watching television with their laptops open,” he says. “After an advertisement ran, traffic to the site would go up immediately. We could gauge not only which programs worked but what days worked and what time of day worked.”

Bluefly.com is not the only e-retailer to use offline advertising. Faced with growing competition online from multi-channel retailers, web-only merchants increasingly are turning to mass media used by offline retailers—TV, radio and print—to raise their profiles and attract shoppers.

Like Bluefly.com, Overstock.com was looking to create brand awareness when it launched a national ad campaign in October 2003. Overstock sells brand name products at clearance prices.

“We looked at the Internet and knew that the bricks-and-mortar merchants of the world—the Wal-Marts, the Targets—had the opportunity to be online merchants,” says Stormy Simon, senior vice president of branding and customer care. “We thought it was important to start branding before some of the other bricks-and-mortar brands made their presence online well-known.”

After a four-week test of a radio ad campaign showed promising results, Overstock.com put together a national TV ad campaign featuring model Sabine Ehrenfield touting a wide variety of products and urging consumers to “make the ‘O’ part of your life.” In the commercials Ehrenfield always is dressed in white against a white background, giving them a distinctive look.

Within three years of the campaign launch, awareness of the Overstock.com brand increased to 65% from 12%, Simon says. But it’s harder to quantify the impact of the campaign on sales, she adds. “Someone sees a commercial today and has a birthday in three weeks. Does that commercial prompt them to visit Overstock to buy that birthday present?”

For Netflix.com, the online DVD rental service, mass-media advertising seemed to be the best approach to marketing a product to a mass audience, a spokesman says. “We’re a fast-growing consumer brand, becoming more and more ubiquitous in the consumer mindset,” he says. “When you get to be that type of a company, you go to all the marketing channels you can.” The Netflix spokesman won’t discuss the results of the ad campaigns but will say the company will be shipping its one billionth DVD this year.

For a mass media campaign to succeed for a web-only retailer it must focus on driving traffic to the web site, says Peter Kim, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “Making sure you start with that interactive, digital, focused approach, knowing that it’s all going to come back online, that’s the key when you’re starting to look at offline ads,” Kim says.

At Bluefly, executives thought that goal could best be accomplished by selecting an agency, McCaffery Gottlieb Lane LLC, with no strong ties to the online business or the fashion retail world but solid experience with distinct businesses. “We wanted someone who would really understand we had a unique kind of business and were really consumer product-oriented, and who would really work with us to develop an interesting campaign,” Matson says.

Bluefly wanted an ad campaign that portrayed shopping as an emotional experience rather than a practical one, Matson explains. “People buy higher-end clothing and products because they want to feel a certain way, they want to feel great about themselves,” he says. But the campaign had to communicate that feeling without listing any designer names or prices or discussing discounts, he adds.

What to wear
The end result was Bluefly’s first national ad campaign, dubbed “That’s Why I Bluefly,” which featured a nude woman standing in front of a full closet, frustrated at finding nothing she wants to wear. Her solution is to wear nothing at all. “We got a tremendous response,” Matson says.

In its most recent ads, a young married couple dresses to go to a concert then quickly disrobes and falls into bed as an announcer says, “Bluefly.com—fashion that turns every head in the place—even if you don’t get to the place.”

In creating the ads McCaffery Gottlieb Lane assumed Bluefly’s target shoppers were a computer-savvy group likely to be on the Internet at home, checking e-mail, handling banking or doing a variety of other online activities, says Jerrold H. Gottlieb, chairman and CEO. “We’re trying to reach out to generate interest, peak awareness of Bluefly.com, knowing the people are home in front of the computer,” he says. “But we’ve chosen not to explain what Bluefly is.”

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Because the target audience already is online, they can reach Bluefly simply by typing in the URL, Gottlieb says. “Evidence to date suggests strongly that they are, so it says we’re doing something very right,” he says.

To ensure that the message gets to the target group—fashion-conscious, obsessive shoppers—the Bluefly ads appeared during shows such as Sex in the City, a cable series chronicling the tangled relationships of four single women in New York, and Project Runway, a reality series in which 15 fashion designers compete to show their designs during New York’s Fashion Week. “We’re very, very selective in the programs we choose to advertise during,” Gottlieb says. “We know these programs have a higher viewership of the kinds of people we want to reach.”

Likewise, Bluefly selects shopping magazines such as “Elle” and “Lucky” to showcase print ads. “We favor behavior over demographics all the time,” Matson says. “Do they have the fashion quotient and the hip quotient that we’re looking for? We know that’s where we’ll find our customers.”

Get them shopping
Driving potential customers to the site is one thing. Getting them to shop is another.

“Television’s job is to create some interest and awareness,” Matson says. “Once we get them to the site, it’s really the job of smart online direct marketing to convert them to Bluefly shoppers.”

To that end, Bluefly always runs an online sweepstakes concurrently with the television ad campaigns, Matson says. For example, in one contest, shoppers have a chance to win a different hard-to-get, high-fashion handbag every day for 45 days. They must register their e-mail address to participate in the contest.

“We’re able to capture somebody who sees the product, loves it and wants that handbag,” Matson says. “They don’t have to buy anything but we get their e-mail address. That then allows us to start communicating with them and showing what Bluefly has to offer. And that ends up converting them into buyers.”

Netflix uses its mass-media ad campaigns to drive home the theme that there’s always a movie waiting at home, the spokesman says. For one ad campaign Netflix produced five 30-second spots in which characters from different movie genres—children’s, romance, foreign, suspense and war—played out scenes in subscribers’ homes. “There are more effective ways of informing, giving more in-depth information, but when you want to get some recognition of the name and some quick impressions of what the company does, 30-second and 60-second spots on network TV reach the mass audience,” he says.

Consistent message
Netflix selected ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to handle the mass media ad campaign. As befits its broader target audience, Netflix runs the ads on NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox on such popular shows as Grey’s Anatomy, Dancing with the Stars, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with David Letterman. Netflix also makes use of radio, print ads and direct mail in addition to traditional online marketing techniques such as banner ads. “Everything is done with consistent messaging, consistent visuals, consistent themes,” the Netflix spokesman says.

Like Netflix, Overstock.com advertises on a wide variety of programs that draw from different demographic groups. “We really aren’t concerned if it’s a detective show or a reality TV show,” Simon says. “We’re more focused on whether people are loyal to the show.”

Overstock, which creates and manages the mass media ad program in house, has advertised on such programs as The Nanny, CSI, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, and the World Series and Superbowl.

Mass media advertising doesn’t come cheap, and online retailers have to compete for ad space with bricks-and-mortar companies with huge marketing budgets. Last year Bluefly spent about half of its $13 million marketing budget on TV and print advertising, Matson says. The remainder of the budget went toward online marketing such as paid and natural search, affiliates, comparison engines, and e-mail.

Adding mass media advertising to the marketing mix makes sense for web-only merchants because consumers are exposed to a mix of media, both online and offline, says Kim of Forrester Research. “If you want to get the message out the most effective way is to take an integrated approach,” he contends.

Still, offline ad campaigns aren’t the answer for every e-retailer. “I wouldn’t advocate a rush into mass media just because you can,” Kim says. “It’s a matter of asking, ‘Is this the best place for me to spend my money above and beyond what we’re already doing?’”

linda@verticalwebmedia.com