Powerful, Affordable Advertising...

**duncan drennan** · 29-Jul-08, 09:19 PM

Originally Posted by Dave A

Ad blindness is a known phenomenon amongst online publishers.

Or even better, just get Adblock Plus along with a suitable filter (such as Easylist) for Firefox and then you really are blind to the ads.

**Ryan S** · 30-Jul-08, 08:24 AM

you are thinking of traditional advertising, just online. That isn't what I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about interactive marketing. 'marketing 2.0'. Things like social networks like facebook or my space, competitions, youtube, google, del.icio.us, digg. things like that. Ill give you an example. I'm actually stealing this from a book I just read

Honda was one of the first companies to use social marketing. Car companies try to capture the youth because they believe the first car you own will very likely establish you as a brand loyal customer for at least a couple more purchases in your life. So the aim for all car manufactures is for their entry level cars to be desired by the youth. In the US Honda's entry level car the Honda CRV wasn't popular at all. So, after a lot of research, they changed the name of the car from CRV to Crave and created a microsite to host a competition that challenged people to submit a picture of their 'favorite crave' along with a few lines about why they craved it. The top half of the page was filled with thumbnails of the entries. viewers could mouse over the image and vote on how good the entry was. Now the cool thing was people that submitted an entry told their friends and family to go to the site and vote for their entry. When they did they were inspired to upload their own entry and tell everyone they know to go and vote for it. They wrote about it in their blogs and on their myspace page, they put links to the site and tagged in on digg and del.icio.us and the site got top ranking with goggle. The traditional media found is very interesting and wrote stories about the site (not adverts). it was even talked about on TV. The micro site cost Honda a few thousand $ but brought millions in free publicity. Over a very short period the CRV went from nowhere to one of the top 10 selling cars in the us.

Thats the power of web 2.0. 'Marketing 2.0' is basically a way to tap into the the best form of advertising. Word of mouth.

**Norri** · 30-Jul-08, 08:47 AM

Ryan, that's exactly the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Far too many people in SA are still doing things "the traditional way". Which is fine for big companies but has never been a good idea for small businesses. It's the very reason guerilla marketing was "invented". Coz small businesses need low-cost, high-return advertising. It usually means paying in TIME instead of MONEY.

Checking out your blog now.

Won't you post a few more examples here and link back to your blog? I'd really like to see this thread becoming an important resource on the forum.

**Dave A** · 30-Jul-08, 09:15 AM

Are we going to differentiate in this thread between advertising and marketing?

There is a substantial difference.

**Norri** · 30-Jul-08, 09:39 AM

Originally Posted by Dave A

Are we going to differentiate in this thread between advertising and marketing?

There is a substantial difference.

Hmmm, too right, Dave! Let's keep it for Advertising. Marketing would require an entire forum dedicated to it

**Dave A** · 30-Jul-08, 10:33 AM

Originally Posted by Norri

Marketing would require an entire forum dedicated to it

That was the idea

Ryan, I think that is the challenge here. Clearly, Web 2.0 fits into marketing, but let's focus on advertising spend.

Consider this for a moment:

Vernon Koekemoer is essentially a Web 2.0 phenomenon. But look at where he is popping up in paid advertising - offline media! So what does that tell us?

To me the signs are clear - You can become a personality online nowadays, but when commercial advertising starts grinding its wheels to use that star value - look at where they are running the ads.

**duncan drennan** · 30-Jul-08, 12:16 PM

Originally Posted by Dave A

To me the signs are clear - You can become a personality online nowadays, but when commercial advertising starts grinding its wheels to use that star value - look at where they are running the ads.

Do you think most people possibly eat in front of a TV, and therefore advertising food (grilled chicken in this case) on TV at appropriate times is possibly a good way of priming people to substitute their current meal for grilled chicken?

**Alta Murray** · 30-Jul-08, 12:18 PM

I whole-heartedly agree with you Dave, I think that is indicative of the most effective medium for advertising,where you get through to the people. Too expensive for us though

I do like watching the market leaders as opposed to the second's as a market leader has to fight very hard to stay number 1, and they are doing 'defensive advertising' which is different from aggressive marketing.

I don't think flyers and posters do the job, not from what I have seen, even billboards failed with one client, so I am dubious at best as we humans have filtered out almost all of the noise.

You might tend to find the young bloods on-line a lot, so that's cool, but the majority of them will not exactly be rolling in money, so I am still not sure about going that route.

The best, best way of advertising is socializing, though we don't want to know it, my experience bears that out. We have one client that is absolutely fantastic at generating sales in this way, and I have actually calculated his return on expenditure, and you can see it paying off on sales, and it became a way to predict sales for that company

I would not recommend this route if you are not a social animal ( and I don't mean slogging back the drinks) or if you are not a 'finished product' as an individual.

Every business usually have what I call a 'face man', someone who can fill that function.
Best advertising I have seen. Sorry Norri, I am terribly old school when it comes to this

For ex. microsoft is the begin all end all and their new accounting 2008 download site looks horrible,and every time I try to download a demo version i seem to hit a loop, or my line dips as it takes 1 hour 30 odd minutes to download. that after 1 bil dollars and 30 people on the project? Won't hurt them, but it would hurt me a great deal, so i am cautious.

With my new marketing idea, I find it hard to differentiate betwix marketing and avertising, so I might be making an elementary mistake and fall flat on my face....or I am just blending the two. It will be one hell of an expensive mistake, and I have actually saved up for it!

**murdock** · 29-Aug-08, 06:58 AM

word of mouth is the only form of advertising for me and has been for more than 17 years now...it must be work.

it all depends on the product or service you are selling

**Norri** · 29-Aug-08, 09:09 AM

Originally Posted by murdock

word of mouth is the only form of advertising for me and has been for more than 17 years now...it must be work.

it all depends on the product or service you are selling

Nothing will ever beat word-of-mouth. But if you have a new service or you're testing out the market before developing something WORTH talking about, you're better off paying for some exposure until you can tweak your offering to be something people will talk about.