Full article from eMarketer.com

From your inner circle, to personalized news, to seamless transactions, here’s a take on the top ten digital trends predicted to go mass-market in the coming year. Which do you agree with? Read more

Full article from AdAge.com

Full article from Mashable.com

Full article from AdWeek.com

Al Hampel, a well known, New York based creative director in the 1980s, laid out a set of rules for creating effective advertising.  Kind of a ten commandments of “do’s” and “don’ts” he expected his creative department to follow.  At the top of the list (or the tablet) was this one: “It isn’t creative unless it sells.”  Another Hampel-ism was “Say the name of the product in the first three seconds of a commercial.”  Not surprisingly, he took a lot of heat for his rigid approach from copywriters and art directors who didn’t want to be told how to do their jobs. The creative community held the belief that there were many ways to grab the consumer’s attention and deliver a compelling reason to buy.  They didn’t need or want a checklist approach to creativity.  They certainly didn’t want to adopt what they saw as Al’s hard sell, shove it down the consumer’s throat philosophy.

Yet interestingly, despite all of the arguing back and forth that Hampel’s pronouncement set off, there was no disagreement that the role of advertising was to sell the client’s product.  Cut to 2011.  Where are we today?  Selling has become kind of dirty.  No one wants to use the word.  Now it appears we’re in the business of conversations.  Consider this recent quote from an agency principal when he was asked what would be unique about his newly formed shop.  “What we aim to do is create ideas and content that influence conversations.  We expect to be able to distribute content and engage in conversations with consumers in a multichannel way.  We’re not PR, and we’re not traditional.”

The last thing an advertising agency wants to be these days is an advertising agency.  And the last thing they want to do is sell a product.  Selling is old school.

It’s assumed that if you can engage consumers in a conversation, they will eventually get around to buying whatever it is you’re supposed to be peddling.  Or maybe not.  And what difference does it really make so long as you generate a ton of “likes” on Facebook and get a gazillion views on Youtube?

Don’t get me wrong.  I believe the digital space provides an incredible opportunity to connect consumers with products and services in new and exciting ways.  But at the proverbial end of the day, the job of advertising (There, I said it!) is to sell something.  People buy products that somehow, some way, fill a need for them.  Advertising gives them the information they need to form a preference for your product over your competitor’s product.  Let’s not be afraid to do that.   Now there’s something we can have a conversation about.

So what are we to make of this? Why is the internet considered a great way to attract dollars, but not votes?  There could be several reasons:

1. There still aren’t enough older voters, the kind most likely to turn out for midterm elections, available online.
2. A 30-second commercial (or a printed direct mail piece) is better suited to deliver the scathing, negative messages that dominate political advertising.
3. The right voters can be more accurately targeted with TV and direct mail.
4. There’s something less compelling and persuasive about a message delivered digitally.
5. When push comes to shove, politicians are just more comfortable with the tried and true way of communicating with voters.

No matter which candidates come out on top in the elections, the battle for votes should have a profound effect on marketers.  At the least, it raises questions about what can and what can’t be accomplished online.  That traditional media is alive, well and continues its powerful hold on us.  And that politics just gets stranger and stranger every year.



First, let’s start of with definitions for those of you who may not be so familiar with these important terms:

PPC – Pay-per-click – The pricing structure used by some online channels to charge an advertiser each time a user clicks on the advertiser’s ad. The advertiser usually sets the amount, not the channel. Also called cost-per-click (CPC).

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “organic” or un-paid search results.

While both the above are terms from the world of online marketing, SEO is probably not as well known and is certainly not as popular as PPC. We’ll take a closer look at each and talk about their short and long term benefits. We’ll also explain why PPC is no longer as effective without good SEO.

We’ll start with PPC. First and most importantly, it is a paid form of advertising. Its benefits can be both immediate and significant. In a short period of time, a company can use PPC ads to go from relative online obscurity to being highly visible on the Internet. Imagine appearing on the first page of the results from top tier search engines for keywords related to your business! There are a lot of assumptions here, but all other things being equal, PPC is a far swifter method of online exposure than any other practical method. It is easy to implement, easy to track, and it can theoretically provide immediate gratification. There is also a feeling of having some control – spend more money, get more visibility – with PPC that resonates with traditional advertisers. Conversely, it is also the quickest to reverse if and when the budget runs out and you can no longer pay for ads for your keywords.

SEO, on the other hand, isn’t a specific advertisement for which a company would pay, but that’s not to say it’s free. SEO can take many forms, such as technical changes to the code on a web page, the use of topical landing pages, or the creation of keyword-rich content placed strategically on a website. Of course, when coding and content creation enter into the conversation, so does the realization that there are resources required to complete these tasks such as time and money. Couple this with the difficulty in explaining the benefits of SEO to a company, “So we changed the titles of our web pages, now what happens?” and it becomes clear why SEO can be a difficult sell.

It is also more difficult to measure return on investment (ROI) derived from SEO. For one, it takes time to make the necessary changes, and then more time for them to have an impact on search results. Businesses investing in SEO have to have more patience and trust when implementing SEO than they would in PPC. SEO involves many small, incremental changes that can seem insignificant, but that collectively serve to make a big difference in the eyes of search engines. There is no secret formula or magic to it. It’s just a matter hard work, focus, and quality content creation.

Interestingly, PPC advertising is now dependent upon SEO to a great degree as the search engines’ ranking algorithms have gotten savvier. The quality of search results rely upon a keyword being relevant to an ad, the landing page for which must further be relevant to the ad. A search engine’s business relies on the quality and relevance of their search results. As such, they won’t allow ads their algorithm deems of low quality to show no matter what the advertiser is willing to pay. So by investing more in SEO, you get more for you money with PPC.

While there is more complexity and time involved, the long term ROI of SEO as opposed to PPC is of great importance. PPC traffic may increase at a much quicker rate initially, but over the long term less will be spent on the traffic gained from SEO. With SEO, the traffic spigot doesn’t just turn off when the ads stop. It may not be forever, but well implemented SEO has an appreciable half-life.