LetsBuyIt Blog

We have previously mentioned viral marketing however we were wondering whether anybody has examples for the monetary value of viral ad campaigns?

We read that the campaign “Will It Blend”from Blendtec generated $50,000 in ad revenue with 100 million views in total.

Apparently “Ask a Ninja” generates an unbelievable $100,000 a month in ad revenue and income from merchandising and licensing for creators Kent Nichols and Doug Sarine.

According to Wiki.media-culture the BMW viral ad campaign in 2001 generated BMW a sales increased by 12.5% compared to 2000 with peak times even crashing the servers.

What examples do you have for viral marketing campaigns where the benefit can be expressed in monetary value?

Following our last week call for finding any old LetsBuyIt ads, Jing - one of our dear readers - found 3 of them! Jing, thank you so much!!

They are available on Youtube. Welcome back to Buyer Power!

Fashion still stands for a significant part of the revenue for online retailers, who endeavour to develop and improve their ways of presenting and marketing their products online. Merchants and developers are getting very creative as you can see with the 3D retail space modulation of Kinset Technologies, the connection of billboards to the internet through QR codes or the currently developed Bluetooth Billboards by Ströer and many more.

Reviews and ratings, despite the latest developments at eBay, however are an increasingly important factor for increasing the online sales. These reviews however need to be independent and unbiased and written by real shoppers, e.g. Reevoos. The article “Stilbildung im Internet” or “Stylecreation in the Internet” published at the FAZ is a very interesting article describing how the true fashion scene is commenting and blogging about fashion independently: Fashion as seen on the streets and not sold by retailers seems to be the latest trend of independent fashion critics.

Check out the most famous blogs about fashion: thesartorialist.blogspot.com, facehunter.blogspot.com, shoeblogs.com, styleclicker.net, glamcanyon.blogspot.com, gofugyourself.com, www.slow-wear.de.

We have already written an article about Mobile Marketing and QR Codes on June 20, 2007. Finally we see the initial large scale attempt of international retailer H&M who are “tuning” their ads with barcodes.

You take a photo of the barcode on the poster, the software recognizes the product and without any hassle the shopper can purchase the product over the phone and the price is simply added to the telephone bill. These barcodes can be easily recognized with a small software of the Canadian mobile phones marketing specialist Semacode that allows code recognition in liaison with mobile phone cameras. That is even better than purchasing the product within the banner ad without having to leave the page, made possible by Gettailgate.com.

The new wave of self-improvement efforts of retailers to adapt their websites and its navigation to the needs of the users, by implementing the latest technologies, is breezing refreshingly through the retail scene.

The fascinating tracking technologies, such as Google Analytics, allow retailers to improve the usability of their websites by closely investigating how viewers navigate on the websites and where there is need for improvement such as responsiveness to advertisements, colors, schemes and cursor-movement patterns. There is a great need for this improvement and we are looking for the new ergonomics 2008.

A new focus in retail has been put on the product itself as consumers become more critical of product, quality, price and presentation with the help of internet transparency. The efforts will be concentrated on finding new mediums to provide the best information to persuade the viewers to trigger a purchasing action.

The shocking research findings of the American Usability expert Jakob Nielsen that modern internet surfers are completely blind to banner ads on websites, by having studied eye-movements, is evidence that retailers need to move on. All proactive Marketers are looking for the new thing.

Mediums 2.0 are new marketing must-have-tools for every frontliner. Video is probably the new buzz of internet marketing 2007 as you can see in the Tomorrow Focus and Doubleclick video-effect experiment “takeGAS” and on IKEA Germany now. IKEA has created an entire videoshow presenting all 1,154 products of the new catalogue, which is a truly fascinating movie. One things is for sure: All this multimedia selling-tools will push forward those high-speed servers from Berlin Hosting Company 1blu without a doubt.

Another great hype is viral marketing with online animations, such as the genius new Wilkinson Teaser “Fight For Kisses”, the BMW M3 game or even for company presentations on www.floaded.com (check out Mercedes Benz). There are many more examples out there, even the GMAIL Video campaign, etc. That viral marketing is very difficult is proven by the Jupiter Research stating that mere 15% of the campaigns succeed as the TigerBalm Youtube video campaign shows.

May the creative and intelligent ones win!

Yesterday and today, Emmanuel and me are at the OMD 2007 Media and Marketing Fair in Düsseldorf. Everybody of the German Marketing and Advertising scene is represented at this fair so it is a great opportunity to meet all the companies, potential partners and representatives of our competitors alike.

The potential is amazing and therefore we are more than keen to soon launch and be part of this thriving e-commerce movement of new media. We can identify interesting shifts in the news, media and marketing industry as the market is moving on from the old ways of thinking into the new e-generation. One sentence summarizes our blackberry generation: “We have reached a time, where people are willing to send intangible cyber-gifts and even pay for this”.

One highlight, at least for us, was my interview with the Julius Endert from Handelsblatt.com, the most influential business newspaper in Germany, who also act as main sponsor for the OMD. Check out the video in the Handelsblatt Video Page. You will soon be able to find the translated script here on our blog.

Hope to see you at the OMD.

The system lets publishers insert streaming video ads in online video content on their Web sites.

Google on Tuesday launched its AdSense for Video pilot program to test its system to allow publishers to insert streaming video ads in online video content on their Web sites.

“With this pilot, publishers control when the ads play in their videos and choose which videos get the ads,” said Christine Lee, AdSense product marketing manager, in a blog post.

AdSense is a Google advertising program that lets publishers place ads on their Web sites and split the fees paid by advertisers with Google. AdSense already lets publishers place click-to-play video ads.

A french game production agency, Motion Twin launched a few weeks ago a new ‘aimless’ website: Miniville (meaning MiniTown). What is it? You can create your own town, with its inhabitants, tranportations, criminality or even unemployment!
There is no way to control it or to know who created the town, and each new connexion to the website create a new inhabitant in the town!
Want to help us make LetsBuyIt’ City grow?? Just click here: http://letsbuyit.miniville.fr/

A new example of a 100% buzz action!

This week we would like to highlight the interesting concept of a company that pays for the reviews of items: ShopperO.com. A German start-up from Hamburg has created a system of financial remuneration for reviews instead of only being thanked for with an email, rewarded with discounts or never-to-be-redeemed-vouchers.

They have come up with two payment methods as stated on their website:

“Every Shoppero gets 20% of the revenues from the review pages and 60% of the revenues from page hits tracing back to adgets or links.”

The definition of revenue is not very clear however if you could enlighten me, please feel free! I like the idea and this will enhance the speed of web-marketing development.

We went to a meeting this morning on the growing opportunity of marketing on mobile phones. The interest of all techniques and methods - SMS, MMS, Bluetooth points or QR code - has been proved regarding to different marketing goals and objectives of the advertisers.
Effectiveness of these mobile campaigns was one of the most significant points of the demonstration: opening rates up to 98% for SMS campaigns, return rate of 25% in average for communication campaigns, in addition to a penetration rate of the mobile phone use in Europe that doesn’t stop increasing.

I must confess that I still have some remaining questions about mobile marketing:
- Return rates are still very high today because commercial mobile messages are not very spread, and spam does not exist on this terminal. But what will happen when spam will appear among sms and mms as they are today by emails? Will we all have to get a anti-spam solution on our mobile phones?
- What about answer and/or website connection fees included on these messages? Will they be carried by the advertisers or is it gonna stay the way it is today: surprises?
- As for QR codes (or 2D codes), I must confess I’ve always been puzzled about them, but never really saw them since they appeared.. I barely believe that just by tacking a picture from any angle of a small code, it will really redirect you with no mistake to the good website!