LetsBuyIt Blog

An article of Cédric of “Woweffect” has given us some great links to truely unforgettable ads. Check out all these great ads as listed on DezineHQ, Toxel, SmashingApps and Tumblr.

We would also like to add this Adidas add to our favourite adds because it is really unique (here). This unique ad made us look for other handwritten designs, which made us tumble upon this list of excellent handwritten designs: Smashing Magazine site.

Are there any other great ones that you would like to recommend?

By the way we were inspired by this movie:

Source: youtube.com

Jupiter Research published a study saying that branded communities are a failure and don’t reach their consumers. As stated in Internetworld and Acquisa the average number of members of branded communities in Europe are 6,494 members with more than have half of the communities only counting 1,000 members in comparison to the investments sometimes going far beyond EUR 100,000. Viral marketing is also out of date and is not lucrative anymore for those branded communities in most instances because most companies don’t understand the modern internet users. They try to just give information to the members instead of making the effort of understanding their consumers and providing them with interaction possibilities or even reasons to communicate. According to a report by David Eicher, CEO of the internet agency Robert & Horst, one just needs to merely be smart and integrate the users at the beginning of the development of the community instead of creating an expensive “community platform” and then looking for members. That sounds easy! What do you think?

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!

Here you can view the complete video of the interview, that taken during the OMD 2007 in Düsseldorf. I am looking forward to hearing your comments.

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.

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!

While more product information, market research and detailed business information is available online than ever, general search engines do not always provide the detail, context and semantic benefits needed to find the right business information fast. New vertical search engines are targeting the business consumer, or the “pro-sumer,” and delivering ever more targeted results to the B2B searcher.

Search-driven online marketing is increasingly leveling the playing field for smaller companies to compete against the big boys when it comes to reaching new customers and markets online.

B2B search provides a way for small, local advertisers to find the customers and other businesses that are actually looking for the services and products they provide. Any business can refine their procurement processes and expand their distribution opportunities by better exploiting the new breeds of semantic-based business search and associated advertising.

Have you heard about ZoomInfo?

ZoomInfo is the premier business information search engine, with profiles on more than 35 million people and 3.8 million companies. ZoomInfo delivers a single site for quick and easy access to in-depth information on industries, companies, people, products, services and jobs.

In a recent article for the E-Commerce Times, entitled “Social Networking: A Web 2.0 Revolution“, the journalist give a more detailed description of the Web 2.0 and its implications.

The most striking realization about this new evolution of the World Wide Web is that it is no temporary phenomenon; it is here to stay.

Web users have been empowered as never before. There is no possibility of putting the genie back in the bottle. The future will mean only more empowerment to the user.

Clearly, this evolution of the Web is truly helping marketers a great deal. They can now succinctly focus their marketing efforts and achieve much greater leverage for their advertising dollars.

All in all, everyone benefits.