Unicast

I’ve read several pieces lately about the advertising industry’s attempts to decode what women want, the latest being this review of a book called What Women Want (which happened to be written by a man). The buying power of women is rapidly expanding, and everyone is trying to figure out how to cash in on that trend. As a person who has been female since, oh, before I was born, I’d like to offer some tips straight from the horse’s mouth:

1. KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE PINK. I am so sick of having the “female version” of every product looking like it’s been dipped in Pepto-Bismol. We are capable of viewing and appreciating more than one color. We are complex, dynamic grown women, so please consider using a complex, dynamic color palette when speaking to us instead of the color of the booties they put on us in the hospital when we were born. Also, pastels are not always necessary.

2. Instead of “women,” could we just be treated as “people?” There is so much advertising aimed at women (especially moms) that makes me think, “Gosh, my husband’s the one who does that.” And when I see an ad for something marketed to women that men could use too, I think, “Why am I being singled out here?” Gender inequality is shrinking, and advertisers have some catching up to do with this new emerging reality.

3. Make our lives easier. I am never going to remember to fill out the survey on the two-foot long receipt when I get home. I have consistently failed to remember to take the coupon with me when I go to buy something. I don’t want to get an email to take a survey every single time I have my car serviced. I want fewer pieces of paper to carry around. I want the coupon to be on the box and ready to use at checkout. I don’t mind sharing my feedback with you, but you have to make it easy and non-intrusive for me. I want to subscribe to your email updates instead of being magically enrolled and having to figure out how to unsubscribe, and if I do subscribe, I want to hear from you when it’s actually relevant, not every day. I want you to keep your message short and sweet and then give me the option to find out more quickly and easily.

Women are busy these days, so if you can keep that in mind when crafting and delivering your message, you’ll reap the rewards, and so will we.

4. Respect our age (This is the part where I’m supposed to say “Even if we lie about it.”). Grown women don’t need to be talked down to in the “hey girlfriend!” vernacular in order to be interested in what you have to say. If you’re marketing to grownups, feel free to leave out the OMGs and BFFs and gossipy tones and give it to us straight. It doesn’t need to be juvenile to be fun. Also feel free to retire some of those old “women are like this and men are like that” clichés—yes, women like shoes. Ha ha. Let’s move it along now.

That’s my list—ladies out there, do you have any others to add?

Social media offers businesses a host of ways to connect to their customer base. It’s more than just a buzzword; it shows consumers that you want to be connected to them by more than just a purchase. It shows that you’re technologically savvy, and maybe by extension, smarter and easier to do business with. It reminds people your business exists when they forget. The benefits can be huge if you do it right, but what if you’re too small to have a marketing department and you wind up doing it on your own? How much effort do you wind up having to expend, and what’s the return on your investment?

Let’s start with why it’s worth the effort. I recently was in need of a spare bed for my guest bedroom. I started doing my research online, and quickly wound up at Amazon, which I think is a great site for user-friendliness. I easily found what I was looking for, but the shipping charges were more than I was willing to spend, and I had to have it by the weekend because I had guests coming to town. I shopped around on several other major furniture sites that I knew had locations in my city. If I couldn’t find what I was looking for with a simple keyword search, I abandoned the website pretty quickly and moved on to the next one. I finally wound up on websites for some strictly local companies that had no catalog or search functionality or anything remotely resembling that on their website and wound up having to make phone calls (so old-fashioned!). Their websites were basically a glorified version of their entries in the phone book. I did eventually end up buying from one of them. Well, they got my business, so how exactly did they fail with their $2.00 website and lack of a social media platform?

      1. There were literally DOZENS of other opportunities for someone else to snag my business before I ever found out about this place. If those previous websites hadn’t been so disappointing as well, there’s an excellent chance I’d have purchased somewhere else first. I wound up at my ultimate destination against pretty steep odds.

      2. When making a major purchase or trying new restaurants, I often head first to Facebook and ask for recommendations from my virtual community. Or go to Yelp and look up reviews for places (which I actually did do with a couple of those sites). Those are the easiest places to start the hunt because I’m already on them, so if the mountain comes to my virtual Mohammed, they’ll get all the attention first. When there’s no info there, I start browsing websites.

With that in mind, I think we can safely say that your odds of making a sale are definitely improved if you have a better plan of attack that involves social media. The plan might look something like this:

      A. A robust website that is easily searchable and has the information your customers are looking for (like your prices/rates). This will be the core for everything else you do; all the rest of your social media efforts will lead back to this. Bonus points if you have an email subscription option (and for heaven’s sake, don’t send anyone an email unless they request it through that first). A caution here though: use the email sparingly—this does not need to be a daily thing! Extra bonus points if you have a blog on your site that shows the human side of your business, and mega-bonus points if it’s actually entertaining and informative.

This piece will take the most time to maintain, and you may be tempted just to stick with that and skip the rest since this will be a fair amount of work. But you’d be missing out on some opportunities.

      B. The Facebook page. This should be a complement to your website, but it also accesses people that your website can’t. The great thing about a Facebook page is that it’s easy to set up, but don’t make the mistake of letting it languish after that; get in there, spend some time on making “friends”, and make regular updates (though not so many that people hide you from their news feed). If you change something on your website, let people know about it on Facebook. Got a coupon or special deal or contest? Put it up there with a link to your site. Add a new photo every once in a while, update it a couple of times a week to keep things relevant, and you’re on your way to creating an actual community with your customer base.

      C. The Twitter feed. The ubiquitous companion to the Facebook page. Since so many people are on both, if you don’t catch them on one, you’ll have the other to help cover your bases. It’s a good idea to put things like coupons and special deals on here too because they can be easily passed around.

      D. For the truly advanced, check out how you can incorporate location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. I recently read a great article about how to do this here. Since this functions as a sort of game, offer some reward for people who check in frequently and become “mayors,” etc.

So you’ve set up all of these things, and now it’s a question of keeping them maintained. Focus first on your website. When something new happens on the website, announce it on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else you can think of. If something important happens at your business, think about how you’re going to let everyone else know. Since you’re reaching a much larger audience than you normally would, you’ll be reaping the benefits of all this increased exposure. And hopefully, you’ll be able to maintain these things without undue burden as you’re trying to keep your smaller business running.

OK, got my morning beverage, time to get to work. Oh wait, first I’m going to throw on some Pandora. Hmm, says something about Facebook…eh, I’ve got a ton of email to read, figure that out later. Oh good, the Killers. Love this song.

Whoa.

Apparently Greg likes this song too. How does Pandora know that Greg and I are connected? Hmm, and what information about what me is going to show up when Greg goes to Pandora?

OK, starting to get a little creeped out, internet.

***

This was my actual reaction upon my first foray into Facebook’s Open Graph. Working where I do, I like to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on out there on the internet, so I had heard a bit about Open Graph. But even after hearing about it, I was not prepared for how unnerving it would be to simply open up Pandora. I love Pandora, but that morning made me wonder if I should even be using it. And if I decide later not to have Pandora connected to Facebook, where do I go about undoing that? And why didn’t anyone ask me if I wanted this to happen in the first place?

Not being asked what I do and don’t want has been a common theme lately. Recently, I ordered some Mother’s Day flowers from a typical website. I SCOURED every page during the process looking for the automatically checked checkbox that says “please bombard me with email every two days about special offers until I am so sick of you I can hardly stand it” (OK, it doesn’t say that, but that is what I see). There was no checkbox. There was no option for it at all. OK cool, maybe I’m lucky and these guys get it and aren’t going to automatically opt me into a bunch of email that I don’t want.

Cue the emails.

Great, now I have to scroll to the very bottom of the page. Click Unsubscribe. Yes, attachments and links are OK, blah blah blah… Click Unsubscribe again on the landing page.

I’ll have to keep this in mind for next Mother’s Day.

Now on the one hand, if I had opted in to the email list and got one at, say Thanksgiving, I might think, “Ooh, since I’m not going to see my grandmother for Thanksgiving, I should maybe send her a bouquet to let her know I’m thinking about her,” then boom, very effective use of email. But sending me stuff two days later? With no new holidays in sight? I smell a lack of restraint, so I better unsubscribe now.

Finally, I went to buy a Camelbak this weekend at a retail store. The store had one of those sign up to get a discount card deals where you get to carry around a plastic card with all of the other discount cards that all of the OTHER stores make you carry around, not to mention the little plastic keychain thingies, and now you can’t even close your wallet or get it back into your purse and at every single store you go to you have to remember if you have the card or not and then try to figure out where in the heck you put it and WHY CAN’T YOU JUST GIVE ME THE $1.62 DISCOUNT???? And sure, you can say no, I don’t want the card. But they never just drop it on the first try. And the next time you walk in here, they’re going to do the hard sell on the card AGAIN so don’t think for a minute that this matter is settled by you already having decided that you don’t want one!

OK, sorry, that was a bit of a rant. But my point is this: I am much more likely to come back to your store if I don’t get asked about the card every time. I’ll even tell my friends about it if I just automatically get the savings without having to submit to junk mail and email and little plastic cards.

And I’d be more likely to sign up for floral updates if I know you’re reminding me about something useful instead of burying me in spam. Do you think I purchase flowers weekly? Then why would I need to hear from you that often?

And I’m a lot more inclined to remember the time you creeped me out on Pandora and completely rewrote my profile without asking me if I was OK with either, Facebook. And no, most people aren’t quitting yet. But we remember all the times you screwed up. We remember every time someone passes along a message urging you to go to your Privacy Settings and turn something off that you never turned on in the first place. We remember every instance of it, we store that away, and one day we’re going to be spending more time figuring out how to turn off things in your application that we don’t like than enjoying the things we do like, and that’s when we leave; is that what you want?

Consider your audience. Put yourself in their shoes. You know how busy you are and how much you wish everything could just be easier and less cluttered? Keep that in mind next time you come up with the next bright idea, and make sure your users have the OPTION to decide what they want from you, and then follow it up by respecting that.

I am a former Apple employee who adores pretty much everything that they come up with (although I am still trying to wrap my head around why I’d ever need an iPad). I remember the sheer glee of unwrapping my new MacBook Pro a few years ago and the little flutter I felt when I sat in that darkened auditorium and listened to Steve Jobs tell me about his fancy new phone. I immediately wanted it. I drool over hardware specs and software alike. I got my husband switched over and he’s never been happier. It’s safe to say, I am a Mac.

But I also love Adobe. I cannot wait to get my hands on the Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5. Flash has changed my world entirely because now I can make things MOVE! Heck, the word “Flash” is in my job description. I use AfterEffects for video editing almost every day. Adobe has made products that have changed industries, and I think they’re geniuses.

But there’s conflict! Adobe’s Flash versus the Steve Jobs-backed HTML5: who will win this epic battle? Is this battle even epic? Message boards are lighting up with the debate.

I don’t know how it’s all going to end up, but I would like to speak on behalf of creative types like myself who hold both companies and their products in very high esteem when I say: work together!

Can you imagine how great it would be to have you two powerhouses on the same side of the fence? Why do battle when you could join forces and use your powers for the good of the creative types that you’ve embraced so much and who have embraced you right back? Why do we have to choose between just one way of doing things when the modern digital age offers nothing but options and alternatives? Why couldn’t we take what’s best about HTML5 and Flash and merge them together to create some impressive new hybrid version that would make both companies money? Something that would run on iPhones and iPads as well as Droids and Nexuses (Nexi?) and plain old web pages without battery vampirism, slow performance, or huge overhead! Something with a nice UI that works with both sides of the developer/designer brain! Imagine the possibilities when you take competing efforts and turn them towards a common goal. Instead of one side winning, one side losing and the rest of us having to pick sides, everyone wins, most of all us creative types.

So Apple and Adobe, let me know if you’re interested-I’m happy to mediate!

Thanks to the fact that I work at a pretty awesome company, I can log into Pandora every morning and delight myself in endless hours of music while I work intently on my day to day projects. Listening to everything from Beethoven to Beyoncé helps me power through my countless emails, all the while keeping me in a great mood and my energy levels up!

Over the past year, I have seen the ads on Pandora transform from simple 300x250 ads that sit awkwardly on the page and often overlap the player to enormous and elaborate designs that transform the entire page into something almost magical. The ads are impressive to say the least and as much as I want to hate them for interrupting my music experience for 15 seconds, I have to admit they capture my attention. Just recently, I saw an ad for the movie “Kick Ass” on Pandora. This ad allowed users to choose stations designed to evoke the supposed musical preferences of each one of the super heroes in the movie. I couldn’t help myself and chose “Hit-Girl’s” station. To my surprise the music was actually very good. The station played everything from The Grateful Dead to Joan Jett and the blackhearts.

This ad was insanely clever! They didn’t interrupt my music experience but offered me the opportunity to make it better and try something new, while still effectively promoting the premiere of the movie. In addition, the design caught my eye instantly. It was huge and colorful but didn't cover the player- essentially it didn't come between me and the content I care about. In an age where technology is evolving at the speed of light and consumer’s attention spans are steadily decreasing it’s important for publishers, marketers and agencies alike to keep their finger on the pulse. Online ads should not only promote your product or service but they should also seamlessly integrate into the publisher page and compliment the content on the page if possible. I think Pandora and those who choose to advertise on it are definitely on the right track. These new ads show that they understand the importance of sharing their message through innovative designs and features while creating a positive user experience without stopping the music!

Our clients are always in search of the next big thing, the out-of-the-box solution that will make a big impact. I’ve seen some great out-of-the-box executions both from our internal clients and out there on the web as a regular user, and the one from this article stands out as a great example. It used ASCII art along with a sort of virtual scavenger hunt to really engage its users. Here’s why I think this and other out-of-the-box ads have worked so well:

1. They knew their audience. People who play video games are often a little more tech-savvy than the rest of us. The Dante’s Inferno ad catered directly to the nerds in their target audience (and lest I offend anyone, I should note that I am a HUGE nerd, so I count myself among them).

2. They made it fun. Collecting passwords from six different images to unlock one final bit of information? Sounds a lot like the video games that their audience is already playing.

3. They made it worth it. Getting access to exclusive music and art is a pretty nice payoff for someone who has done all that work.

The trick with out-of-the-box ads is not to do it just to do it. Sure, it might be visually appealing and do some neat tricks, but the best ones know their audience, make it fun for them and reward them with a pertinent payoff.

Learn more about Wieden+Kennedy's high-tech campaign for Electronic Arts' Dante's Inferno game here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=123870

I remember the days when a URL started to show up at the bottom of TV commercials. Those companies were instantly thought of as being on the cutting edge, because not everyone had a website back then. (And then we walked to school barefoot, in the snow, and it was uphill both ways…)

Nowadays, it’s common knowledge that your business is nothing without a website; those URLs at the bottom of ads are ubiquitous and expected. But now I’m noticing all the Facebook and Twitter and MySpace logos popping up at the bottom of ads. It’s no longer enough for a company that is serious about marketing itself to simply have a website. Now you have to have at the very least a Facebook or MySpace page, and preferably a Twitter account to go with it. And that original website should have a blog. So what changed? I believe it’s mainly two things:

1. The explosion of Viral. Social media takes plain old word-of-mouth and puts it on steroids. The results can turn a normal British woman or a kid coming home from the dentist into an instant celebrity, and the possibility of that happening to your product is too tempting to ignore.

2. People are less willing to try something based on a cool ad campaign alone—they want some proof before they jump in. When a user goes to a Facebook page and sees that the product or company has 600,000 fans, they’re more likely to let their guard down and give it a shot. If a restaurant has bad reviews on Yelp or City Search or Urbanspoon, it’s a big problem because that’s where people are going to find out about them.

Consumer engagement used to go something like this: create a great ad campaign and people would buy. Now the process has changed: consumers find out about the company or product and get hooked through their advertising, look up their website to find out more info, and then investigate them through social media to make sure they’re worth the investment. Consumers are willing to do a lot more homework before they spend their time and money these days, and businesses have to be willing to do theirs too.

I recently had the opportunity to meet with an agency that was in the very early stages of a new campaign. Coming up with the creative for a campaign can be an exercise in prognostication—what will engage the consumer? What are the results we want and how can we get them?.........

I am reminded of one ad that we ran that had 0% CTR. That’s right—this ad drove no traffic whatsoever to the client’s website. But when I think back over all of the ads I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a LOT), this one sticks out in my mind as one of the best. The ad featured a game that was very cartoonish, silly and cute, but it really drove the point home of what that company did and what they were good at. It took the company’s logo and associated it with a single idea. To this day, when I see one of their TV ads, I think back to how clever that little ad was. And the ITR on it was astronomical.

This leads me back to the agency that’s just starting their new campaign. For the team starting to build new creative, I think it’s a good idea to start with the question “What kind of report do you want to see at the end of the campaign?” Usually, you want one with high ITR and/or CTR, depending on what the goal of the campaign is. But those aren’t just numbers; a high CTR means that what you’re doing is working—people were engaged enough by what you created that it made them want to go out and buy something or find out more about it. High ITR is a little more tricky, but if you’ve done things right, it means that people are enjoying themselves while your logo is in front of them, and while that might not add up to immediately heading for the website to buy, the benefits can go more long-term when they’re carrying around that association in their head.

When we get involved with clients who haven’t worked with us before, it’s exciting for them to know how many possibilities there are for their ad units.  But it can also be daunting to figure out what things are going to work best in a medium that may be new to you.  The sheer number of options combined with an almost-always tight deadline might throw you.  So what to do?

Don’t worry-we can help!

Here are a few tips to get you started on your way to a successful online ad:

1.   Know Your Goal

Are you trying to drive traffic to your website or increase brand awareness?  The answer can determine what kind of creative you need.

2.   Get Some Samples

You can view our online gallery at http://www.unicast.com/Showcase.aspx.  As you look through the work, notice which ones are jumping out at you the most and why, as well as which ones have your same goal in mind. 

3.   Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should

Sure, things like videos, animation, games, email functionality, Twitter interaction and 3D are all cool, but do you need all of it in the same ad?  And even if you pick just one, will it help you accomplish your goal, or will it just take up space in your CPU usage?  We have a ton of great features to offer, so find the ones that are right for you and keep it to that.

4.   Consider The Assets You Already Have

Do you have things you can pull from your website?  Layered PSDs?  Flash assets from other ad units you may have worked on?  If so, these make a great jumping-off point instead of having to start from absolute scratch.

5.   Pick Your Best And Send It Over

We prefer to work with the highest resolution images and video that we can lay hands on.  We can play around with the file size to get it where it needs to be, but if we start with great quality, we have a better chance of ending with it.

6.   Still Lost?  Let’s Talk!

We’re happy to get on a call with you any time to discuss your creative.  Whether we’re building the creative or converting what you’ve built, it’s always better for us to work things out on the front end and get you exactly what you need instead of sending you multiple revisions later.   

On October 22nd 2009, we launched Microsoft’s International Windows 7 campaign on the MSN homepage across 24 countries. The creative concept consisted of two synchronized banners, a 300x250 and a 728x90, for a total 48 placements that went live in each country at approximately 12am.

It was one of the most unique campaign’s we had worked on to date because it required that we launch ads every hour on the hour around the clock. In addition, we had to convert one piece of creative to fit each market by translating the copy into 18 different languages. We successfully translated text and completed localization in less then 48 hours.

Although a campaign that is required to launch in over 20 countries may seem daunting at first, we knew that by keeping the lines of communication open close to 24 hours a day and 7 days a week we could ensure that this campaign was managed as efficiently and smoothly as possible. By working closely with the MSN team – we held daily meetings to review details and discuss the progress of the campaign and on the day of the campaign launch we had an open bridge call available 24 hours - we were able to resolve any issues that arose almost instantly and provide MSN with a daily and often hourly report on the status of our efforts.

I commend the dedication of all of the parties involved. For any campaign, no matter how big or small, working with a team of people that devotes their expertise to the project at hand and can easily exchange ideas and accurately perform tasks quickly is the key to its success.