Industrial Research: Making Money Advertising

Even in times of severe budgetary crisis, WMATA still has to advertise itself. And what better way to reverse the public's negative opinion about random bag searches, constant maintenance, annoying talking buses, broken escalators, confusing fare structures and so forth than with some state of the art "guerrilla" marketing! Kytja Weir reports that the agency is going to try and get your attention the same way your local emo band does.

The transit system brought on Williams Whittle, based in Alexandria, earlier this month to help market the agency using traditional advertising but also possibly "guerrilla marketing" and "street teams," said Metro spokesman Reggie Woodruff.

"Williams Whittle will assist us as we continue to explore ways to increase revenue and off-peak ridership and to more effectively promote Metro and the improvements that we are making," he wrote in an e-mail.

That could mean "unconventional marketing" that directly engages potential riders, he explained. He could not provide any examples of what such direct marketing might look like, though.

What, was Evan Hensleigh not available? WMATA will be using about two-thirds of its $1.8 million advertising budget on Williams Whittle's services. For the sake of public transportation, I sure hope that Williams Whittle has some better "unconventional" ideas than those Second Life animations which Metro rolls out every now and then -- based on the company's website, it looks like they've got a ton of experience creating slightly annoying, yet oft-imitated television ads.

I'm exploring the site now. First impressions:

1. Promoted Tweets: "When you promote a Tweet, only the most relevant users see it—put simply, that's users that follow similar accounts to yours." OK - so Twitter has some kind of (proprietary) segmenting algorithm. Does that mean "If I'm promoting tweets about RC Cola, users following Coke and Pepsi will see it, but someone who isn't following either of them won't?" What about someone who's following a celebrity that Coke or Pepsi sponsors? I guess if I were a brand, I'd want something a little more specific than that. On Facebook, I can say, "Only 18-35 year old males who are fans of any NBA team will see ads for my basketball shoes." What's the equivalent on Twitter?

2. Promoted Trends: Yeah, Carri's right about this one *and* there's another hitch. The way this has been described, a trend has to *already* be a Trending Topic before you can promote it. That means the brand has to sit at a console, watching Twitter, or have a script watching the world-wide, local and regional trending topics. When a new trend is "born", the brand has to decide if it's relevant, compose a tweet, then hit the "Promote" button.

I've seen Promoted Trends, so they must either have had a strong clue that it was going to make it into the Trending Topics ahead of time, like a sports event or TV show, or they were camped out on a console. I know the W+K people had a whole control center for the Old Spice campaign, complete with home-brew analytics, creative and legal teams working in real time, and so on. In any event, this seems to me to be a big-brand tool only, in conjunction with mass media and real-time campaign management and lots of data integration.

There are a few other issues with Promoted Trends. Every user can choose to see "World Wide" Trending Topics, or trends from certain cities or regions. If you're promoting a Boston restaurant, I'd think you'd only want to show the Promoted button to people who were viewing Boston trending topics. Another issue is spammers. When the list of trending topics updates, there are spambots that latch on to multiple topics - if I viewed "Boston Celtics" during a basketball game, sure, I'd see a Promoted Tweet for the restaurant at the top, but right after than I'd see a bunch of garbage. Twitter needs to filter the spam out of Trending Topics before Promoted Trends will be effective. I think it's an easy piece of code to write - just ignore any tweet that matches more than one trending topic.

3. Promoted Accounts: As far as I'm concerned, I don't know that I'd buy a promoted account if Twitter was filtering who saw it. I don't think Twitter's "Who To Follow" algorithms are that good yet. For example, I followed a math teacher in the UK recently who tweeted something interesting. For *days* after that, Twitter's Who To Follow list was mostly math teachers in the UK! Either they all follow each other or Twitter is looking at the profiles. If I bought a Promoted Account I'd want to either know how many people would see it and how they were selected, or I'd just want everyone to see it. And If I only pay per follower and not per view, I think I'd insist on knowing how they were segmented - I wouldn't want to have to spend my own resources qualifying followers.

4. Analytics: I'm really glad Twitter is providing those only for advertisers, because they're going to be tweaking the algorithms for months, and that costs money. Again, though, you really need to be a big brand before you can dedicate a real-time Twitter team to a campaign.

Bottom line: even with all the issues, I think it's going to be successful for campaigns like the Old Spice campaign, major league sports, mass market movies and television shows. It's working for Conan O' Brian, it worked for Old Spice, it probably worked for Best Buy and some of the movies that used it.

But for smaller businesses, with, say, a single person at a dashboard for a local business in one of the cities where Twitter captures Trending Topics, it's going to be a bit like day trading. Eventually, you'll learn how to do it, how to follow trends, promote them, compose a tweet stream that "resonates", etc., but there won't be much "science" in it. Spammers will figure out how to game it and "black hat Twitter resonance optimizers" will appear on the scene as if by magic.

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Thursday, December 23, 2010

Making Money Advertising

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