Posts from — June 2010

UK web campaign in partnership with Steak highlights 10-minute boarding experience with NetJets Europe

June 18, London, UK – Europe’s leading business aviation company, NetJets Europe, today launches a new digital marketing campaign in partnership with Steak. The campaign, ‘The 10-minute Take-off’ highlights the hassle-free nature of flying with NetJets Europe, getting time-poor businesspeople from their car into the air within 10 minutes of arriving at an airport.

The campaign will see a series of display advertisements drive visitors to a dedicated microsite, including site ‘take-overs’ with the FT.com and the Wall Street Journal.

Following a year of travel disruption and commercial airline woes, NetJets Europe has enjoyed increasing interest in its services from first and business class fliers looking to maximize their productivity and escape travel headaches.

“Our research has found that our clients and prospects want nothing more than an easy and completely hassle-free experience of aviation, something that only NetJets has the scale to deliver consistently,” comments Claire Cronin, Director of Marketing at NetJets Europe. “Although we’re the world leader in private aviation, we’re still something of a ‘well-kept secret,’ and with this campaign we’re hoping to educate a wider audience about the benefits of using NetJets.”

When users click on a display ad, they will be taken to a search-optimized microsite at http://www.netjetsuk.com. The centrepiece of the site is the “10-minute take-off” – a dramatisation of the easy, hassle-free boarding experience that passengers will enjoy with NetJets. This message is contrasted with the experience of flying commercially: transfers, hassles, queues, crowds and delays.

Steak was appointed following a competitive pitch to design and produce the micro-site and online advertising assets, support the media planning and buying strategy, and handle search engine optimisation for this latest campaign.

Oliver Bishop, CEO of Steak, says, “NetJets Europe is an exciting brand, with a well defined, demanding target audience. The ‘10-minute’ campaign seeks to reach this audience in an innovative and relevant way, and deliver compelling messages about why both individuals and corporations should consider NetJets.”

This campaign was created for the UK market as a pilot. If successful, NetJets Europe will look to develop new campaigns and online materials in its other target territories in Q3 and Q4.

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch, June 4, 2010

In part one, we talked about factors that should drive the adoption of retargeting (also referred to by Google as “remarketing”). Now we’ll examine the limitations of Google’s offering, other tools, and some thoughts on how marketers can embrace retargeting.

Digital Getting Wiser

The growing maturity of the digital industry, and the level of knowledge within agencies and marketing departments, is an important factor here, too.

Most marketing departments have an awareness, if not in-depth knowledge, of search and display. Increasingly, campaigns are analyzed across channels as tools like MediaPlex, tag carriers, and a number of independents provide the ability to analyze the consumers full journey path during a cookie period — from first impression, to first search, to last search, and the traditional last click.

Once marketers know consumers visiting Site A are likely to search and buy their products and have planned their display and search campaigns to leverage this trend, the next obvious step is to look at where drop-offs are occurring — which consumers are searching, but then not buying — and what sites can they be reached on with retargeting?

Third-Party Tools

Google’s offering enables this sort of tactic, but only for sites with AdSense ad units on them. Using a third-party tool like MediaPlex or DoubleClick Boomerang as well, brands can run this sort of activity web-wide. Not just retargeting to “lost” prospects who didn’t convert, but targeting existing customers with cross sells.

Once you’ve dropped a cookie that tells you things about the visitor/customer, your only constraints are your budget and ideas. No doubt, other tools providers are scrambling to introduce this functionality if they don’t already have it.

Display’s New Best Friend?

Google’s announcement also included one other piece of important information: it’s not just for search. Once you’ve added a piece of code to pages on your website, you can retarget consumers who visit the site through any source:

• Sending a customer CRM e-mail out? Retarget customers who click but don’t buy with a display ad.
• Have a members-only area? Retarget recent log-ins with a new product.
• Receiving a lot of direct traffic as a result of a new TV campaign? Don’t let your competitors suck up sales from the interest you’ve generated — run a display campaign featuring the TV ad tailored to people who have visited the site but dropped out mid-shopping cart, with your order line phone number in the advertisement.

All of these options could make retargeting display advertising’s new best friend, a shot in the arm that could cause brands to fundamentally re-examine the interaction of search and display, and to remember a basic fact when planning: consumers don’t operate in silos, and neither should we as marketers.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, June 2, 2010
The biggest obstacle with actually integrating SEO activities with other business functions is that SEO people don’t talk to other teams enough.

This isn’t as harsh a criticism as it first sounds — we’re all busy in agencies and passionate about the subject and clients. Time is at a premium. So it isn’t as easy as just saying that SEOs are antisocial hermits tucking themselves away in corners.

Good SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum, as we all know. There are many ranking factors that are specifically aimed at ensuring SEO happens as part of a natural online marketing presence and not just a focus on the one goal of getting traffic from Google.

Happily, there is a big plus side to this for digital agencies, as a good display campaign, affiliate campaign, and social media campaign will all help your SEO progress for a range of reasons. Here’s a quick list of considerations for SEO teams.

Speak to Your Display Team

Always try and negotiate content hosting arrangements with media buys. If you’re buying banner ads on a site, then see if they will also host press releases or product reviews with backlinks.

Alternatively, ask your display/media team for their list of contacts at key industry sites and see if you can negotiate a deal separately.

Finally, see if you can put clean links within display ads so that all ad placements pass direct value back to the client’s site.

Speak to Your Affiliate Team

If you’re running a good affiliate campaign, see if you can negotiate clean links or content hosting alongside your affiliate links. Some sites already add a clean link as well as a standard affiliate link as a matter of course.

See if you can get a list of affiliate contacts and negotiate deals to put useful content on their sites — good quality product reviews, for example, can be of real interest.

Speak to Your Social Media Team

More SEO Advice
•Search Engine Optimization is Unfair
•Breaking the Single Keyword Obsession in SEO Campaigns
•Powerful SEO Content: Understanding Breadth of Coverage
It may be jumping the gun slightly, as there is no conclusive data or any confirmation from Google, but I’ll join the ranks of SEOs already going with this. A well-run social media campaign will have SEO benefits. If you can get people talking about your special offers on LCD TVs for the World Cup, then you will rank better for related keywords.

One of the benefits of a well-run social media campaign is that key influencers will be identified and directly engaged. Get your social media team to help you out by trying to get that all-important content onto the key blogger sites.

These are some simple solutions to the age-old problem of getting links from important and relevant sites. And remember, if you’re extra charming, you might even get other teams to get those links for you — double whammy!

List voted by music lovers through social media app

The campaign from swiftcover.com, the pioneer in online insurance, offered music lovers the chance to create this “Summer’s Hottest Playlist” in collaboration with Absolute Radio.  Building on their ‘Get a Life’ campaign, swiftcover.com extended the campaign theme to encourage users to ‘get a life’ this summer by voting for the summer’s hottest tracks. The campaign devised by Steak, used Facebook as the main hub, hosting an easy-to-use voting application.

A master playlist of 75 tracks was selected by popular Absolute Radio DJs: Christian O’Connell, Geoff Lloyd and Ben Jones.  Spotify and Absolute Radio listeners were prompted by the DJs to visit the Swiftcover Facebook page and voted daily for two weeks via the “sucks” or “rocks” buttons beside the track. This saw the music tracks physically rising and falling, depending on popularity, on the Facebook “chart”.

The final playlist hosted is hosted by Spotify on 22 June through the summer; with Facebook fans, Absolute Radio and Spotify listeners being notified that the winning list can be downloaded and played all summer long.

The idea was conceived by Steak, who is handling the social media and online display campaign.  Audio and display ads including billboards and takeover pages, will appear on Spotify, Absolute Radio and Facebook linking through to swiftcover.com’s Facebook page.  The Facebook app songs then link back to Spotify, which enables visitors to the site to listen to the tracks they’re voting for; and there is an opportunity to win a Spotify premium account for a year.
         �
Tina Shortle, Marketing Director says, “This is a perfect campaign for the summer – sitting in the park in the sunshine listening to music that you’ve voted for – it epitomises our ‘Get a Life’ campaign.  We’re excited that social media was at the heart of this campaign. Absolute Radio, Facebook and Spotify are the perfect partners for music lovers to create this ‘Summer’s Hottest Playlist’”.

John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media at Steak says “We wanted to demonstrate how we can effectively integrate social media into our existing through the line digital strategy. This campaign is ultimately about building and fostering relationships between swiftcover.com and their audience in social channels that they’re comfortable with by adding value rather than selling. Music and summer festivals are effective passion point or the swiftcover.com
demographic and form the basis of our content strategy. We are excited and fortunate to work with brands like swiftcover.com who continue to lead the way in digital marketing within the insurance vertical sector”.

Kate Hussey, Head of Display at Steak says “We are excited about enhancing the current Absolute Radio partnership for swiftcover.com along with introducing another key strategic partner, Spotify, as a main driver of our audience. We believe that this campaign has the ability to kick off a summer full of ‘Getting a Life’”.

From Gareth Owen, Head of SEO…

“Calls to action in TV ads will be hugely important for SEO – the iPad will be sat on someone’s lap while they watch TV and it will be SO easy to get them to do a search for ‘LCD TVs’ and click on the Dixons result. Even if it is in P5 you can still ask people to do it – the clickthroughs from that alone are a massive ranking factor.

Beyond SEO, I think this does cement a whole new way of advertising to people on TV – ‘Download our app now’, ‘play our quiz game now for 10% off’. 

What the iPad really introduces, more than anything else is the world of micropayments. If someone asks me to put in my card details to pay 60p so I can view some content I won’t bother. If it asks me to do it through my iTunes via a one-click ordering system, I might. The success of this can be demonstrated by Amazon, with an enormous conversion rate and sales via the mobile version of their site that would put anyone to shame.”

From Betina Bell, Account Manager…

“As its mobile predecessor experienced, the announcement of the iPad has come under intense scrutiny for all its perceived failings as a kind of computer, kind of mobile. However, what these non-believers fail to comprehend is that it isn’t masquerading at all. In fact, it is plugging a gap and fulfilling a demand where there previously was none – an achievement in itself. Providing wider accessibility with its simple aesthetic and promising covetability from those around you, including, albeit through gritted teeth, those disapproving non-believers.

For Display, it remains to be seen whether it will enjoy the same success and cult status as its smaller kin. We’ll be eager to segment and target to understand the demographic of its users and keen to see how advertisers react to its lack of Flash support. Our challenge as marketers is how to engage users, if this is to be a coffee table product. Given that the first model doesn’t allow a machine to machine connection, the iPad is very much challenged by the all-consuming TV.”