SensoryMetrics » advertising

Adsense: Flooded by Weight-Loss Ads

Jobe Roberts — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:56:15 +0000

Update: *editorial corrections marked in brackets [as such].

It has been decided by the SensoryMetrics marketing advisory sub-committee (SMMASC) that Google Adsense will be turned off on this site. Um, that is, turned off and deactivated, (just as soon as we figure out how to close our account).

I know, so many of you will miss our colourful random meaningless [-ful] ads provided by Google Adsense.
Well to remember them by, here’s a post to say goodbye [thank you] to Adsense, it’s been nice! but, bye, bye.

I know, you must be wondering, “Why would we turn down free cash? It’s delivered in the mail for crying out loud!”

Well, there are a few [two minor and somewhat insignificant] reasons. For one, Google Adsense seems to exist in a weird unconnected business silo bubble or black hole. We have never [not yet] been able to resolve linking Google Analytics to our AdSense account. The Analytics support won’t talk to the Adsense support or is it the other way around? Who knows, we give up on it. It’s funny [been useful] to read the posts in the Google support forums, a bunch of people have this problem, but no one from Google Adsense support seems [has had the opportunity] to read this stuff. Um, is there an Adsense support group? Do they even exist or are they just virtual Google bots?

I guess the second reason, is that we’re sick of fat chick [weight-loss] ads. Go away, leave us alone with the fat chick “how to lose a ton of weight through a secret we will sell you” [lose weight] ads. Enough’s enough. [We'll happily endure more crazy ads since we like weight loss advertisements as much as the rest the ads]. It’s just not [so] worth the free money to put these annoying [fun] ads on the site! [Thanks, for the tips, yes, logging into our account and blocking the ads we don't want is just too obvious a fix, thx.]

If you are a member of the Adsense support team and just can’t live without our participation in your business. Here’s what it will take to win us back:

Please help us fix our broken account link between Adsense and Analytics. Then we’ll update this post with joyous praise or delete it as you wish.

Forever in your debt-itude. Your humble servants @SensoryMetrics.

Posted on behalf of the SensoryMetrics marketing advisory sub-committee (SMMASC)

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Love Potion Number 9

Mitch Brisebois — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:34:39 +0000

It seems that Virgin Canada has won the fastest off the mark award for their Metro print ads this week. Poking some fun at former NY governor Eliot Spitzer, the ad reads

At Virgin Mobile, you’re more than just a number. When you call us we’ll treat you like a person, not a client. Whether you’re #9 or #900, you’ll get hooked up with somebody who’ll finally treat you just how you want to be treated.

Virgin also has another ad featuring Hillary proclaiming that her bill was out of control. Hillary-ous!

Where else but Canada can Wireless be marketed with political humour… or gay beavers… or dogs and bugs… or patently false claims of Unlimited Data?

via Marketing Magazine

Tags: Advertising, Virgin, Client-number-9

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Vintage Tech: Part 2, HP selling “usability”

Mitch Brisebois — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:25:28 +0000

Prior to becoming a discount PC vendor, HP (formerly known as Hewlett Packard, the two names of the founders, in case you’re under 30) was an innovator of scientific equipment. They were the geek-vendor of choice, before the word geek was ever coined.

This 1969 ad sells the geek-tech on the strength of usability. Sort of…

To quote RetroThing…

“Solving even transcendental equations now becomes as simple as typing your name.” Quite true, if your name is Mr. Inverse Tangent. This crushingly complicated H-P 9100A scientific calculator retailed for a whopping £2,448 in 1969. Those who chose to wait another three years were able to pick up an HP-35 handheld for a much more reasonable £200.

Tags: HP, advertising, retro

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URL Best Practices: Location, location

Mitch Brisebois — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:43:57 +0000

There’s a corner store in the town of Renfrew that closed this summer… It was prophetically named “Across The Tracks”… Apparently, it must have been on the wrong side of the tracks because business wasn’t so good!

In the virtual world, naming is also critically important. URLs – being locations, have many challenges when it comes to advertising. You’ve probably heard of the many goofy multiple-word urls: Speed Of Art (www.speedofart.com); Big Al’s Online (www.bigalsonline.com): Go Tahoe (www.gotahoe.com); Therapist Finder (www.therapistfinder.com): or Who Represents (www.whorepresents.com). These are all real sites, seemingly unaware of their twisted names!

If URLs are your passion, you’ll love GoodURLBadURL – a blog created by Aaron Goldman – a self-prefessed URL-aholic. As a web designer, he offers these useful best practices for displaying your URL…

URL Best Practices
Do’s
1. CapitalizeTheFirstLetterOfEachWord.
2. Use Different Colors Or Bold To Help Each Word Stand Out.
3. Whenever possible, use YourBrandName.com.
4. If .com is not available, use YourBrandName.net.
5. If .com and .net are taken, find a new brand name. Seriously.
6. Use YourSlogan.com when running an integrated media campaign.
7. Use subdomains when driving people deeper than your homepage – e.g. Product.YourBrandName.com.

Don’ts
1. Don’t include www. We know to go to the World Wide Web to find you.
2. Don’t include http://. If your audience isn’t web savvy enough to know where to type the URL, you shouldn’t have a website.
3. don’tusealllowercase (canyoureallytellwhereonewordendsandthenextbegins?)
4. DITTOFORALLUPPERCASE
5. No-hyphens/or slashes.
6. Don’t use acronyms, abbreviations, or numbers unless your brand is widely known as such.
7. Don’t bury your URL at the bottom of a billboard. I’m the only nerd driving around with a 4x zoom lens to find URLs.

Here at SM if we ever decide to advertise on the side of buses, you’ll see:

SensoryMetrics.com

Tags: goodURL, BadURL, advertising, uglyURL

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Brand Jury: Talk back to the ads!

Mitch Brisebois — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:13:18 +0000

Do you ever get frustrated at really stupid or offensive banner ads? (True.com are you listening??) The folks at BrandJury
are about to launch a private beta of their “collaborative” advertising platform. They allow consumers to give feedback on ads. From a web console, advertisers can assess consumer attitudes to their creatives. We’ve signed up for the beta – if done right this could be a great opportunity for advertisers to reconnect with web users.

Tags: BrandJury, advertising

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Starbucks’ broadcast advertising: the Dinosaur eXperience

Mitch Brisebois — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 05:08:40 +0000

Poor ol’ Starbucks! The failing US economy is starting to hurt the bottom line. The brilliant marketing Buck-heads have decided to enter the exciting age of broadcast advertising… just when everyone is leaving. In fact these numbers reported in the Wall Street Journal yesterday show that Starbucks haven’t really needed any marketing – until now. Not taking any chances, SB hired the firm that created Nike’s ubiquitously annoying “Just Do It” campaign. Apparently the first TV ad features an animatric reindeer cracked high on caffeine! “Get out of my F’n way Rudolf!!”

UPDATE: here’s a link to the first ad

…and a pretty picture…

Tags: advertising, Starbucks

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Fast Food Pirates: Who wins the “truth in advertising” award?

Mitch Brisebois — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:26:35 +0000

The latest Simpsons / Burger King commercial has Homer eating a delicious Whopper… What gets me is that my REAL whopper has NEVER looked like the CARTOON whopper. We suspect that all of television fast food doesn’t come close to looking like the real thing. I was going to head to town to “test” this hypothesis… until I found the This and That site. This dude named Wayne compares McDonalds, Wendy’s, Carl Jr, Subway, Quiznos, Jack in the Box, and Arbys. His verdict? Subway actually wins the truth in food advertising award.

It’s funny that Homer’s whopper looks exactly like the “real” advertised whopper. Sadly the whopper on the right looks like Mitch’s whopper.

Tags: advertising, this-and-that, homer-simpson, truth-in-advertising, whopper, burger-king

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MemeLabs: SocialNet Collaborative advertising

Mitch Brisebois — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 18:32:03 +0000

You might have heard of Vancouver-based MemeLabs. They launched last year and they’re redefining interactive advertising. Advertisers essentially sponsor contests. To enter the contest, users create home-made videos – and these get rated by other users. Think of it as a mashup between YouTube, Digg, and AdAge. My favourite right now is the Worst Vacations videos. The winner gets a great vacation at the Mont-Tremblant resort in Quebec.

Tags: MemeLabs, advertising, video

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Nortel Pride Day: Rebuilding the brand

Mitch Brisebois — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:04:59 +0000

Ad Campaign post yesterday – it seems like it’s making the viral rounds at the company. What prompted the post – other than that wonderful “unfortunate ad placement”, was the fact that the marketing machine at Nortel often missed the mark. Campaigns like “Business without Boundaries” undermines the value of the products, and focusses attention on the negative aspects of the business. I just caught up with Nortel CTO John Roese’s blog, it seems that the company’s Chief Marketing Officer feels the same way. In a guest post, Lauren Flaherty writes

Do we have it all right yet? Not by a long shot, but we’ve made great progress quickly and we’re fine-tuning constantly, as we should. Perhaps what I find most encouraging is that there are a lot of people out there who would like to see Nortel back at its fighting weight.

Go for it Lauren!

Tags: nortel, john-roese, marketing, advertising

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New Nortel Ad Campaign: it is just da bomb!

Mitch Brisebois — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:27:36 +0000

I’ve long been critical of Nortel’s misguided ad slogans… Remember “What do you want the internet to be?” (Tell us, cuz we sure don’t know!) “This is the way>> This is Nortel” (sounds too much like There’s the right way, then there’s Nortel..) How about the prophetic, “Business Without Boundaries” (SEC rules?? What SEC rules??). Who can forget the Beatles inspired “.com together” campaign? (just before the “bubble .com apart” campaign).

Well they’re at it again! Copyranter brings us this banner ad at Chicago’s O’Hare airport… duh.

Tags: Nortel, Hyperconnectivity, the-big-ka-boom, advertising

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AdPerk: engaging the user in the marketing eXperience

Mitch Brisebois — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:15:37 +0000

I actually enjoy video ads. What I hate is repetition and lack of relevance. Try as hard as you can Pampers but I won’t be buying diapers for my 5 year-old daughter.

I came across a new site launched a few weeks ago called AdPerk . You choose the ads you want to watch and earn credits. A 30 second video earns you 1 credit. 10 credits earns you a magazine subscription. Super simple. There are very few ads to choose from at the moment, but the potential is huge. It would be interesting to link a short surbey after viewing the ad to earn even more credits. To advertisers the benefit is offering multi-levels of conversion – maybe going as far as signing up the viewer for special offers. Check it out (unfortunately, perks are only available for US addresses.)

Tags: AdPerk, advertising

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Plymouth’s Push-Button Driving: Advertising “usability”

Mitch Brisebois — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 12:33:02 +0000

While product usability is all the rage right now, it’s rare that you’ll see it mentionned in mainstream media ad campaigns. I’m not sure why. Back in the glory days of magazine ads and the consumer revolution of the 40-50s, ease of use was often touted as a key differentiator – especially when marketing to women.

Here in this terrific ad for a 1956 Plymouth, the spread focusses on all the ease-of-use advantages of its new “push button transmission.” As an added bonus – push button electric windows!

ad via historyofthebutton

Tags: Buttons, advertising

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SnapShot Sneaks in Random Links

Jobe Roberts — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 09:58:43 +0000

On the web, you’re never more than about two clicks away from anything and everything. You can’t control who talks about you nor who links to your site. However, you can control who you link to, unless you use Google’s AdSense or the equivalent. At SensoryMetrics, we’ve resisted the temptation to generate cash using this random link method. If we advertise something, we want to be the ones to choose what that product or service is. We want to be in control of what shows up on SM. We also know from past experience that the click through rate even on very popular sites is very low. Of course, even a low click through rate on a high traffic site will generate some cash.

A few weeks back you may have noticed that we enabled Snap on the site. It lets you preview links to external sites. You just rollover the little icon next to a link. It works by popping up a little image of the site’s page before you actually go to that site. I really like it, the visual previews quickly provide context.

Unfortunately, we’ve just noticed that Snap has now added random links to other sites into the snapshot previews. I can see why they’d want to do this. However, I wish they’d give us the option to buy the SnapShot service for our readers without the random ad links (or allow us to choose what is linked). It would be another way for them make money (from us control freaks). In the meantime, we’re now looking for an advertising free alternative to Snap. Please let us know if you know of (or have built) such a solution.

Tags: Snap, snapshot, advertising, links

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