The marriage of creative & data

I’m not going to go on at length about the Omniture/Adobe deal, since everyone else has already said it better than I can.

Kunur Patel’s piece in AdAge.com this morning, What Adobe’s Omniture Acquisition Means for Advertising, had a quote worth calling attention to though.

It’s sexy these days for creatives to talk about data.

Patel’s subhead? “Expect Creative to Become a Lot More Data Driven.”

Can I get a ‘Hell yes’? Boo-ya! Right on. It’s about time.

Great creative pairs nicely with great results, don’t you think?

How to make display ads (and their landing pages) suck less

Noah Brier has a thought-provoking article on Advertising Age eloquently titled How to Make Display Ads Suck Less.

His main tenet is that most “creative” of display advertising has been unnecessarily handicapped because it is almost always developed in a vacuum, absent of consideration of the specific sites and pages where those ads will be placed. As a result, these generic, write-once-run-everywhere ads usually end up looking out of place in their commoditized slots — and certainly don’t build synergy with their context.

Without thinking about where the display is sitting, the creative is left focusing on a totally-out-of-context consumer. The big problem I have with this is it pretty much gives up the biggest advantage the web has over other media: the ability to target smaller groups affordably with discrete messages. As soon as we go with a single message across all these sites we’re left with a glorified television ad.

Noah’s recommendations to create display ads that break free of these limitations include:

First off, we’re going to need to start doing more versions of display ads and at least doing custom ones for the larger sites. If you know you’re designing something for ESPN.com, for instance, you would create a very different thing than if it were for Newsweek.

Second, by knowing what site it’s running on, I believe we can start to design things that look like they belong a little more. Banner blindness is a well-documented phenomenon, but little has been written about why people ignore the ads. My suspicion is that it’s in large part due to the fact that they look like they don’t belong on the page.

I think Noah is right on the money here, with his most poignant point being: why should we give up the very advantage of Long Tail scaling that the Web uniquely provides us?

Of course, having ads really bond cohesively and build synergy with the context in which they appear is only the first step — call it ad placement synergy. That can win you more clicks, but you then need to follow through by providing those respondents with matching landing pages — call it ad flow synergy.

If someone notices a new ad, styled via Noah’s recommendations to be particularly relevant to its context, and clicks on it — which they wouldn’t have done before — that’s wonderful. But if the landing page fails to carry forward with that context, and instead disappoints the respondent with a disconnected experience, it was all for not.

You need context for the click… but you also need context for the conversion.

However, this is exactly the dialogue that agencies need to be having. Doing a lot more targeted ads and targeted landing pages is more work. But 50% more work for 200% more return is a great deal. And — a little self-promotional hint — there’s some nifty software out there that can help you achieve this mission very efficiently.

Grilled Cheese Landing Pages

I was at a dinner meeting last night with a few other ionians and a few folks from an agency client of ours (in town for an intensive week of LiveBall immersion therapy). It was a nice meal with good wine (‘04 Pio Cesare Barolo) and great conversation.

At one point, one of the agency entourage (who is prone to humorous food-based analogy) was comparing and contrasting our solutions to those of the big multivariate testing (MVT) players. This client, who is “technology agnostic” relayed a recent food-based analogy that she used when speaking with her clients about landing page conversion optimization alternatives.

I’ll frame this in the fact that this agency is a major natural and paid-search player and the clients with whom she deals are Fortune 100.

Back to the analogy that she relayed

[Major MVT Player] is the Top Chef kitchen. Not only don’t you need it to make great food, you won’t be able to make great food because it’s overwhelming—too many tools, too many options. You need to make a great grilled cheese—fast. You need a great skillet and a spatula. That’s LiveBall. It makes the perfect grilled cheese.”

Initially, I wasn’t sure how I felt about being a skillet & spatula. Then I became one with the perfect grilled cheese and I realized something.

The tool should never get in the way of the ingredients

The perfect grilled cheese isn’t anything without EVO, fresh butter, crusty bread and some perfectly aged sharp cheddar. It’s also not going to make it to the plate if the heat is too high, the skillet unseasoned, the cheese sliced too thick or if it’s flipped 30-seconds too early or too late.

Ultimately, even with the perfect tools for the job you still need great ingredients and at least a little bit of skill.

Here’s to perfect grilled cheese landing pages and bite after bite of dining bliss. Cheers!

Amplify Your PPC Message

Landing pages are the amplifiers that take your 130 character pay-per-click paid search ads and crank up the volume. When ROI design gets creative, it also gets conversions.

How much noise are you making?

PPC and the Importance of Searcher Intent

Empathy for searcher intent is the single most important characteristic of a search marketer. For the most part, we just don’t get where they’re coming from. Of course this is no different than understanding the audience in any other medium, but it’s more instantly apparent when we’re out of touch in PPC SEM.

The intent of those searching should inform everything in your PPC marketing—your keywords, ads, landing pages, auto-responders, etc. If you understand your audience you can communicate with them.

Depending on your situation, getting to that intent may involve research, analysis, brainstorming, testing and/or dumb luck. Once you’ve distilled intent, restate it in your creative brief or whatever marketing document you use to keep your horizon level.

Keep in mind, intent varies along with your keywords and messages, so be careful not to generalize one intent onto very different audience segments. You’ll know when you’ve nailed it, because your engagement and conversion rates will soar.

In all marketing, it’s far too easy to become internally focused and self-absorbed. We can lose track of our audience and the reasons that they engage with us. Keeping an objective eye on intent helps us stay in touch, which helps us communicate and persuade. PPC is instantly accountable, so when we lose touch there, it’s instantly apparent. When we stay engaged, so does our audience.