Advertising & Marketing Blog

In a recent news article on Drug Store News, Walgreens announced several new mobile marketing and communications options for pharmacy customers. The majority of the news focuses around mobile text messaging reminders for customers who need to refill their prescriptions. It’s the mobile version of email and I’m sure will be useful to customers in addition to email given customers want to know as soon as possible when their prescriptions need to be renewed or picked up. I’m interested in seeing how they advance their mobile strategy to include coupons, gift cards and other typically bar code driven initiatives with mobile devices.

In a recent news release, IBM announced it is acquiring Coremetrics, a prominent online web-analytics company.This is somewhat surprising given that their largest competitor, Omniture, recently sold to Adobe Software for over $1 billion. Adobe and IBM seem like very different sorts of companies within the technology universe that would have an interest in web-analytics software. Needless to say, this shows the breadth of focus for large diversified tech companies to get a piece of the internet marketing revenues that are continuing to explode as web marketing expands. IBM focused in on their desire to leverage Coremetrics to address the need for tracking and analytics around social media. They weren’t clear about what their areas of interest were within social media, but we all know that discipline is a hotbed for innovation and focus among marketers.

I’ll be very interested to see how IBM begins to make inroads into this seemingly unfamiliar territory.

A lot of recent press has been focused on mobile coupons of all shapes and forms. Coupons via SMS with promo codes or via bar codes, like for Starbucks and Target written up here, are just some of the ways marketers are delivering coupons to the users phone.

I’ll try to break down mobile coupons in three categories.
-No tracking (i.e. show your phone at the register and get the deal)
-Basic tracking with promo code (delivered via SMS or mobile app)
-Bar codes on the phone (delivered via SMS, WAP or mobile app)

For mobile coupons with bar codes, the merchant will likely need to buy new scanners (optical versus laser) that will be able to scan a mobile phone. Furthermore, the merchant will likely need to buy a 2-D bar code imager versus the traditional linear scanner (i.e. vertical lines) given that the future of mobile bar codes are 2-D and not linear like most traditional print coupons. These scanner cost some major money, especially for large chains that need 15 per store… Just one thought to consider.

The other important point that I will touch on in my next blog post is what types of merchants are best candidates for each type of mobile coupon and which are simply NOT candidates. There are important distinctions to understand from both a business, operational and technological perspective that will drive these decisions to get into mobile coupons. More to come…

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, full story by clicking here, it looks like many major restaurant chains are developing mobile apps that will piggy-back on the location based capabilities of newest generation smartphones, like the iPhone and google Android phone.

The GPS capabilities will allow restaurants to target offers to customers that are near a location with particular offers etc. The biggest issue is getting customers who have these fancy phones to download and adopt the mobile apps for each of their favorite restaurant brands. Assuming enough people install the apps, restaurants like Sonic, Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, and others will be able to target customers based on location.

I’m skeptical that this will deliver results at scale given that internet coupons, which are huge in comparison to mobile, still a small fraction of overall coupon marketing. This might be big at some point but in the near-future, it will likely be more sizzle than steak…

I haven’t been super up-to-speed on Twitter’s newly announced advertising model, so I recently read an article on Forbes (click to read full article here) that outlines the 101′s of their new model. Some may call is contextual advertising, others are calling engagement advertising. Simply put, they’re steering clear of the display ad-model and selling “impressions” to users, which is what Facebook and MySpace have done to-date with relative lackluster success. Users are engaged in the social media world, which does not include looking at intrusive banner ads.

Twitter’s model will allow advertisers to peg their tweets to high-up rankings in twitter feeds and searches, giving “sponsored tweets” more time in the spotlight, hopefully generating more responses, re-tweets, and clicks by followers and the broader twitter community.

I think it’s a step in the right direction considering display ads perform horribly and click-through-rates continue to plummet (indicative that consumers hate banner ads – or at least don’t respond to them). We’ll just have to see if this long-awaited paid advertising model will generate the type of revenue consistent with the hype of the announcement…

RevTrax was in the news recently with a new article published by co-founders Seth Sarelson and Jonathan Treiber (yours truly) in Multichannel Merchant titled “Ten Tips for Curtailing Coupon Fraud.”

The article is for bricks & mortar retail, restaurant and packaged good manufacturers looking to embrace best practices for online coupons. I’ll let you guys check it out from here…

MediaPost broke a newstory that announced Clear Channels endeavor into the digital out-of-home space with the installation of hundreds of digital billboards. Read the full article here for full details. I think that this will have a very mixed reaction both from advertisers and from consumers. Digital billboards are a huge investment to make compared to the plain-ole’ canvas billboards that get put up and taken down by union workers before and after a billboard ad has had its time in the sun.

Digital will have significant maintenance and repair costs, along with installation costs. The hope is that it provides a more interactive out-of-home advertising experience much like consumers have on the internet with dynamic ads versus static banner advertisements. It seems to me like they’ll be rolling out these digital billboards slowly to see how advertisers respond. My guess will be that some forward-thinking advertisers will throw some money at these new digital screens, but over time, interest will likely wan as they realize that the returns on digital (assuming that their ad-rates will be higher than for traditional screens) are no better than the old-school billboards.

The outdoor media industry is an industry that desperately needs to get with the times and figure out a digital strategy. This is likely the closest thing they have come up with that will provide an interactive experience. I think that they should be thinking about mobile engagement and triggering mobile digital content based on passers-by of the traditional billboards with some basis location sensors, blue tooth and others. This would create a much lower-cost model with a digital bent that might likely appeal to advertisers more, and may appeal to consumers a whole lot less. Just food for thought…

MediaPost recently wrote an article focused on the newspaper industry that didn’t harp on the declining circulations and depleting ad-revenue for a change. The article, found here, talks about online local newspaper websites that focus on local content. It’s a very interesting report that consumers would trust local newspaper sites regarding content, editorials, etc. versus large national sites like cnn.com or fox.com. Does the same dynamic apply to consumers trusting their local hardware supply store more than they do Home Depot? I’m not sure, but either way, the local newspaper sites need a way to monetize their eyeballs the same as the national sites. Whether it be local content in the form of articles or coupons/deals, consumers need a reason to keep coming back to the local sites versus flock to alternatives on the web.

Just last week, Kmart launched a geo-targeted email campaign with a coupon only available at certain stores. Within hours, the coupon hit the deal sites and blogs and went “national” in a way they clearly did not intend. What ensued was short of mayhem. Consumers were printing and attempting to redeem them at their nearest Kmart store without knowing that those stores would not accept them. Furthermore, several incidents at “non-participating” stores involved store-manager accusations of consumer-fraud. In one documented situation, the manager of one store even threatened to call the police on a consumer trying to redeem the coupon. Wow!

Check out the full blog post here.

In an article published on Chain Store Age Magazine, available here, we spoke about the ongoing shift from direct mail to digital forms of 1-to-1 marketing, including email and social media. With the price of production and postage going up with no end in sight, digital marketing becomes ever more appealing from a cost perspective. However, merchants/marketers need to know that their direct mail strategy does need some tweaking to adapt to the digital world, especially around controlling the offer and more granular tracking that is required to map / tally results. Check out the full article here.