Constant Beta

Using traditional media to advertise an online brand

At the recent Temple Ad-Club speech, one of the students asked us about using traditional media to advertise online/ digital brands. I think it's a brilliant and ironic question by itself. Because you see, you have a whole host of digital media practionners who still write and publish books and then you have a host of online brands that advertise on TV. Even though audiences that consume traditional media are fragmented and perhaps traditional advertising doesn't have as many eye-balls anymore -- it is certainly not dead. And here are two brands that I think are doing it right. chemistry.com and ask.com

I'm not a fan of comemercials that take potshots at their competitors on-air. I think its highly unoriginal and barely creative to do so. But the recent chemistry.com commercials perhaps may change my opinion. Have you seen them?

I've never used dating websites so I don't know if eharmony really rejects people on those grounds. I thought there was a match for everyone... But then, take a look here. Apparently eharmony.com does reject people on unclear grounds. Their reasoning might be very valid - maybe they just don't have the match for them. But chemistry.com -- a new player in the online dating industry, used this criticism of eharmony.com to their advantage. By the way, chemistry.com is owned by match.com -- the industry leader in online dating.

I don't know if it is brilliant or sad - but these ads worked for me. I remembered the new brand, I remembered the commercials (because they are so damn good) and I correctly relayed this to the students 2 weeks after I had seen this ad. This, I think, is a great example of how to use traditional advertising to market to market an online entity.

The goal of sych advertising should be tri-fold:

• Good enough that people remember the brand name/ the dot.com URL
• They remember what the ad was about/ what the brand is about.
• Correctly able to recall the brand and talk to friends about it.

I doubt there is magic formula or the right recipie to achieve all the goals above, BUT --

I think a few elements to doing this teh right way are:

• Establish the sole distinguishing factor from competitor -(without really ridiculing the competitor please- that's just something I am not cool with and would have no respect for a brand that did that.)
• Give audiences the "OMG!" moment. (OMG - taht's funny, OMG - that's cool.. whatever your OMG is) Have you seen the ask.com commericals? My reaction was "OMG - those features are so cool" And I did log on the site to check them out.
• Can you add to this? What other elements worked for you that you think will work for online brands taht want to use traditional media for advertising?

PS - I'm referring to the new ask.com commericals - where all you see are the website features. No annyong man singing and no references to alogorithins or complicated concepts. Just the website - and what it can do for you. I'll post them here when I find them - right now, youtube.com has the old ones.

Social media and college kids

Life has been kind to me. I've met some amazing people who have taken a chance in me and given me the kind of opportunities someone my age can only dream of. And I strongly believe in passing it on . So something I am very passionately involved in is trying to mentor college students. It is a two-way street really -- I pass on what I know and they always end up surprising me.

This past spring, I voluneteered my Sunday evenings and weekday lunches to mentor a few super smart college students that were interested in advertising/ marketing. Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing at Ogilvy PR and his entire team were kind enough to extend us some real juicy assignments to work on. And that's when I really began to pay attention to how college students use the internet. Simply based on my observations, I was a little surprised to learn that most college students are not as social-media savvy as we digital media practioners think them to be.  The most startling discovery was that college kids do not blog. (This is an observation, so if you have a different experience, please share) In hindsight, this doesn't surprise me because when I was in college, I was pretty much the only one blogging among the people I knew. (And it was not so long ago)

Last night, Annie (Social Media Director at GPTMC) and I spoke to bunch of curious college students at Temple Unversity's Student Ad Club. And we both thought it was very interesting out of 20 some students present at the meet, not one blogged. And only a couple read blogs. I have questions about this -- and I'm returning to this group next week to sit with them to really understand how they are using the internet and all it's social application.

Some other observations:

• They didn't use or know of twitter but used the facebook status update very often
• Almost all of them were familiar with perezhilton.com -- or his show.
• They were curious and a common question was, "what do you blog about?"

What do you guys think? Any insights you can share? I'm putting together a survey to learn more about how college students use the internet -- any ideas on what should be in the survey?

Funny ad on facebook

This marketplace listing ad on facebook cracked me up!! You gotta love the panache of college kids.

Ideablob DEMO Video

Ideablob -- and a win at at DEMO!

So I have some very exciting news to share! (www.advanta.com) Advanta Bank Corp - where I work in their Innovation Group, just launched www.ideablob.com at the prestigious DEMO (www.demo.com) conference in San Diego last week.

Advanta is one of the largest issuers of Mastercard credit cards for small business owners. We have been in financial services for over 50 years. For the last four months, our team was frantically pushing through to bring ideablob to life. And in case you didn't know -- it's a huge feat for a bank to have managed this in such a short time. (I've become a quasi-expert on legalese involving the launch of a social network!) It was a not only a fantastic learning experience, but also incredibly gratifying to see how brillaintly our legal, Project management, customer service and innovation teams worked together. Truly a roller-coaster ride!

We had every intention of launching this year, but getting into DEMO motivated us and pushed us further to launch sooner. DEMO only invites about 70 companies from hundreds of applications it receives. And our fantastic team (all members are not pictured above) went and conquered !

I will soon share with you our flickr photo stream, but to give you an idea of how carefully and beautifully the whole launch was orchestrated -- 10 of us from Advanta were at DEMO, each of us had different T-shirts that represented a particular small business industry and we had matching business cards with it. On the first day -- I was the DRAMA QUEEN, representing actors (yepp -- they are a small business) and my business card stated facts about actors. The T-shirts were a delight and we were asked several times if they were for sale! haha...

Anyhow, I'd urge you to check out www.ideablob.com

It's a humble effort from a bank to try to be different and to try to make a difference. We want to build this online community for the give and take of business ideas. We are also awarding $10,000 to the business idea that gains the most votes at the end of each month. Yep - we are talking the talk and walking the walk. As we should be. I'm very proud of my team and the guys at Red Tettermer (www.redtettemer.com) and Seso Media (www.seso.net) who helped us make this possible.

(BTW -- we also won the People's Choice award at Demo. woohooo. Any Demo peeps that chance upon this, do say hello!)