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.

Comments

[eHarmony Blog]

You forget the backlash: that Chemistry would be where rejects are.

Today, over one year after these ads came out, site traffic metrics show that eHarmony and Chemistry are where they were 12 months ago. Unfortunately Chemistry's ads didn't perform as expected.