Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

Insights

Why I Dig Advertising: Part 1

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The thing that most jazzed me in my advertising agency days was that I got to work with so many different clients and their varied issues. My client categories included:

Land line companies.

Mobile phone companies.

Breakfast cereals.

Yogurt.

New food products.

Snacks.

Restaurants.

Computers.

Email services.

Hosiery (in the days when it was a billion $ industry.)

Sporting goods.

Sports teams.

Ski resorts.

Hotels.

Airlines.

Record companies.

Musicians.

Publishers.

Health care.

Automobiles.

Boats.

Wine. Yes, wine was fun.

OK, I’ll stop. It was this diversity that made me love working in advertising rather than worrying about one brand or product day in and day out like many of our clients do.

Inbound Content Marketing & Ad Agency New Business

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Here is a sweet chart from a study on content marketing from Eloqua. The bottom line… create smart, targeted, strategic content (think blogs, white papers, SlideShare presentations, etc.) that will work as inbound marketing tools and client magnets. Content marketing works for me. That’s how I get my qualified leads. Here is the chart.

www.oracle.com webfolder mediaeloqua documents Content Marketing Kapost Eloqua ebook

Easy Plan

Here is a fast micro plan for how to do it. Of course, the devil is in the details.

  • Go get a blank media / creative brief and write it like you would do for a new client program:
  • Determine who your target audience is. Is it any client with over $1,000,000 to spend? The dentist down the street? The entire automative category?It probably isn’t the art director at the competitive agency so stop writing the 7,000th blog post on responsive design with keywords only a web developer will be interested in.
  • Determine what you want your target audience to do. Like, call you up. Or, join your mailing list.
  • Create a two – three month content plan. Think like an editor. What will  the subjects be that will be of interest to your audience? What are the keywords they use to search for information?
  • Assign someone to mange and at least a couple of people to write the blog.
  • Start with at least 15 blog posts of from 500 to 1,000 words.
  • Keep at it. As the chart shows, it takes a loooong time to get up to speed.
  • Tie the blog automatically to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Then…kiss your new clients.

 

Ready To Leave Advertising For Silicon?

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If you are ready to leave advertising for what might appear to be greener silicon valley or alley pastures*… Here are some places that might be looking for you and their recruitment tag lines. These lines are actually quite effective (except for Walmart’s which is _____, well, you fill in the blank.)

Take one of the tag lines before getting on New York’s 7 train to battle with your clients.

Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought that these guys would have such good copywriting. But, then again, they can afford good writing.
*Note about greener pastures. My old friend Michael Keeshan used to tell employees that were leaving his agency that “the grass is just as shit brown on the other side of the fence.” Or as my more yoga-style friends like to say: “wherever you go, there you are.” But, Google does have nice buses when its neighbors are not beating them with baseball bats.

Advertising Age & Web Marketing ala 1997

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Ah, the joys of doing an Internet search on yourself. Here is an oldy but goody editorial I wrote for Advertising Age in May, 1997 on advertising agencies not getting into digital marketing fast enough. Remember… this is from 1997. I left Saatchi & Saatchi in 1995 to put newspapers online for Advance Publications. Yes, I invented the Internet with my friend Al. If you are an Advertising Age subscriber, you can see the editorial here.

Opinion: Have agencies lost their footing in Web marketing?

I’m worried that the advertising community is getting behind the curve when it comes to the Internet. Most clients are ahead of their agencies in understanding the value of Internet marketing–I know, because they’re coming to us to design their programs.

What’s holding agencies back? A love of proven media and maybe some myths.

1. Advertising agencies cannot make money planning and producing Web advertising.

Agency profits, strangled by clients during the past 10 years, don’t leave much room to dabble in new low cash-flow technologies. It’s easier to plan and buy TV.

However, almost every client is now marketing on the Web. Since the Web seems a bit better at direct response and promotion than brand building, I think it provides agencies with a great opportunity to grab from these other ripe budgets.

2. The only folks making money on the Web are pornographers.

Dell is selling $7 million worth of computers online every week. New Jersey’s Planet Honda has sold over $1 million worth of cars and parts off its site. Condomania is selling $1,000 worth of condoms every day off of a $10,000 Web site.

3. Banners do not work.

I worked in advertising for over 15 years, and the only time I could swear on a Bible that advertising had any direct effect on sales was when my airline client’s fare ads sent people to the counter. Now, when I look at my advertisers’ banner statistics, I know exactly what worked and what didn’t.

4. Web advertising will not work for mass brands.

Why not? Both men and women buy pasta, and when they’re online, they’re not using other media. Use the Web to leverage some of that mega co-op spend out there. Imagine a banner that says “50¢ off pasta today at A&P” and also links to that “brand-building” Italian odyssey site the creatives want to build.

5. The only big-time advertisers on the Web are large Web sites or technology companies.

Advertising follows the eyeballs. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users; TV, 13; cable, 10; and the Internet, five. That’s why a recent scan of “high-tech” Web advertisers included Rockport, Levi’s, Visa, Gatorade and Godiva.

6. Push is the future.

Maybe familiarity with broadcast is why the new “idea” of push is so beloved by the advertising industry. Pull is the power of the Internet. It may be hard to learn how to turn it into an advertising tool, but it is intrinsically more powerful and consumer-focused.

7. PointCast is push.

OK, I do like push. But sorry, guys, e-mail is the push God. E-mail is easy to use, it’s low-tech and highly targeted. There are more than 35 million Americans (70 million worldwide) using e-mail every day, while there are only 1 million active PointCast users. Pick one.

Peter Levitan is president of Advance Publications’New Jersey Online.

So, was I right? I was certainly opinionated. I am still.