It’s no surprise to anyone that there are ads on the sites Telligent managers in conjunction with Microsoft. At least it wasn’t shocking to me when I came on to lead this team. What was surprising was the lack of variety in the ads that I see go up on the site. Maybe it’s just me, but a lack of variety means I instantly recognize and avoid the ad.
There is a good article here about the new wave of online advertising that’s about creating an entertainment proposition for customers and I think that’s clearly important, but something the article misses is the necessity of variety in your marketing strategy. Grocery store owners have known this for years as they rotate product placements and those end of the isle sales in a never ended struggle to help customers see something new and get hooked on it. I’m surprised how rare this approach is in advertising.
A good example, and they could take it further is the series of bud-light radio “We salute you” ads. Living in the pacific northwest I don’t have much of a reason to drink bud light, but I stop and listen to just about every one of the ad spots I hear because there’s a chance for a joke I haven’t heard. There are several layers of humor within each ad and countless people that are saluted in different ads. Once they had a working premise they churned on it to create variety.
It costs orders of magnitude less to do this with online advertising, in fact you could rotate thousands of versions of your banner or text ad for the price of one well produced radio ad, but this approach is rare. Most companies stick with one or two text ads, 5-6 banners, and a maybe a couple of flash ads to be rotated. I won’t comment on the entertainment value of these approaches, but that’s also something to work on.
Variety in your messaging is just like variety in humor. What’s funny to one set of people might not be funny to the other set of people that are looking at buying your product. One person, for example, might care about customizability of your product while another might care only about uptime. Why not create a version of your message for each?
Most companies are probably worried about brand and message dillusion. They are sticking to the advice about picking one thing, one message, and being the best at it. And that’s a certainly a good way to look at building your product, but it might not be the best way to grab the most attention and rate of return on your advertising investment.