Was the “Old Spice Guy” campaign really successful? A lot of respected marketing and ad people had their doubts right from the beginning, and evidence is starting to emerge that the campaign’s success may be as limp as a dead fish.
The arguments about it’s success or failure centre around the age old divide in advertising and marketing about whether the purpose of an ad is to sell something or win creativity awards.
As far as the latter is concerned, there is no doubt that the ad is brilliantly creative and hugely entertaining, but did it actually boost sales of Old Spice?
“If you meet your guru on the road, knock him on the head and kill him.”
Old eastern spiritual saying.
Such old wisdom applies even more to modern online marketing. Snake oil seems to abound, and it’s often hard to determine who really knows what they are talking about.
The following video aptly portrays the dangers of blindly following self proclaimed gurus, social media or otherwise.
Warning: Mild coarse language is used. It’s also very funny.
After you’ve finished choking on your Red Bull, we can begin today’s lesson. Darren Rowse over at Problogger recently posted about why he always transcribes his video’s on his blog.
And judging by the response he got, many people feel the same way about the need to always provide a transcription.
Rowse’s three main reasons were:
1: Accessibility: Some people simply can’t consume video, whether it be from technical reasons or disability reasons.
2: Learning Styles: Some people just don’t like videos, or prefer other ways of getting their information.
3: SEO: Search engine obviously love textual content.
Rowse’s post highlights a bigger issue in that the explosion of online video is being greatly abused by many people. While video is a powerful means of communicating, it is not a magic solution for all your online marketing desires.
How to make Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer play nice with each other.
The most annoying thing about both Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer is that they don’t work together “straight out of the box”.
Simply pasting the code that the Optimizer gives you will cause several problems in Google Analytics which will basically kill all of your marketing data.
While we should all be just a little obsessive about increasing our conversion rates, the problem is everybody measures them differently.
Your Conversion Rate is simply the business results your site achieved (EG: Sales, registrations, names gathered etc) divided by the number of visitors to your site.
But do you use Visits, Unique Visits or even something else as the basis of your conversion rate calculation?
Email still remains the king of online marketing, and even snail mail performs much better than social media.
A recent survey by Crossview revealed that 39% of customers preferred to receive promotional messages via email as opposed to just 9% from social media.
The old fashioned direct mailer (via snail mail) also remains a potent tool, with 23% preferring it over social media.
That’s not to say that social media isn’t an effective tool, it’s just that as marketers and business owners we need to keep perspective on where we’re focusing our marketing efforts.
The simpler you can make your online processes the better.
The easier it is for your customers to interact with your site
the more money you’ll make,
the more leads you’ll get,
the more conversions you’ll get etc.
Just think of Google.
Late to the search engine game, it made searching so simple it eventually trumped all the long established players. (Some of you don’t even know who the players were before Google.)
Not only did Google become the premier search engine, it went on to become one of the dominant technology companies, even putting the wind up Microsoft.google
Simplicity is a very powerful marketing tool. Don’t under estimate it.
Remember the KISS principle – Keep it Simple Stupid.
For the past 12 years I have been a conversion rate fanatic, evangelist and downright pain to some people over conversion rates.
While my obsession has not been without good reason, for a while now I’ve been thinking that conversion rate is perhaps not the ultimate measure of a site’s performance that I thought it was.
The Problem With Averages
The first problem with comparing yourself to global average conversion rates is that they are averages.
Was the “Old Spice Guy” campaign really successful? A lot of respected marketing and ad people had their doubts right from the beginning, and evidence is starting to emerge that the campaign’s success may be as limp as a dead fish.
