Coast Digital Blog

One of the most significant examples of a viral marketing phenomenon doing the rounds on the internet at the moment is the new video for Weezer’s current single, “Pork and Beans”.

A favourite band amongst the marketing team at Coast Digital, we’ve certainly notched up a few views between us in the office, not only for the musical content, but for the incredibly digital-marketing-savvy video.

The video for “Pork and Beans”, released on YouTube weeks before international music TV channels began showing it, is a collection of Weezer’s ‘favourite stuff’; in other words various internet video ‘stars’ miming along to their latest track.

Essentially Weezer brought together various cult internet ‘memes’ and flew a number of self-made YouTube ‘stars’ to Los Angeles to film parodies of the videos which first made them popular.

The smart marketing ploy was to create a video featuring the creators of previously viral content – if one thing is bound to get your brand or message noticed, it’s through endorsement by people already popular in the public eye.

Weezer are certainly not the first band to come up with the idea of a collaboration of YouTube Celebrity – The Barenaked Ladies produced a similarly themed video for the track "The Sound of Your Voice" last year, but to less fanfare.

A great contributing factor to Weezer’s success, is that they had the good grace to allow the “embed item” link in the YouTube channel – something many record companies don’t seem keen to allow, often preferring to direct traffic to the official website. But this move allowed bloggers to spread the video at an even greater rate - us included.

The video reportedly had over 1.2 million views in its first 24 hours on YouTube, reaching 7.5 million views by June 19th.

Obviously Weezer’s marketing efforts have paid off, providing the band with their fastest rising single to date in the American Billboard Modern Rock Charts, shooting up to number 1 after just 3 weeks release.

E-consultancy report that research into the global impact of social media indicates significant growth across all social media platforms; with video clips growing the fastest; now commanding 81% penetration worldwide.  This kind of growth signals an exciting boost for non-traditional marketing methodologies and strategies.

Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo is no stranger to YouTube – he is currently compiling a series of homemade videos entitled “let’s write a song”, encouraging viewers to provide feedback and ideas for a track, which is evolving through a number of stages, from title, style and feel, through to lyrics and more subtle production elements.

This kind of transparency and involvement is one way bands are proactively using the internet to create buzz and differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. Nine Inch Nails founder, Trent Reznor openly makes high quality multi-track versions of his tracks available on the internet for the general public to remix, modify and upload. The director of the ‘Pork and Beans’ video, Matthew Cullen, hopes others will use the video to create their own video mash-ups.

If you’re keen to expand your email marketing strategy, click-through data should be a key consideration. It provides a wealth of information to help you understand what customers want. A basic send out isn’t enough to capitalise on the many benefits of email – it’s just the beginning.

Unfortunately many businesses don’t take advantage of email:

• to drive more traffic to their website
• to make them more money
• to deliver excellent online customer service

I recommend you keep on track and learn from your click-through data. This will help you deliver more targeted email campaigns.

Here’s a few ideas:

• Why not create an email offer for popular click-throughs? For example, if you’ve identified a particular group of customers that like “handbags”, why not send them a brand-focused email offer?
• If there’s a common pattern in order of click-throughs to your emails, re-arrange future messages in order of interest. Customers generally scan emails. Capture their attention as quickly as possible.
• Send follow-up emails based on click-through data. For example:

1. Create an automatic “thank you email” to send to customers following a purchase. Introduce the “customers who bought this item also bought…” concept pioneered by Amazon.

2. Identify segments of customers who don’t click through, and send them a “second chance email” offer. 

3. Create a well-developed email subscription model to target your data collection and increase click-through rates.

4. Click-through data can provide enough information on customer interests to enable you to follow up with a phone call.

5. Consider sending an online survey to customers who click-through. You could offer a reasonable incentive such a discount off their next order.

6. Don’t forget to say thank you to any customers who forward your email on to a friend – it’s just plain good manners!

And where possible personalise your email. But don’t make customers feel as if you’re stalking them!

Don’t forget… when a customer clicks-though on an email it’s only the start of their online experience. As a first step I recommend creating effective landing pages. Whether they form part of your website or specifically relate to your email link, landing pages are important to track where the customer goes next.

The Google trademark update has been in place since the 5 May 2008. A month on I thought it would be useful to review the effects of the change. Firstly I’ll take a look at paid search (PPC) activity on Google Adwords and how it’s affected my clients.

Here’s a summary my observations:

• As predicted, competitors are now bidding on our clients' trademarks.
• Our clients’ average cost per click (CPC) has been pushed up by 20-25%.
• The increase in costs was seen from the 6 May (the day after the trademarks were changed and the day after the UK bank holiday).
• The use of trademarks in competitor adverts has been relatively easy to monitor but difficult to stop (only Google can stop advertisers from using trademarks).
• The Google Adwords editorial team have been overwhelmed by the number of advert review requests - we have seen significant delays in competitor ads being removed.
• Sales via the affiliate channel have increased. Sales have been migrating from paid search to affiliate sales.

Now let’s look at some of the wider market ramifications:

• Google Europe has made a heap more money as advertisers rush in to bid on each others trademarked terms.
• It now costs all advertisers more money to maintain their Adwords campaigns. The result is that paid search is delivering diminished returns.
• Of the press articles and news items I have read, I can’t find an advertiser that’s happy about Google's decision to pull out of Adwords trademarking.
• Major retailers – such as the big supermarkets – now have ‘gentlemen's agreements’ in place amongst themselves to avoid the others trademarks. The rationale presumably being there’s no need to confuse the end user.
• Rather than relying on Google to protect against trademarks, advertisers are now taking competitors and/or Google to court (amongst others read about Louis Vuitton versus Google).
• Google's decision to not protect trademark owners is not final. They’ve given themselves the option to back-track. Reading between the lines – Google might re-instate their trademark policy if their hand is forced by the law courts, or the advertisers kick up enough of a fight.

If you have any updates or thoughts on the above then please comment on this post. We'd love to hear from you.

After months of speculation Yahoo has sealed a deal with Google which allows them to use Adsense on their search and content network; which could be worth $800 million in revenues to Yahoo over the next 12 months.

Just a few hours after showing Microsoft the door for the second time, the promiscuous search engine Yahoo has finally decided to settle down with Google.

After flaunting itself to Microsoft for a number of months, trying to squeeze more money out of the potential full/part buy-out for its shareholders, Yahoo canned the deal and signed up with Google.

The Google-Yahoo partnership affects the US and Canada, where Yahoo can use Adsense to show Google ads on some of its search engine results pages (SERPs) as well as on its content network.

The deal is set to last 4 years but if successful Yahoo has 2 three-year extensions available. The deal is also set to make the two online giants’ instant messaging software compatible.

According to Google’s official blog post on the matter this IS NOT a merger, and does not remove Yahoo as a competitor. Yahoo are still going to be running their own search engine, and are still going to be running Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM).

At the end of the day though, Yahoo will be generating revenue - and essentially more profit - for Google. The difference in click-through-rate from searches on Yahoo and searches on Google is substantial, so using Google’s ads should allow Yahoo to gain a much larger volume of clicks.

This deal says to me that Yahoo have no intention of improving their own search marketing system, and are quite happy to pay Google for use of a better one that will display more relevant ads and in theory generate more clicks (and more revenue).

Google also say on their blog that Yahoo are welcome to use their technology as little or as much as they like. So if it proves successful, will we see Yahoo join Google’s search network permanently? Could this be the beginning of end for YSM? I’m sure we’ll find out before the end of the 4 year deal.

Google have quietly introduced their new Merchant Search system. This tool is currently being tested to help find products and services matching a search, for example, secured loans.

It seems Google will benefit financially as they’ll receive payment once someone has successfully sent a quote to the merchant.

The interesting part of this is that Google will arrange a call via one of its operators and the customer will then speak to the chosen provider.

And Google are taking data privacy very seriously as at no point will any information be passed onto the provider, Google are purely responsible for introducing the parties.

Google may have been a little slow off the mark with this tool but I imagine if they start appearing prominently in the search results they will eat up a large percentage of the page 1 click-through rate.

The comparison market is already heavily saturated but Google’s muscle in moving in on this market will start to upset regular listings on page 1 searches.

I estimate there will be a queue for partners to join the system – if you can’t fight them – join them!

It will be interesting to monitor how search positions / page layout of Google results change over the next few months, and to see how they expand this service.

New research has shown that over £3bn was spent on online ad campaigns in 2007. This is a new record in terms of online and represents 16% of the total UK market.

The continuing trend is for online advertising taking market share from the more traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and direct mail.

It’s interesting that the internet continues to be the biggest growth channel as press advertising shows slow decline.

I believe the research from the Advertising Association and the World Advertising Research Centre points to continued growth of marketing you can measure through online channels despite the air of gloom cast by the credit crunch.

In fact there are so many factors driving the move to online. These are most notably:

• the innate measurability and transparent ROI delivered by online channels
• the obvious cost benefits
• growing environmental concerns; online is a ‘greener’ technology
• continuing changes in consumer behaviour

Everything points towards online ad spend continuing to grow and gain market share.