For at least a year, Barracuda Networks has been running large ads in Vancouver’s airport. I think I’ve seen their ads in other airports, but can’t confirm that (anybody?). I snapped a bad photo of one of several large display ads in the baggage collection area:
I’m always puzzled when I see these ads. Barracuda makes humming boxes that companies install in their networks to protect against email spam, viruses, phishing and so forth. This one costs about CAN $650:
The Barracuda Spam Firewall is compatible with all email servers and can fit into nearly any corporate or small business environment. It is used by small organizations with as few as 10 employees and large organizations with as many as 200,000 employees. A single Barracuda Spam Firewall handles up to 100,000 active email users. Multiple units can be clustered together for even greater capacity and high availability.
According to YVR, about 4.1 million international passengers passed through their gates in 2007. What tiny fraction of those passengers are potential buyers of Barracuda’s products?
The math gets murky, but according to BC Stats, there are about 81,000 technology workers in BC. Of course, not all of those are potential Barracuda customers. Plenty of those have no interest in the IT concerns of their companies. Others work for companies that have fewer than 10 employees. Let’s be generous and imagine that one third of these tech workers might possibly be or know somebody who could become a Barracuda customer.
That works out to 6 out of 1000 British Columbians who might be the target market for these ads. That fraction is certainly lower for foreign visitors. So–best case scenario–that ad might be relevant to one out of every 200 passengers. In truth, I suspect the number is closer to one in 1000.
And yet this is a sadly commonplace scenario. Most offline ads are incredibly dumb–they’re irrelevant to 99.9% of people who see them. Barracuda runs these ads as an act of faith. That one or two out of the madding crowd of visitors grabbing their bags might take an interest, and start on the long, treacherous path towards an IT purchase. And do the folks at Barracuda Networks have an accurate sense of the return on investment of these airport ads? What do you think?
On a vaguely related note, I saw an enormous barracuda in shallow water in Panama a couple of weeks ago. It was at least three feet long, and just cruising gently by in about three feet of water.
James likes to say that advertising is an act of faith. That’s generally true, and it’s a concept that I rail against whenever I speak to marketers. The ad industry of the twentieth century was built on a house of sand: immeasurability. Most of the time, most marketers failed to measure most of their advertising spend.
How effective is that full page ad in that industry magazine? How many people actually see that billboard? How many people actually pick up and read your brochure? These are questions that, too often, assaulted the faith of ad buyers everywhere.
Of course, all of that changed with the web, where we can measure the cost of every click, every conversion, every customer. It makes the newspaper ads and movie posters seem hilariously antiquated. When we talk to ad reps on behalf of our clients, we’ve always got an exact cost-per-conversion in mind. If they can’t offer services below that cost, we don’t advertise with them.
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
We always discourage our clients from undertaking any advertising that they can’t measure. If they’re running offline ad campaigns, we urge them to have a unique call to action (such as a specific URL) so that they can track a campaign’s effectiveness.
I’m certainly no expert in real estate marketing. However, if I’m identifying the six bullet points I want to put on my new building’s sign, should ‘fully sprinklered’ really make the list?
Let’s ignore, for the moment, that ‘sprinkler’ is not a verb. Does this really matter to their buyers? I’d imagine that their target demographic would be empty-nesters and young professionals, most of whom have lived their entire lives in ‘unsprinklered’ accommodation. Is the omnipresence of sprinklers going to convert them to buyers?
I bought the latest issue of Wired magazine. Why do I only read magazines when I travel? I’m not sure why, but that’s not the point of this post.
Reading through the magazine, I encountered a full-page ad for Delta Airlines. I snapped a photo with my incredibly old and lame camera phone:
If you can’t read that (and I don’t blame you), the main text goes like this:
CHANGE IS:
NO BOGUS “BOOKING FEES”
SKIP TRAVEL WEBSITE BOOKING FEES AT DELTA.COM
First off, that’s a various dubious use of quotation marks. That usage is usually meant to imply that something is not what as it’s described, as in:
Our “free” flight that we bought using Air Miles cost $300.
It’s not like a booking fee is actually something else. It may be questionable business practice (though I don’t think it is for the big travel sites), but it’s still just a plain old fee for booking a flight.
Questionable quotes aside, I thought that was a bizarre message to feature in Delta’s ad in Wired. Booking fees usually are quite small, and they’ve actually been around forever. That’s how travel agents make (or used to make) money.
Is That Really a Differentiator?
Do they really think that Wired readers would eschew the obvious benefits of the Travelocitys (plural agreement? Arg!) and Expedias just to save a few bucks?
Other full page ads in Wired are for cigars, executive class travel with Air Canada and Hyatt hotels. I’m not implying that Wired readers are rich, but other ads suggest that they’re willing to pay for luxury goods.
I just don’t see ‘no booking fees’ as a compelling differentiator? Surely Delta has other offers that would be more compelling.
I know this is arecurringtheme on this site, but rest assured I don’t post here every time I see an artist exploiting their fame to promote products. I know I’m tilting at windmills, but I find it deeply distasteful and, often, an unprincipled decision by the artist. I’ll spare you the usual Neil Young citation.
I wonder if she dreamed of pimping printers back when she was in a little Anaheim ska band? Did visions of glossy paper float through her head when she slept in the back of the van? I found this quote from Ms. Stefani, from back in March, 2005:
“Y’know someone one time called me a cheerleader, negatively, and I’ve never been a cheerleader. So I was, like, ‘OK, fuck you. You want me to be a cheerleader? Well, I will be one then. And I’ll rule the whole world, just you watch me.’”
She’s ruling the world, one colour laser jet at a time. I wonder how much she makes for this campaign? And does she really need the money?
As a side note, I saw this ad on TSN’s video site. This is probably a secondary broadcast medium for the ad, but it’s interesting to think about whether the Gwen Stefani + HP Printers + TSN equation makes sense. Particularly when, strangely, they’re promoting Stefani-themed paper dolls. Bizarre.
Mark Evans recently articulated an issue that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. What happens to the web if ad-blocking software becomes commonplace?
Anyone using Adblock wants to eat their cake (access free content and services) and have it too (no advertising). Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t gorge yourself at the Web buffet without paying for it in some way such as seeing advertising.
Mark wields some fairly alarmist and provocative language, but he’s generated some interesting discussion in the comments associated with that post.
Hobbyists, Beware
If things online advertising revenue goes south (and we’re talking Patagonia here) as Mark suggests they might, that would be a disaster. I’m wouldn’t be overly worried about web companies who rely on advertising revenue. I’ve talked with plenty of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs who have creative plans to make money that don’t rely on serving ads.
I’d be more concerned about the hobbyists and site owners who have enjoyed (usually small) rewards for their work through Google AdSense and the like. They’ve experienced a significant paradigm shift in recent years, and that’s probably inspired them to keep doing the often excellent work they do online. Here’s a commenter from Mark’s post:
I have provided free content on improvisational theatre [ed: wow, thorough site] for more than a decade, and Google Adwords is the first remuneration I have ever received for this labour of love. It actually helps out with the endlessly thankless task of giving your stuff away ;).
Remove the ad revenue, and you might end up back at GeoCities? Not really, but you get the idea.
Even more problematic than that, however, is the amount of commerce that web advertising enables. Surely there are far more companies using Google AdWords (et al) to generate leads than there are companies depending on advertising for revenue. We’ve had technology companies who get 90% of their leads (and therefore revenue) through their AdWords campaign.
TiVo or Newspaper?
In thinking about this potential problem, we first need to think about how the average person conceives of web advertising. Is it like ads in the newspaper or ads on television? TiVo and the mute button enable people to ignore TV ads, so the ad skipping genie is out of the bottle.
How come readers tolerate ads in newspapers? I don’t think many of them regularly think about how the ads subsidize the price of the paper. By the same token, once they discover the power of ad-blocking software, you’re never going to convince people that they should just turn it off.
If Microsoft ever decides to add (and turn on by default) ad-blocking in Internet Explorer, beware. It will have a huge impact on the economics and, therefore, the landscape of the web.
Bonus links: While looking for an appropriate photo for this post, I encountered two otheramusing billboards.
Quick question for those of you generating the online revenue. This is mostly for a client site, but also out of personal interest. What’s your experience been with BlogAds? I imagine the rate of return beats Google AdSense. Have you been happy with the ads they run? Any complaints?
