Successful advertising methods

**Areeder1** · 11-08-2006 02:55 PM

Hi, I'm doing a report on advertising, and I need the opinions of business owners who have used various advertising methods.

The mediums I'm focusing on are: newspaper, television, direct mailings, magazines, radio, and internet ads (keyword, banner, pop-up, etc).

If you could tell me what has and hasn't worked for you, that would be really helpful!

Or if you know of people who have used any of these methods and had success or failure, tell me about it.

I need lots of opinions! The more the better!

Thank you so much for all your help!

PS: It's really important for me to have opinions on all the mediums I mentioned, so if you have any experience with any of them, please let me know about it!

**orange655321** · 11-08-2006 04:22 PM

Targeted (TARGETED) CPC's work well

If you run an effective CPC and get high conversions from the campaigns, then the key is to continue to increase your marketing budget for these campaigns until your conversion to billable activity ratio starts to decrease.

**Sam Barona** · 11-08-2006 04:42 PM

I have experienced both ends of the spectrum (in terms of responses/sales) in most of the mediums you have mentioned; I guess just like most professional marketers out there.

My biggest success was when I did a direct mail shot to the UK's top 200 companies. I achieved a 82% response rate that I have not managed to duplicate to this day. I had a lot of research carried out previously on each of the respondents, sending them each an individualised 3-D mailing.

Email has also been very good to me as a medium, with which I have achieved 13% response rates from an in-house list of 15,000. I sent low-tech (text only) emails, but crafted out a real knock out piece of copy. This was in direct contrast to the tests I did using flash and HTML, which only delivered 5 & 3% response rates accordingly.

TV and Cinema advertising is where I have burnt my fingers the most, but much of this is due to the fact that they are such expensive mediums to test effectively. So, unless you get it just right the first time around, or you have a budget of Pavarotian proportions, then you're struggling anyways.

Since then, I have now partners who have won the Cannes and Sundance film festivals, and together we did a fantastic campaign for Mercedes in Korea that achieved over 60% recall. And we did it 50% below budget!

I firmly believe that to succeed in this field you really need to do exhaustive segmentation and use focus groups where this is feasible. You also need to choose your mediums very carefully and then choose the right media buyers to achieve things within budget. More importantly, perhaps, is the creation of a campaign that is not only original, but well crafted to fire the right synapse connections in your audience's brains. It has to have to be original and, more over, have longeivity designed as standard.

Video, in my view, is the most effective method of above the line advertising; simply because it engages more of your brain. Unfortunately, most advertising agencies and their clients just don't get the right mix, resulting in adverts that catch your attention, but leave you wondering what it was all about; others that tell you everything you need to know about an offering, but bore you senseless; or worst still, uninspired adverts that just simply don't have the impact, nor the class to make them memmorable.

I am currently starting to test video emails, which I feel have great potential.
Also, am involved with a relatively new form of advertising that could even be classified as experiential, since it engages the touch, vision and audio senses.

We are bringing interactive video to the high streets that include directional sound for a unique, direct to ear mode of message delivery. The technologies have the impact to pull people in, whilst the content provides the right information to either close the sale outside the store, or pull to pull them into the store.

In this line, we are also introducing interactive billboards. Large (6X4 Meter) screens that talk to you without shouting, Its like the person on the advert was talking whilst standing right next to your ear. The Bilboards will then play adequately timed video footage to accompany the sound and invite the audience to interact with the video; so that you can download music, say, from the billboard, or text your billboard your email address for more information, e-coupons, or such.

This last bit of information could perhaps be usefull in your report to describe where outdoor advertising is going in the very near future.

Best of luck with your report

Sam