Hasta La Creative!

We live in the social age. Along with the amazing ability to connect to friends and family within seconds, business owners can sometimes feel like they live under constant pressure to be responsive. One bad review blown out of proportion can spiral out of control, leading to a social nightmare with dire consequences for your company’s brand. One way to increase user satisfaction is to be more transparent about who you are and what you offer.

Offer customers methods to contact you, give them a voice on your site and let them speak for your services. Start asking customers for testimonials and looking at what data you can publish to increase your credibility.

Customer Reviews

Google Alerts is a free service you can use to track what other people are saying about your website or your brand across the Web. Have alerts delivered to your email that search for keywords you define so that you can monitor competitors as well. When you find review data, contact the customer and ask if you can publish his or her review. Offer them space on your website and let them know you’ll quote them by name in a special section for customer reviews.

Tools like the Brand.com reviews widget allow customers to leave instant feedback on your site. A five-star ranking system gives visitors a quick view of the quality of services you offer. Testimonials with customer names also grant a little extra clout to professions in which an individual review could be more meaningful.

Asking for feedback is the only way for you to know what your audience wants to see. It’s true that not everyone will respond, but a short survey can teach you a lot about how your customers perceive your website.

Page View Data

Page view data is always a tricky metric because no one is ever sure how much is enough. You don’t need to publish actual page views to show that your content is engaging. There are many ways to judge your traffic: Facebook friends, Alexa rank, search engine rank, and volume of competition being only a few free ways that are simple to find.

What’s better is for you to show the quality of your traffic. If your articles only have a 25% bounce rate, that’s an amazing statistic that you should flaunt everywhere possible. What advertiser does not want the attention of a highly engaged audience? Look at your statistics and figure out what you can publish that will help sell the idea that your page is a peak destination in your niche.

Social Signals

Besides your friend count, a Klout score linked to your Twitter account will help give a better indication of your reach. Look at how many mentions and retweets your stories get, and focus on pushing content out to the most vocal users on Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook Insights also provide extra data to you like your potential reach for a particular post. Look at your most popular posts and try to highlight what makes users want to talk about you so that you can tailor future work accordingly.

Making Valuable Commitments

Commitments to user protection during the payment process phase is not a feature, it’s more like a foundation for trust. Commitment to use personal data responsibly, or listing ways in which you will use user data shows you care about the people that visit your page. Look into commitments you can make, like “Do Not Track,” or “Non-Intrusive Ads” that respect the time your users invest with your business.

One of the best things you can do is to give users more control over their data. Don’t bury unsubscribe options, but try to look at why users leave your email list. Ask for feedback, display reviews both negative and positive. Invite the kind of discussion that makes your product better onto your website.

The post Being Transparent with Your Customers appeared first on AdPulp.

“Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one.”

This little truism is especially true today. We’re all critics, even when we’re consumers at the same time. So can brands narrowly target an audience anymore, or will they hear about their marketing from everyone, regardless of whether they’re the target? Case in point: The recent Mountain Dew “Goat” ads that were deemed offensive by almost — but not quite — everybody.

Every creative brief I’ve ever been handed contains a section about who the target audience is. Some are very narrow, some are quite broad. It’s futile to try to target even a majority of the population.

Yet when large swaths of the public rise up and complain about an ad or a brand, they get attention. Woe to the brand manager or CMO who says, “Sorry, we’re just not talking to you.” All consumers are supposed to matter, and when anyone can write a blog or use the Twitter megaphone, they all need to be heard or placated. In cases where a controversial ad is in question, many people don’t think twice about pouring gasoline on a fire.

It’s the subject of my new column on Talent Zoo.

The post Targeting Is Futile When Our Audience Is Everyone, Everywhere appeared first on AdPulp.

So in the past two weeks, we’ve seen a couple of spots go for a disguised profanity joke. And they’re getting attention.

First, the Kmart “Ship My Pants” spot:

And now, the Philips Norelco “I’d FAQ Me” spots:

As I learned when I wrote this Talent Zoo column about cursing, clearly there’s something about cursing, or the hint of it, that gets attention and publicity.

But are these spots taking the easy way out by playing to the cursing? And are puns okay if they’re used in place of curse words?

The post Subtlety? FAQ That Ship. appeared first on AdPulp.

According to The New York Times, Getty Images will scour Flickr for images it might be able to sell.

Getty editors will comb Flickr in search of interesting images. They will then invite photographers to participate in the program and ensure that their images have the proper releases to be licensed legally. Those who are included in the program will get paid at the same rates that Getty pays photographers who are under contract with the company.

Jonathan Klein, co-founder and chief executive of Getty Images, said, “Because the imagery is not shot for commercial services, there is more authenticity. Advertisers are looking for authenticity.”

This, for a Dallas Kia dealer:

UPDATE: I guess they do a lot of impersonations:

This seems like forever ago…

From the AP: Rock pioneer Bo Diddley dies at age 79.

MoveOn.org is sponsoring Obama in 30 Seconds, a contest for its members.

I’m not sure I totally buy the implied message or ending of this (and I’m an Obama supporter), but I really like this spot:

Very, very clever.

That’s a headline you don’t see every day. From MyNews in India:

Most people picture Mahatma Gandhi as some gentle, fragile man who people followed because he was just so peaceful. Gandhi wasn’t an idle peacenik; he was a perceptive communicator who would have been right at home in today’s ad industry.

But the truth is he wasn’t just some sappy dude who sat around all day smiling. He was a sharp lawyer who had a mind for smart communication. He was non-violent, but not passive. He devastated an empire by taking residence in people’s minds. He knew how the media worked and how to get attention. He spread his message by causing peaceful civil disobedience that got talked about in international press and word of mouth. That’s the power of a story worth discussing.

Read the rest here. Who are the Gandhis in the ad world? Are you one?

Boy, is this a weird story. After two major Kia executives depart comes a possible reason for their departures, from Ad Age:

The 13th U.S. president was central to Kia’s upcoming “Unheard of President’s Day Sale,” honoring, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, the first commander in chief to have running water in the White House. The punchline of new TV ads promoting the sale is a soap-on-a-rope bust of President Fillmore; the automaker handed out the same soaps to reporters at its media dinner last week during the Chicago Auto Show.

But Byung Mo Ahn was not amused. The South Korea-born executive, who returned to Kia’s Irvine, Calif., headquarters nine days ago in the newly created position of chairman and group CEO of Kia Motors America and Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia (the automotive plant currently under construction in West Point, Ga.), doesn’t like the current brand of humor in Kia’s ads, according to executives close to the matter. One of those executives said Mr. Ahn prefers to show the cars and trucks as serious contenders with good quality.

Yeah, he doesn’t look all that funny. Now Grover Cleveland, that would have been a better choice. He was hilarious, you know.

Once again, we are headed toward Super Bowl Sunday. And once again, the two head coaches of the Giants and Patriots, who are leading their teams to the NFL’s premier contest, have themselves never played a day of professional football.

Is there a lesson in the advertising industry can learn from this? I think so. I first wrote about this in a Talent Zoo column from 2004. I got some nice compliments on it, so I thought I’d repost it: