Hasta La Creative!

For years, you had a dream. Your vision was that you were going to leave the company that you worked for since you graduated college and start your own business. In your vision, your business would be large enough to outcompete your former employer and become the No. 1 business in your industry in your hometown. Last […]

The post Should You Expand Your Business? appeared first on AdPulp.

The whole world shops online. Before you purchase your product on an online merchant’s site, you have probably noticed that it is listed in the site’s cart. The notion of cart functionality sounds simple, but understanding the technology supporting this platform requires some prior knowledge. Simply put, a shopping cart is an online business’s content management system (CMS). This CMS interfaces with your browser to handle online transactions for your company.

A advanced online shopping cart system provides youeverything you need to start, processing credit cards and fulfilling orders on your website. Manage the content, page navigation and images all from your dedicated Content Management System (CMS).

Simple to Use, Pretty to Look At

The easier your CMS is to modify and develop, the fewer headaches it will cause you in the long run. A good CMS has a Dashboard, or front of system operating panel. It really is just a way to click easily on the features and pages of your site, without having to be code-proficient. And then when it comes to code – the less you have to use, the better. Make sure your CMS offers themes or templates you can customize for the look and feel of your site. Finally, what is the customer support team like? A great online shopping cart CMS provider also has an awesome team to help with all your design and development needs.

How Do Customers Choose Which Products to Buy Online

How do you choose which products to buy online? Most shoppers would answer that they view a product’s picture, its product description, and any comments/ratings provided by users. All of these details are features of your shopping cart platform. When choosing a shopping cart CMS, a key feature that should be customizable is your online transaction system. It’s best if it allows for customizable product images and support for consumers to enter their comments and ratings of products.

Drill-Down Capabilities

Drill-down capabilities is geekspeak for leveled-navigation on a site. The top-level domain is the site’s home address – for example, Amazon.com. The levels, or tiers, beneath that level are what the user drills down. On Amazon, for instance, the second-level domains include departments, such as Books & Audible; Movies, Music, & Games; Electronics & Computers; Home, Garden, & Tools, and so forth. Beneath each department are more levels. If you click on Books & Audible, you will see the choices for Books, Kindle Books, Children’s Books, Textbooks, and Magazines. The more specificity your shopping cart’s CMS allows in drill-down capabilities (also known as layered-navigation), the easier it will be for users to locate their products when browsing the site.

Key Features of the Checkout Page

You have probably purchased products online and become frustrated by how long it takes to complete your transaction. We’ve all been there. It’s best to limit the number of page-clicks a customer has to sit through to buy a product. A customizable CMS optimally allows you to configure a one-page checkout. Also, when customers return to your site, an Archive feature of the shopping cart will allow them to review their previous purchases. In addition, the CMS you choose for your shopping cart should have a Refund option that is easy to add to the checkout page. And for you to track purchases and sort them by client or product, other key features of the checkout page include Export to CSV (spreadsheets) and a Sort and Filter capability.

Promotions

When choosing your online shopping cart CMS, make sure it has couponing, discounting, and gift card platforms available. Several hub coupon sites exist these days (Groupon, for example). Simplifying the entering of coupons and discounts on your cart is essential. Also, your online store may offer gift cards. An excellent shopping cart CMS tool will allow customers to purchase and redeem gifts cards. Also, the CMS will track the amount spent on the gift card, so the customer can return to the site and use their card again if money is still on the card. An even better plus is if you have the ability to make the gift card look pretty by designing it with a unique template.

Product Inventory

Perhaps this feature should be the first one listed. If your online shopping cart does not have a way to track the location, price, and quantities of products, customer may end up ordering items that are actually not in stock. Also, as a business owner, you need top-notch import and export functionality so you can use third-party software, such as Excel or Quickbooks, to track sales. Finally, is your inventory system integrated with analytics?

The hot word in today’s technosphere is data. The ability to track sales and customer profiles using a platform such as Google Analytics allows you to develop your business plan and marketing campaigns. Analytics help you to identify your customer base, target how to promote and discount hot products, and generate sales reports.

Now that you have an understanding of the key features of online shopping carts, it’s time to narrow down your search for the best provider. Make sure you have your domain, Web host, and a dedicated IP address registered for your site. Explore the different online shopping carts available. Do this before deciding on the design of your entire site. It is best to work from that final transaction page and move backwards so you can review all the details of the “guts” pages as you go. Think about how you want your home page to look, the number of levels (or tiers), you’d like to build out. Once you have a good picture of what your online store will look like and how you want transactions conducted, find the shopping cart CMS that hits all the key features outlined in this article. Good luck on building your online business.

The post Narrowing Down the Necessary Features of Your Online Shopping Cart appeared first on AdPulp.

Taco Bell encouraged real men with a famous name to testify! “I am Ronald McDonald and I love Taco Bell’s new breakfasts,” several real Ronalds repeat into the camera.

This new campaign from Deutsch LA is not exactly brilliant, but it may breakthrough. And breakthrough is what it is going take to loosen McDonald’s grip on the morning hours—McD’s currently dominates with 31 percent of sales. Egg McMuffin ain’t no joke.

Ad Age’s reading of NPD data indicates that breakfast in 2013 logged its fourth consecutive year of growth for restaurants, while lunch and dinner continue to decline. Fast food, which accounts for 80% of total restaurant morning meals, showed the strongest growth, with a 4% increase over the prior year. And the forecast looks good: NPD estimates that fast-food breakfast will grow a cumulative 9% over the next nine years.

According to Nation’s Restaurant News, the hot item on Taco bell’s breakfast menu is expected to be the waffle taco—a waffle that cradles scrambled eggs and a sausage patty and is served with a packet of syrup for $1.79.

An Instagram post by a customer who stumbled across the waffle taco went viral, sparking about 4 million impressions.

UPDATE: The Ronald has responded on Facebook in a visually stimulating way.

Previously on AdPulp: A Smothering Jewish Mother Smothers Son With Taco Bell, Son Eats It Up

The post Real Ronald McDonalds Agree: Taco Bell’s New Breakfasts Taste Good appeared first on AdPulp.

Digital advertising will account for 22.7% of all worldwide ad investments this year, or about $117.60 billion — up 13% compared with 2012, according to estimates from eMarketer and Starcom MediaVest Group.

I’m not certain this is a good thing. Unless, brands and their agency partners clearly know what they’re doing with all that money.

 
I posted this new Adobe commercial from Goodby Silverstein & Partners on my friend Bob Hoffman’s Facebook wall. Hoffman is a champion of common sense and logic in the face of much digital advertising speculation. Recently on his Ad Contrarian site, he pointed to a Solve Media study that claims 46% of the viewership reported by websites seems to be fraudulent. That’s a lot of ghost traffic.

As someone with feet in both the media and marketing worlds, I can say it’s not all that simple to say exactly how many people are visiting your site, where they’re coming from and if they are real people or not. Yes, there are tools aplenty, but tools are biased. How you choose to measure something impacts the data and flavors the results.

If we can’t trust the data, or the people who willfully manipulate it, what or who can we trust in terms of getting value for our ad dollars? We can’t trust the traditional ad guys who are invested in making TV. We can’t trust the digital demigods either. This is not a good situation for the ad business, nor for the clients who need to trust someone to help them reach their communications objectives.

My take is create a media plan that makes sense for your particular business situation. I often drive by a large lot of shiny Airstream campers, and I think here is a company that desperately needs well-made TV to tell the story of weekends in the mountains. Naturally, a client like this would also be well advised to develop its digital assets. Thus, the divide between TV and digital is a false divide. Companies need to spend on both TV and digital and apply the best metrics available to each, while keeping in mind that persuasion is an art.

The post Whether Perpetrated By Bots or By Babies, Click Fraud Is A Crime appeared first on AdPulp.

Jaron Lanier, author of Who Owns The Future?, asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class.

Looking forward, he says it is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web.

In an interview with Nieman Lab, Lanier argues:

If you have universal backlinks, you have a basis for micropayments from somebody’s information that’s useful to somebody else… Every backlink would be monetized. Monetizing actually decentralizes power rather than centralizing it. Demonetizing a network actually concentrates power around anyone who has the biggest computer analyzing it.

Monetizing decentralizes power. Perfect! Americans love freedom and money.

I also love to provide information that might be useful to somebody–like this very article–thus, I am fully behind a workable micropayments system that rewards me (and others) for being prolific and readable.

The post Transition To The Modern World, Give Markets A Chance appeared first on AdPulp.

Since I moved to Seattle, I’ve become much more aware of environmental issues and groups that draw attention to them. But where I came from, it’s another story.

We’ve seen many attempts in recent years by marketers to capitalize on a growing awareness by consumers of environmental issues. Today’s New York Times reports on the efforts Clorox is making with its line of Green Works products. And up until now, the bottom line seems to have gotten in the way:

When Green Works was first launched, it came out of the gate with a lot of investment by Clorox,” said Jason Gere, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “Initially it started to do well, but then the macroeconomic environment took over. Clorox realized that in this consumer-led recession, having products even as environmentally friendly as Green Works’ are, but charging a 20 percent-plus premium to conventional cleaners, was not working.

Green Works has launched many digital and social initiatives, including its “The Green Housewives” web series:

It’s hard to tell anyone on a tight budget to pay more for environmentally-friendly products. But marketers will keep trying to push “green” products. So does the environment really matter to consumers when they’re shopping? Is more, or different, consumption really the answer? Or are we becoming simply too jaded for all the marketers’ green efforts?

Marketing with a focus on the environment is tricky. There are arguments to be made for less energy consumption, use of better (or recycled) raw materials, or even reducing a lengthy supply chain in making products. But consumers don’t often take those into consideration. And as we’ve seen, quite a number of politicians and supporters refuse to believe there’s even a problem, or a need to be more sensitive to how we treat our earth and its natural resources.

If you’ve had any experience with clients or brands looking to push their environmental efforts, leave a comment and let us know how much success you’ve had.

The post It’s Earth Day. Do Consumers Really Care about “Green” Products? appeared first on AdPulp.

I don’t know if ad grunts are any more likely to complain about work than any other profession, but I do know we find plenty to complain about: unreasonable timelines and budgets, long hours, okay pay, testy clients and account directors, unnecessary attitudes from the creative department, mindless focus on the minutia, and so on.

But all that is the glass half-empty view of the agency business. For the glass half-full version we turn to former CEO of Leo Burnett Singapore, John Kyriakou.

Writing for Campaign Asia-Pacific says, Kyriakou extolls our virtues, while challenging us to reach higher.

I still hear people say ‘we’re in the ad business’. At some point we need to realise that the success of our business is entirely based on the success of our clients’ business. Entirely.

If we at least begin to accept that, then we should be developing ideas, not just ads, that help strengthen the spreadsheets of our clients. We need to become, you guessed it, thinkers and innovators.

Businesses need to be more creative now than ever, not more conservative. They need new ways to stimulate people, whether it be through product development, packaging innovation, new distribution channels. People do not need more of the same, they need difference in their lives. Agencies have everything at their disposal to supply it.

It’s funny, I was in the “ad making” business for awhile, and it was a me-centered universe. What mattered was selling the best creative, regardless of what the client thought of it, or if it actually might work in the marketplace. Because those things didn’t matter. What mattered was a better book for me, so I could get a better job and more pay. If my clients and their customers were also happy, all the better.

Thankfully, I managed to grow up and get past this limited POV, but I am well aware that the conditions which created it remain in place. We are human beings and we like to follow formulas. Even the best agencies follow formulas. Take W+K. It might be a stretch to say their work is suffering, but I will say it is increasingly formulaic. And there’s a reason for it, which has everything to do with following formulas.

The formula W+K and other elite agencies use looks like this: Hire only the people we know, or know of, people with strikingly similar books and backgrounds, and keep them busy doing what the agency is best at — delivering TV campaigns.

Why do you think digital is such a challenge for W+K and other leading traditional shops? Digital is outside the formula. So, right now a new digitally-enhanced formula is being made, which will theoretically create new digital hits. Yet, for digital to jump the direct marketing shark and emerge as a brand building platform, we need radical disruption, not another formula.

The post Hey Ad Man, What Business Are You In? #Rhetorical appeared first on AdPulp.

The Bush administration’s economic stimulus package is far from enough to drive Americans into their local car and truck dealer.

June’s sales numbers, compared to June 2007 are horrible and a sign of a seriously weakened economy.

According to The Wall Street Journal, American consumers long enamored with trucks and SUVs are now looking for fuel-efficient cars. Sales of Ford’s SUVs fell 55%, and its formerly top-selling truck line dropped 38%. Toyota sold about two-thirds fewer light trucks than it did a year earlier.

To help offset these declines, GM introduced zero-percent financing for 72 months on many 2008 models. Without this incentive, Toyota would have likely overcome GM in the market share department.

Don’t let the economy quash your vacation plans. That’s the message coming from several destinations, as consumers face inflationary prices at every turn.

Stuart Elliott of The New York Times points to Las Vegas, Panama City Beach, Orlando and other cities that are stepping off their brand messaging platforms in favor of price promotions.

“ ‘What happens here stays here’ is being given a rest,” said Rob Dondero, executive vice president at R&R Partners in Las Vegas, the agency for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, because “it doesn’t have a strong call to action.”

“We need to be a little more retail,” he added. “People want to know what is the best value for their getaway dollar.”

Destinations are not the only travel marketers seeking to woo worried consumers. Hertz is offering bargains like 50 percent off weekend rates. The Extended Stay Hotels chain is proclaiming, “Take shelter from the economy,” in suites with kitchens from $59.99 a night.

When I filled up my Pathfinder yesterday, I realized that $3.54/gallon means a $70 tank–double what it cost me a short time ago. Naturally, this type of inflation has dire consequences for the economy.

For the first time since 1980, consumers are driving less. Last year, the amount of miles driven declined 0.4%. The previous two years had been flat. Prior to that, the amount of miles had grown 3-5% each year.

Brandweek explores some of the behavioral changes taking place as Americans keep it in “park.”

91% of consumers claim they have changed their shopping behavior due to various rising prices in the U.S. economy.

One of the categories getting hit the hardest is restaurants. Last year, customer traffic was up only 0.7%. More than half of financially challenged consumers surveyed said they are stocking up, preparing more meals at home and using leftovers.

The article also says Coca-Cola and PepsiCo will feel the pinch as transportation and raw materials costs rise. “It’s squeezing everybody’s margins,” said Gary Hemphill, managing director at Beverage Marketing, New York. “Beverages are price sensitive, there is only so much you can pass onto the consumer.”

Brandweek believes strong branding is more important than ever, as it’s that much harder to motivate purchase. I believe they are correct, but if gas prices continue to rise at this rate, it’s not going to matter much. People simply won’t have the disposable income it takes to make non-essential purchases.

[UPDATE] Now that I’ve had the chance to read the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, I see this topic is on the media’s mind. The Times says middle- and working-class consumers are starting to switch from name brands to cheaper alternatives.

In Ohio, Holly Levitsky is replacing the Lucky Charms cereal in her kitchen with Millville Marshmallows and Stars, a less expensive store brand. In New Hampshire, George Goulet is no longer booking hotel rooms at the Hilton, favoring the lower-cost Hampton Inn. And in Michigan, Jennifer Olden is buying Gain laundry detergent instead of the full-price Tide.