Joe Pietruch's Blog

  As part of the Dynamic Persuasion course, we regularly peruse the internet hoping to find some gem of an internet advertisement. On this particular excursion, I’ve happened upon three different marketing techniques. While I’m sure there are “correct” names for them, I’ll call the sites’ strategies names that make sense to me: “Send-A-Friend”, “Illustrative”, and “Real-World.”

We’ll start with Send-A-Friend. Characteristics of this style include:

• Some sort of tweaking widget.
• User customizable content.
• A way to email the created content out to friends.

The example I found was CareerBuilder.com’s Age-O-Matic. The idea is fairly simple. Users can upload a photo, or choose from existing photographs provided by the site. They then answer 3 questions about thier jobs, designed to give some sort of basis upon which to judge the degree of aging. The result is a graphical representation of how the user’s career is accelerating the user’s aging. Following the Send-A-Friend namesake, the image can then be sent to a friend, making them laugh, and hopefully try it for themselves.

Send-A-Friend sites spread quickly because of their viral marketing characteristics. Even if a user only sends to two other people, and each recipient two more in turn, in five such cycles, 63 people have visited the site. Advertising like this has the advantage of being delivered through someone the recipient already knows, and chances are the sender knows the recipient will get a laugh out of it.

The downsides to Send-A-Friend are few but significant. Most importantly, I often find Send-A-Friends can be distracting enough that the user can forget what site they belong to. I chose Age-O-Matic because it is for CareerBuilder.com and ties directly into that theme. Monk-e-mail was designed for the same .com, but I wouldn’t have known without thinking hard as it’s not directly related to the site’s purpose. The other “downside” is your server needs to be robust enough to handle the flood of requests such an advertisement can generate. I called it a “downside” because realistically although you’d need a new server, if you ever get enough traffic to crash a server, you ought to be generating enough revenue to afford a new one!

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“Illustrative” advertising is more static than dynamic, and generally includes:

• Some sort of interactive experience.
• Great visuals.
• Information to convey.

A site that I categorize as Illustrative is ikea.com. For this end, I’m focusing on the “IKEA Madness” animated information section. This section features several animations about the processes of IKEA designers. After selecting a designer’s photo (displayed as a jumping/walking head), an animation plays taking you through the design of one of that individual’s products. At the end, you are able to watch another, or go to the product page relative to that animation. This strategy informs the user about IKEA, its designers, and its products, and will take you directly to a product page.

Illustrative advertising is great at conveying information. It dresses up what could potentially be boring into an attractive, fun experience. Illustrative experiences are simultaneously fun and informative, which gives them purpose and value.

The downside to this particular advertisement is it relies on the user to find the site on his own. Granted, this may be an older advertisement that may have had better placement on the IKEA site when it was new, but I had to look pretty hard to find it.

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Lastly, what I call Real-World advertisement includes:

• An online component for interaction
• Real-world results driven by that interaction

For this category, I point to Cartoon Network’s MasterControlTV site. The idea is that TV viewers can log onto the website, vote for what shows they want to see when, and the most votes win. More than just a simple vote, viewers identify themselves with one of three particular teams – which adds some meaningfulness to a viewer’s vote. Rather than “Oh, the show I voted for won/didn’t win,” it’s “Oh, my team won/didn’t win!”

The reason I call this strategy Real-World is that the interactions of the user online directly affect something in the Real-World, in this case the television schedule. A great advantage (especially with TV), is that you can advertise the advertisement while the user is using the product. The voting offers incentive, and losing a vote only makes the user try harder next time!

A disadvantage is it’s difficult to attract a new user base. This technique is great for strengthening and freshening the experience of existing users but doesn’t necessarily draw new people in as affectively as Send-A-Friend.

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In the future, I see internet marketing growing in step with internet usage. It makes sense as advertisers always follow advertisees. With more and more people having more and more access to the internet, more and more companies will invest more and more money into more and more internet advertising.