From Magazine to Online
December 5, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Earlier this year, I visited Gary Vaynerchuk host of Wine Library TV in New Jersey and we recorded a video about Australian Wines – see our video here. Since then I regularly watch his videos and today at www.garyvaynerchuk.com (his other video site) I stumbled upon a video where Gary is discussing the recent demise of Gourmet Magazine.
Gary asks the question why companies are advertising on magazines when the audience has not transitioned to online. He asks where they are going to advertise now ? This video by Gary is extremely relevant to our audience which why I felt it was important to share with you.
Here at Gourmet Ads we can not only provide reach into food blogs and online food communities but most importantly on recipe websites where the household grocery buyer spends time online.
If you previously had budget for magazine spending but don’t know where to put it, contact us and we’ll develop a media plan which will give you a far better return on investment than print.
Targeted Advertising
November 21, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
There is no doubt that Targeted Advertising when done correctly is the most effective way reach your target audience. Here at the Gourmet Ads network, we provide companies the ability reach the Grocery Buyer online when they are making meal decisions for their family. Just by advertising on our vertical network the advertiser is already targeted their audience. However, most advertisers choose to apply additional targeting to their campaigns.
So to illustrate some of the industry standard targeting options available on the Gourmet Ads network we thought we’d put together a quick presentation.
Advertising Agency Presentation
February 11, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
During my recent trip to New York a number of agencies that I met with asked for the Powerpoint that I presented, so they could email it around internally. Because there isn’t any proprietary information included within the slides, I’ve today uploaded it to SlideShare for other advertising agencies to see the presentation.
Here is the PowerPoint for all to share. Feel free to share with your associates and colleagues.
Over The Page Advertising
February 3, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · 2 Comments
During the few weeks of 2009, we have been finding advertising agencies and advertisers asking for ideas and strategy on additional advertising activity which gets their products noticed. One such form of advertising that our team has been recommending is Over the Page Advertising (OTP) or sponsorship as it’s referred to in some parts of the world. That can also be called “Take overs” and are mostly often used to run TV commercials online.
Over the Page Advertising works by loading an overlay above the website when a viewers hits the entry page of the site. Typically the over the page advertising usually plays for between 10-15 seconds, then disappears, reverting to the usual website. As to not annoy viewers, Over the Page Advertising is usually capped to one play per day or even on play per week so viewers aren’t distracted from the content they are visiting the website for. A good strategy can be to run sequential advertising on the site after the over the page advertising has loaded. This way, when a user is finished on the site they have the ability to easily click on the similarly branded advertising they originally viewed.
The key with Over the Page Advertising and any sort of online advertising is the creative. The advertising needs to quickly get the message across and when necessary drive people to click on the adverts. Most Over the Page Advertising uses some form of rich media either, audio, animation, video or more to get the message across. Over the Page Advertising works because it has a high level of audience engagement as well as reach which is what most advertisers want from their campaigns.
Because of their much higher level of engagement, reach and capping restrictions, Over the Page Advertising are priced much higher than usual CPM rates associated with a media buy. Some of the enquiries we’ve received recently are one day campaigns to launch a new product at the beginning of the month and mid way through the campaign to spark up further interest.
Gourmet Ads can run your Over the Page Advertising for just one day or more, so if you’re looking for something different for marketing your products online contact us for more information.
Quantcast
January 8, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Many in the advertising industry, particularly in the US refer to Comscore for their statistic and metrics in regards to analysing website and advertising networks. Unfortunately for most, a subscription to Comscore is very expensive, but great alternative to Comscore is Quantcast which uses pixel measurements to count and rank sites.
Quantcast is a new media measurement service that lets advertisers view audience reports on millions of websites such as Hulu, National Geographic, Fox, Fast Company, Digg, CBS and Martha Stewart to name just a few.
Gourmet Ads aggregates the traffic from all food, wine and beer sites we represent into Quantcast. Although we use our adserving software from Adify to forecast pages and individual users for clients, Quantcast offers those looking to evaluate Gourmet Ads independent statistics from ours.
Apart from the graph above which represents traffic, Quantcast also provides information about the audience. Some of the demographics data provided by Quantcast include sex, geographic location, salary, children and other interesting information which helps media buyers and and media planners in the analysis of advertising networks and websites.
To view Gourmet Ads Quantcast data click here.
Your New Year’s Resolution
January 3, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
If you’re a marketer, advertiser or media buyer at an agency, then your new year’s resolution for 2009 needs to be about spending your advertising budget where you can measure the return on investment and advertise cost effectively. So what does this mean?
Well unlike all other advertising mediums, online advertising is the only medium which can provide clear metrics on the performance of your campaign. This means that you can quickly and accurately measure the return on investment, and increase or decrease the advertising budget as required to ensure performance.
For TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazine Outdoor Advertisers
If you don’t advertise online, then now is the time to start dipping your toe into some sort of online advertising. Online not only allows you to measure the return on investment, but compared to other mediums is not only cheaper, but much more cost effective to run your campaigns.
Online also allows you to target your user in ways that other mediums just can’t do. For example Gourmet Ads can target by Vertical, Geography (Geo Targeting), Time and day targeting, Bandwidth, Browser & Operating Systems, Language or even Frequency capping; allowing you to reach your target audience and completely control the conversation with your consumers.
New Year’s Resolution – Dip your toes into online advertising instead of spending it on advertising you can’t measure.
For Online Advertisers
If you are advertising online, where are you buying your advertising? Are you buying advertising in a vertical network which is related to your products or services? I.e. if you are selling gourmet foods or premium wines are you advertising on quality food sites or wine review sites? Or are you advertising on large portals which don’t really allow you target your audience?
New Year’s Resolution – begin advertising in vertical advertising networks online instead of large portals
So, no matter if you’re an existing online advertiser or new to online advertising, Gourmet Ads can help deliver your message online and on budget. Contact us for a digital media kit and we work with you to deliver your New Year’s Resolution in 2009.
No Budget! Just ROI
December 16, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Recently a prospective client said they had no budget for online advertising. I immediately thought he was trying to be misleading as this company’s advertisements appear on a number of sites on the internet. So I said to this to the company’s marketing manager that I’d seen there ads on sites on the internet and they said, we have no budget, just ROI. At the time their strategy wasn’t clear to me, but after learning and seeing it action, I now understand it backwards. Since that first conversation, I’ve heard this a number of times after talking with prospective clients and thought its worth sharing with you.
Most professionally run online stores know their conversion rates when a particular audience visits their store, ie a 5% conversion rate means that for every 100 people that visit the site, 5 actually make a purchase. Apart from conversion rates, most ecommerce managers know how many times consumers visit the online store before they purchase, how many pages they’ll look at, where they are located and how much they usually spend. Most of this intelligence can be sourced from various web analytic tools like Google Analytics or Web Trends as well as custom reports and metrics.
So after they know the kind of customer that spends, the challenge is how to find these consumers online, and then drive them to the store. Savvy advertisers will generally run a short trial campaign for say 2 – 4 weeks with a budget of say $5000 to see what kind of audience an advertiser like Gourmet Ads delivers and if they are actually buyers. Some channels drive traffic, but they don’t buy.
Once these savvy advertisers know the conversion rate, they can work out the return on investment (ROI) on the advertising costs. Once they’ve got a return on investment in mind, they’ll book ongoing advertising over multiple months, monitoring the return on investment and not the budget. As long as the sales continue these savvy advertisers purely monitor the sales and renew the advertising. The key here isn’t to get complacent; it’s essential to continually change the advertising message, branding and look and feel of the advertising as well as the deal to ensure that audiences continue to be engaged with the advertising.
Because the quality of the click in vertical advertising networks is much more qualified than horizontal networks, we can continue to drive the same levels of return on investment for advertisers over time. See a recent post titled Vertical Advertising Increases ROI.
If you’d like to learn more about the Gourmet Ads vertical advertising network, request a media kit.
Thanksgiving Advertising
November 5, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Many food companies know that a large percentage of their annual profits are made during the Holiday Season. That is why your Thanksgiving advertising campaign is one of your most important campaigns of the year, especially if you are selling foods that are typically high sellers for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, like turkey, stuffing, green beans, cranberry sauce, cream of mushroom soup and pumpkin pie amongst others.
Taking advantage of targeted advertising next to online recipes for holiday favorites is a great way to get your brand at the top of every shopper’s grocery list this year. When a consumer goes online to look up recipes on how to roast their Thanksgiving turkey, will they be thinking Butterball, Norbest or Honeysuckle White? That all depends on whose ad is cleverly placed right beside the roast turkey recipe.
More and more consumers are turning to the internet for their recipe needs; especially their holiday recipe needs and smart advertisers are taking advantage of this trend with their Thanksgiving advertising in order to create brand awareness during the critical holiday sales rush. Ideally, companies should get their products placed four weeks before the big holiday as many shoppers have already begun to stock their pantries in preparation for the big event.
While these relatively new Thanksgiving advertising opportunities are great for the popular holiday food items featured in online recipes, they aren’t the only products that can benefit from these highly targeted ad campaigns. There are many other activities that correspond with holiday celebrations such as watching the “big game” on TV, beer companies can capitalize on this and even less glamorous, but necessary events such as washing the dishes. Your dishwashing liquid, scrubbing sponges or dishwasher detergent can make a play for the millions of dishes that need to be washed after each holiday meal.
And, of course, Thanksgiving advertising is also important in gearing shoppers up for their Christmas purchases as well. Foods and other items that will sell for Christmas meals will need to be well placed by Thanksgiving, but other products, such as holiday gifts or sale events can also make a strong impression when placed next to food ads over the holiday season.
So if you’re selling a product in the lead up to Thanksgiving, it’s essential to run your Thanksgiving advertising online, contact Gourmet Ads for a customised media plan which targets consumers.
Gourmet Ads on Twitter
October 30, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Twitter has been named by some as the next huge thing on the internet and it could be. But if you haven’t heard of Twitter, that’s ok. As with most dot com start-ups these days the initial growth is fuelled by Silicon Valley geeks and Tech bloggers. However in past few months, Twitter has started to spread into other industries, with particular growth with food bloggers and advertising professionals.
So what is Twitter? Well Twitter is social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” to your friends or followers. Twitter is great for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Your friends simply choose to follow you, then they’ll get updates as you update Twitter.
One of the great features of Twitter is that you don’t have login via your web browser and add your update. You can login via your mobile phone, send an SMS to twitter and it updates. Your “Followers” can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application, such as Tweetfox which is add-on to my Firefox browser. We also automatically add our RSS feed directly into the Twitter account using Titterfeed.
It’s not just people that are joining Twitter, even companies are jumping on the bandwagon check out AdTorque, Adtech, DigitalMinistry, which are all active on Twitter in the advertising space.
So start following Gourmet Ads today on Twitter
Holiday Season Advertising
October 24, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Here in Australia the holiday season doesn’t really start till nearer to Christmas Day, but for our American Advertisers, the Holiday Season kicks off in just a few weeks with Thanksgiving on the 27th November.
Major advertisers (particularly those who use advertising agencies) have already booked their holiday season advertising (including their Christmas Advertising), but for most small businesses and online retailers they haven’t so it’s important to make sure you book your advertising as soon as possible.
As holiday season advertising space starts to book up, CPM rates tend to increase closer to holiday dates, so its best to get in early. Plus this year we’re already seeing companies which use traditional mediums like TV, Radio and Outdoor beginning to shift their advertising to online for the first time.
There is no doubt that year after year, the holiday season is the busiest time for online retailers, so if your not advertising, you’re definitely missing out on sales. Apart from booking advertising campaigns, it’s essential to have key messages in your advertising creative which help consumers towards your online store. Make sure you use phrases like “Free Shipping”, “Flat Rate Shipping” and “Overnight Shipping” which are familiar with consumers.
Finally don’t forget about key dates after Thanksgiving and Christmas Day when consumers are looking for bargains. Add to these days like Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) are also days to intensify with your online advertising.
If you haven’t booked your holiday season advertising, then Contact Us for a customised proposal.
