Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
I chanced upon the banner ad rates offered by one Singaporean company awhile back, and saw that a prominently placed banner ad goes for S$4,000 a week, with the promise of “reaching” millions of “eyeballs”.
In Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow”, there’s a chapter called “law of large numbers” where he bought 300 million banner ads for US$600. That’s more than one banner impression for one person in the United States. The result? He made a loss. Selling $500 of merchandise in total. He doesn’t specify what merchandise, but does it matter?
To break even on S$4,000 a week, you need to sell:
- 8 16gig iPhone 3Gs (about one a day)
- 10 Amazon Kindles (about 1.5 a day)
- 50 Xbox games (about seven a day)
- 400 movie tickets (just over 50 a day)
and that’s on revenue, not profit.
The flipside of this is of course, there’s no guarantee that some people of the 300 million saw the ad, and bought the merchandise some time later, thus making it untrackable. But isn’t it the same as any TV, radio or print ad you buy anyway?
Do you think you’re going to do better than Seth Godin’s case study? I’m going to leave the parallel of “reach” and “eyeballs” to traditional media to you.
If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably heard of the old adage “I know half of my marketing doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half”. The good news is if you’re employing banner ads in your marketing “arsenal”, they automatically fall into the half that isn’t working.
But that’s just one case study, if you’re buying banner ads, I’d like to ask you: How have they worked for you?
Tags: amazon kindles, banner ad, eyeballs, iphone 3G, law of large numbers, millions, movie tickets, online marketing, print, profit, purple cow, radio, reach, revenue, seth godin, tv, xbox
Posted in Marketing, Poor Practices | 3 Comments »
Sunday, March 8th, 2009
My mum showed me this article from the Straits Times a few days ago, with the headline: “Blogs’ reach limited: Study“, stating that mainstream media is still the key source of news and views, at least socio-politically. (Straits Times: It literally took me just about four minutes to find the link to that page. Why doesn’t Google pick up your stuff and why is your archival system so bad?)
So what I want to comment on, is this paragraph:
Mr Tan compared the several thousand readers who tune in to socio-political websites The Online Citizen (TOC) and The Wayang Party Club to The Straits Times’ circulation of nearly 400,000 and its readership of 1.3 million.
Without going on all day, here are my quick thoughts:
- I suppose newspapers being awesome have nothing to do with the numerous newspapers shutting down worldwide. (Here are some Google search results)
- Of the 400,000 circulation, how many people actively care about the “socio-political” commentary?
- Straits Times has a “readership” of 1.3 million, which means the 400,000 circulation is roughly passed along three times. Or in the case of my family, seven of us (including the dog) have access to the Straits Times, but maybe one person reads it regularly. (The dog used to eat it regularly. Talk about consuming the news.)
- I suppose the “readership” applies to army camps where they have one copy of it but it’s shared by 30 people, most of whom don’t manage to get their hands on it
- The websites with “several thousand readers” (why no figures?) are actively being sought out, compared to newspapers.
- The people seeking out that content are particularly motivated and highly engaged in the source material
- If I were in an organisation (non-profit, cause, school, company, government), I’d easily trade 5,000 newspaper “readers” for 1 person actively searching for my content
- Reach means nothing.
What are your thoughts? Are articles like this just plain in denial? Or is there really something here?
Tags: actively seeking out content, Blogs, Google, mainstream media, newspaper circulation, newspaper readership, newspapers, newspapers shutting down, reach, Singapore, socio-politically, source of news, straits times, straits times archival system, straits times archives, the online citizen, the wayang party club
Posted in Media, Singapore, mainstream media | 9 Comments »
