Richard Kraneis Blog

2009 Nissan Murano Advertising – April 17, 2008 - Great Car, Not so Great Advertising

Actually, my wife loves the look of the Murano. That’s why I clicked on this beautiful graphical ad that was displayed prominently at www.weather.com .

Unfortunately, the ad didn’t work. Mozilla’s Firefox blocked the pop-up. Yes, I could allow the popup in Firefox, but that’s not my job. Nissan’s job is to get the ad to me quickly and easily.

Then I tried going to www.weather.com to see the same ad using Internet Explorer. This time, the pop-up worked. But it was like watching paint dry…

It took about 15 seconds to load on my T1 connection and then displayed another beautiful ad. I wondered how long the ad would need to load in DSL/Cable, or dial-up. See below.

Also, I’m confused. Isn’t it still 2008? Does Nissan release their 2009 models this early? It’s 2008 and the advertising says 2009?

From an advertising standpoint, from a metric standpoint, how are they keeping track of clickthroughs from Internet Explorer vs. Mozilla Firefox? This is the link from my clickthrough at Internet Explorer:

http://www.nissanusa.com/murano/?dcp=25868130;&dcc=24722859;&dcn=1

But even if the dcp, dcc, and dcn coding means something (and it does), whose tracking this and will they notice the blocked Mozilla clickthroughs vs. better clickthroughs from Internet Explorer?

This brings up another point, whose the target audience for the Nissan Murano? Is it the Internet Explorer kind of person or the Mozilla Firefox kind of person? I know, the beautiful graphics ad should be tested for both ads, but who is their audience?

I bet that the majority of purchases for the Nissan Murano come from the Mozilla Firefox users than the good, old fashioned Internet Explorer users.

So, lots of thoughts on this 2009 Nissan Murano ad today. The ad was beautiful, its click through rate is questionable. I wonder what Nissan would say about this blog article?

Emergency Computer Help with www.CoPilot.com

My son Fritz called from college at about 9:30 PM, my wife answered the phone, gave it to me, and said, “Fritz has a computer problem.”

So I tried talking Fritz through a search on his computer for some PowerPoint files. I helped him do a wildcard search for any file with a .ppt extension modified that day. It didn’t work. We tried it a second time and it still didn’t work.

Fritz was pretty distraught. The usual college student’s lament. Fritz and his marketing class group had a PowerPoint presentation due the next morning and now the 21 slide presentation was missing. So I told Fritz I would call him back in 10 minutes.

I then went to my computer and went to Joel’s wonderful tool at www.CoPilot.com . CoPilot is a web based software for seeing someone else’s computer and taking control of that computer.

This type of software has existed since the early 1990’s, but I met Joel on the Internet and believed that his software was different, easier to use. Instead of requiring many steps to connect to my son’s laptop in his dormitory room, I only needed about 5 steps. That may sound like a lot but it wasn’t.

I went to www.CoPilot.com and paid for a $5 daily pass to use the service, and help my son.
I entered my son’s email address in CoPilot and an email with a CoPilot link was sent to Fritz in Michigan. He received it in seconds (impressive).
When Fritz clicked on the www.CoPilot.com link in his email, a link was established between my computer in Chicago and Fritz’s laptop in Michigan.

I could see and control Fritz’s computer. No fuss, no muss.

“Hey, Fritz’s dad is controlling his computer,” someone shouted on the other end of the phone. It’s always nice having a cheering section.

Fritz was right, using Windows Explorer search technique wasn’t working. Fritz had received a team member’s email, changed the PowerPoint presentation, and saved it. What Fritz didn’t realize was that when you open attachments in most email programs, edit them, and save them, the file is saved in a Temp folder that is buried in file structure on your computer and very hard to find.

After some minutes of rummaging around Fritz’s email attachments, I found about 3 possible PowerPoint files that were worth investigating. Once again, I was looking for a slideshow with 21 slides. I couldn’t open the files but I was able to “copy” the files, one at a time, to a new folder. I copied them and then opened them (sorry, wish I had snapshots for you).

Finally we opened a PowerPoint file that had 21 slides.

Fritz’s friend at the other end of the line started celebrating (2 hours of creative work had been found). Fritz was glad to.

“Thanks Dad.”

“You’re welcome Fritz. Mom and I love you.”

“Me too. G’night.”

Fritz’s roommates were still cheering celebrating as I hung up the phone.

"Advertising to people who are dead may also be Acceptable"

Don’t believe me? It’s true.

Just go to the New York Times to read this article.

I do love this industry, this new profession of mine. But some of the news is just incredible.

Google Advertising and Barack Obama

I wonder if Senator Obama knows that a vendor is using his name in their advertising?

This is a brief article on a few things:

• Defending your brand name.
• 1960’s Burger King marketing technique.
• Celebrity advertising in PPC.
• Landing pages that don’t match PPC ads.

Defending your Brand Name - In Google, I did a search for Aweber, the well known email opt-in service. Every company needs to search their brand name on the major search engines to see what’s happening. I call this “defending the brand”.

1960’s Burger King marketing technique - Off to the right of the screen, you can see a PPC ad by iContact. They’re not Aweber, they’re a competitor. But Google allows this type of advertising. There must be a fancy marketing term for it like “shadowing” or something like that. As a kid growing up I heard that Burger King’s marketing strategy was to find a McDonald’s and build a Burger King next to it. If McDonald’s liked the area, so did Burger King. Well, iContact used that technique to benefit from Aweber’s well marketed brand name. Google allows that all the time in their PPC.

Want A Better Service?
Barack Obama & 100,000 Others Chose
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www.iContact.com

Celebrity Advertising in PPC - Again, in the same PPC ad, you can see the use of Barack Obama’s name to attract attention. Let’s call that celebrity advertising. Perhaps he allowed this use of his name, I rather doubt it myself.

Landing Pages that Don’t Match PPC Ads – When you click on the iContact ad you won’t find anything regarding Barack Obama. Strange. I thought Senator Obama “chose” their service.

So, I’ve often wondered about Google allowing such ads. They do. I have one client that I know will absolutely not use the shadow marketing or 1960’s Burger King technique in PPC marketing. But Google allows it, and many use it.

But does the owner of iContact know his PPC guy or gal is playing off Senator Obama’s name? Probably not. I wonder how much the celebrity advertising technique improved iContact’s CTR (Click Through Rate)?

For me, I suppose I would use the industry practice of shadow marketing in PPC ads. As for the celebrity status technique, I doubt I would use it unless I had the permission of the celebrity.

Google lays off 25% of U.S. DoubleClick Employees

What was a rumor earlier today (April 2, 2008) has become a reality.

Computerworld was the first to cite the Google layoffs at DoubleClick.

DoubleClick has 1200 staff so the layoffs affect 300.

A month ago I applied to DoubleClick for a position. I appreciated the referral from my contact at DoubleClick and the phone interview. I didn’t quite fit the job and the recruiter told me in February, “We’ll be making new plans beginning in the 2nd quarter.”

Now I know what those plans were meant to be.

No industry, no company, is beyond layoffs.

But there’s still plenty of opportunity in the SEM/online marketing industry. I find websites every day that need improvement. All of us in this industry need to find clients who value great online marketing for their companies. And for the clients we have, we need to re-dedicate ourselves to helping them measurably improve their ROI and profits.

As always, I’m looking for my next client.