I was surprised to see an ad for Woolworths during the Network Seven Olympic coverage. You would have thought Coles’ position as major sponsor [see comments] would have given them some category exclusivity.

Research has consistently shown that sponsorship is almost always a poor way of spending advertising dollars. More evidence recently from the Adelaide School of Commerce.

The consumer is so deluged with advertising the association between the event and the advertiser is quickly forgotten. Who sponsored the Melbourne Cup? Who sponsored The Australian Open this year? Who sponsored the last AFL Grand Final? Answers below…

Of course, sometimes TV stations sell sponsorship packages that discount the cost of advertising. Even then it’s hard to justify; you’re buying frequency at the expense of reach. In other words, the same people are seeing your ad over and over. The better strategy is to spread your advertising as widely as possible.

For premium events like those mentioned and certainly for the Olympics, you pay a premium. The justification is that you are hitting such a large audience. In effect this is saying, good reach, less frequency. Offset I believe by the premium and the fact that you have to buy a large number of spots.

Why do apparently rational companies buy into this?

Well maybe not, here’s a contrary view from Mediacom’s Anne Parsons.

One of the interesting things with sponsorships is that the advertising adopts the theme of the event. At present, almost all advertisements feature China and Australian sport. This would be clever if you were the only advertiser doing it. Unfortunately, just about every sponsor has gone down this path, which minimises the amount of cut-through the advertiser gets. Just remind me; this ad I’ve seen 180 times with the beautiful Chinese girls and lots of red in it, who’s that for again?

Partly it happens because the ad agency has to justify the extraordinary expense of the Olympic sponsorship. In light of the massive spend and the fact that the agency was party to the decision it would be a brave Creative Director to advocate another theme. And yet, an ad which avoided the Olympic theme would have stood out. Gorilla in a jockstrap.

For what it’s worth, I like the Coles campaign. The ad acknowledges parents who support their little sporting prodigies. It features normal looking people. Scary concept.

Answers: Emirates, Kia, Toyota. Hope you got ‘em right. About $30m worth of sponsorship there.

The ABC are advertising their Local Radio stations on the teev. Fair enough. The ad features snatches of audio from a range of different programs and a fairly static visual background. It’s dreadfully unappealing.

When you watch television, and this will come as a shock to most of you, your brain is expecting visual stimulation. Colour and movement. And for the most part, it expects the visual to match the audio. If the lip sync is wrong, the brain doesn’t like it.

With television your visual centres demand movement. So certain kinds of static or slow moving programming don’t work that well. Parkinson for example. Television requires rapid cuts. Even the News now hardly shows ‘head of newsreader’. It cuts away to story and graphic over and over. Constantly capturing our attention with the next flicker of change. It’s packetised: eye grabs. We don’t really have programs any more, just non-stop cut-through.

When you listen to radio, your visual attention is not called for so you can move freely in space. Because you’re less constrained your imagination paints a picture that fills in the gaps. As a result, a well told story can be more powerful on radio than on television. When you watch television, the brain is largely occupied interpreting visual stimulus. When you listen to radio, the brain is more free to imagine.

So, given that radio is a different experience, how do you convey that? The current TV ad presents radio as an inferior version of TV. All the audio but nothing to look at. Playing radio sound grabs on television is like promoting a newspaper on television by showing photographs of news articles.

Three ideas:

1. Film people talking. Just because the audience can’t see the DJ while listening doesn’t mean you can’t show them the DJ talking to someone in a studio. It’s TV advertising. Give them a TV experience.

2. Black the screen while you run the audio. This will make people listen differently. Use a full 60 seconds telling a story. Or longer.

3. Interview people about what they’ve heard on radio. Talk about content. Radio programming is far more diverse than TV; that’s one of its strengths. ‘Did you hear that interview with the Jewish journalist who went around interviewing terrorist leaders?’ ‘Did you hear about the Canadian Government giving Australia the oldest document ever printed in Australia?’ ‘Did you hear about the garden of blue sticks?’ ‘Did you hear that program about the blogger who can’t stop criticising the ABC?’ No wait, that last one was the Internets.

“Each morning, the Maori people of New Zealand, which is part of Australia, rise at dawn, cook some eggs, put on their grass skirts and go out to the fields to make 42 below vodka.” It’s the start of a pretty cute 42 Below vodka advertisement that was banned on the web, radio and newspaper by the New Zealand Advertising Standards Authority in 2003.

It was banned because it encouraged immoderate consumption of liquor, was culturally offensive to Maoris, suggested the consumption of liquor in hazardous situations and associated the alcoholic product with ‘identifiable heroes of the young’, to wit Russell Crowe and the All Blacks. The joke about Sydney, New Zealand was not a factor. I wish I’d thought of that joke.

Anyway, the ad was banned; why is it still available? See second comment below.It came to me via an email with a link to the web site; the web site of 42 Below. The email I received referred to the ban; ie the ban is being used to enhance the appeal of the ad. Did the company or its agencies initiate this viral email campaign? If so, they should be brought to account.

If industry accepts the need for advertising standards it must not ignore rulings or seek to use adverse findings for promotional advantage.

The ABC has always been Amateur Hour on grooming. Its station promotions are the other weakness; sickly imitations of the commercial networks’ urgent demands for attention. I’m not suggesting they get better at copying commercial style promotions. Quite the reverse. The problem is an unwillingness to experiment with alternative advertising formats – testimonials, mash-ups, pointers, cross-promotion and snatches. Spare us the insult of needless repetition.

Although their programs treat the audience with great respect, (it’s so nice not to be talked down to) the advertisements they use to promote those programs remain formulaic in scheduling and format. Perhaps there remains some distaste for the notion of advertising, even if it is advertising one’s own excellent content.

ABC Radio National has had tremendous success with Podcasting. But they continue to promote only the forthcoming week’s programs. They could now promote all the content that exists on their web site as well (usually four weeks’ worth of history). Some more creativity in promotion would be welcome. The bad hair we can live with.

I saw a great use of the Telstra Phone Words product this week. Phone Words is the add-on service that lets you use a 13 or 1300 number in conjunction with a word. Makes it easy to remember a phone number. It’s particularly useful in radio advertising because the listener has a good chance of remembering the number. Er, the number-name.

The one I liked was a Day Spa business called Blush. The Phone Word was sign-written all over their limosine, used as part of their premium packages. Nice touch.

When I read 13DaySpa I imagined a Day Spa that lasted 13 days and I thought, that’s about how long I’d need. It cemented the name; here I am blogging about it.

Blush own the URL also, so clients who type in 13dayspa.com.au will be able to find them (it’s not set up yet though). This is an excellent integration of signwriting, phone and web marketing. Too often people treat their marketing channels as separate. I encourage clients to feature their phone number prominently on a web site. Web sites are a browse that needs to be turned into a sale. That’s much easier to do over the phone.

Henry Ford is credited with the insight “I know half of my advertising works really well. I just don’t know which half”. The success of Google, the leader in online advertising, is largely due to the impressive accountability that they give advertisers.

Having done the online training course provided by Google, I sat for (and passed) the Google Advertising Professionals exam. The course covered Adwords, cost per click marketing (CPC), cost per impression (CPM), pay per click advertising (PPC), contextual advertising, placement advertising and a slew of other web marketing devices (WMDs; I made that one up).

It all amounts to a fantastic amount of control for the advertiser.

You can start with a tiny budget. Try that on television.

Not only can you select individual web sites that are of interest to your market, you can target based on demographics and/or keywords. In the case of search marketing, you can confine your advertising spend to people in the Perth area who type “model cars” and exclude people who search for “models”, though why you would do that is beyond me.

The system rewards relevance. If you write ads which contain words irrelevant to the web site you send them to, your cost of advertising increases.

You can experiment with different campaign wording and compare the effectiveness of alternatives. Most of this experimentation costs you not a cent.

Having done all that, you can then monitor and adjust at a micro level every aspect of every alternative whenever you want. For example, you can increase your advertising on the weekends or in a particular time-slot. This contrasts sharply with the way NineMSN sells advertising for example. Theirs is a conventional media package: Buy this product, pay this amount, call us if you need a change.

Serious advertisers can also use the Google API to automate keyword changes and daily budgets.

Finally, you can track the conversion rate of every aspect of a web campaign. How effective was each banner ad, Adwords ad, Yahoo ad … in generating an online sale or a page view? Then compare each to your cost of advertising. It’s a system which combines with Google Analytics to give you a comprehensive method of measuring what works and what does not.

Here is one of the sixteen AdWord variations Henry and I are using to launch the Model T:

Ford: Universal Car
Model T; Open Touring & Roadsters
$300 only. 20HP 4 cylinder. Black.
www.ford.com

Call to Action: let me know if you’d like a hand using online advertising. In Australia: 040 990 8133. In the US, 714 656 4001.

Is that people insist on interacting with it. If you look at the Facebook applications generated by big business you see that Facebook spam is a major hurdle for corporates. Once again the battle between the old respectables and ambush media.

Businesses continue to treat interactive media the same way that they treat magazine advertising. In interactive media you can’t place the ad and walk away. You need to allocate human resources to managing the medium. That’s code for a spam editor.

Second problem: if you’re a big company and you put up a Facebook ap, expect as much criticism as praise. This is a serious issue with interactive media for business. Doesn’t happen when you advertise on TV but Jesus, people love an opportunity to have a whinge.

Quote from the Dell Spot Facebook site: ‘Ive hated dell from the start, there products are cheap peices of crap, and they charge u wayyyy to much, like damn.’

So having appointed an editor to manage your Facebook ap, now decide if their job description includes editing out the comments you don’t like, remembering that those who are edited out will most likely blog about it.

If you’re in the computer industry or politics, I’d say keep your toe out of the web 2.0 water.

On the other hand, if you’re selling lingerie, jump in. Victoria’s Secret has 350,000 Facebook members. Their content is professionally written, social and full of fun.

Dell’s is unmoderated. One topic is headed ‘Dell wants you to think your eating a cheap dick’. Why do so many people write ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’?

Media Tonic is a new client, a media representation business based in Perth. My brother Mark works there. I’ve done them an e-newsletter and a blog aimed at entertaining their clients and agency contacts. ENTERTAINING? Yes, I’m working hard to keep it 40% focussed on the relevant business message. The agencies already know what Media Tonic do and for the most part, know what companies they represent.

The objective here is to position the company as contemporary and approachable. The directors are both popular guys and this is one of the business’s strengths. After personal contact, nothing does the contemporary/approachable thing as well as a regularly updated blog.

The business has just been re-branded which has led to renewed contact with many key people and widened exposure in the industry. The blog will keep them and the companies they represent fresh in the minds of agencies. It’s a networking tool – an extra touch-point for clients that will generate conversation the next time they’re in a meeting or on the phone.

Email is the fire that fans the internet. Hidden amongst untold millions of boring, static web pages are tiny pockets of original content. Yes, there are RSS feeds and sites which aggregate content but how do you find most of the good stuff? It’s probably through people you trust sending you emails which link to web content.

I’m contrasting the static nature of the web page with the viral nature of emails. A good internet meme will hitch a ride on emails and travel the world in a day. It can bounce around for weeks or months, reaching huge disparate audiences, crashing web servers with unexpected surges in traffic. Meanwhile, your web page will sit there, twiddling its thumbs, waiting for people to visit.

This is true of Second Life also. Under the guidance of developers who profit from such things, corporates are making the mistake of valuing the static over the viral. Building edifices that nobody visits. See, even if you built a pretty edifice and people were excited to visit it (I hate to have to tell you this…) you can’t fit more than 40 or so at a time given the server load limitations. Aren’t you better off concentrating on sending your message through Second Life using viral means? That way you stand a chance of reaching a decent sized audience.

You can do this by harnessing the beast that is Second Life permissions. An object (invitation, animation, item of clothing) can be made copyable and transferable, giving people the ability to pass around unlimited copies to their Second Life friends and acquaintances. This is a great sampling facility if only you can design an attractive enough object. No, Sun Microsystems, a T-shirt or coffee cup bearing your logo is not that object.

Viral objects are an underused promotional strategy in Second Life.

There are a number of ways you could go about executing such a strategy, but one of the most powerful ways is to use a Holodeck, a product developed by my business partner Loki Clifton at Inside This World. The Holodeck allows companies to build indoor or outdoor 3D scenes and give them away as transferable objects. These branded scenes can then bounce around Second Life from one person to another.

Apart from its viral nature, the virtue of this approach is that you can build a scene that gives people a context for your product…

“Not a bottle of wine, a five-star restaurant. Not a raincoat, a walk in the rain. Not a range of glassware, a shooting gallery.”

When they have that 3D scene they can walk around in it, invite friends in to it, socialise using it and generally take advantage of the interactive nature of the medium. This will be a powerfully memorable experience for those who participate and we invite corporates interested in virtual world branding to consider it.

Visit the link for pictures and full details about the Holodeck, which we see as the first 3D viral advertising medium.

Clients are starting to ask their ad agencies and digital ad agencies about Second Life. Last week I did a series of presentations to Australian agencies about the virtual world, trying to explain it to people who in some cases have not yet experienced it. In those cases it was like trying to explain television to Sitting Bull. ‘No, listen to me again. The people are not INSIDE the SCREEN’.

The presentation covered what people actually do in Second Life and how their involvement changes over time. But it also addressed the fundamental: What is Second Life? Here is a summary of that section.

Firstly, it is a new medium. You can argue about how fast it will grow and how big it will get but be very clear that people relate to this medium in a different way to any other. Given that it is a commercial platform, is growing quickly and is more immersive than television or the internet, it should be of interest.

Secondly, the thing that distinguishes Second Life from other media is that it provides a shared sense of space. This gives rise to remote intimacy, the glue for virtual sex, social networking and rapid business relationships. A digression: one of the happy accidents of Second Life development was that server constraints limited most events and clubs to 40 or 50 avatars. Research by Christopher Allen into group sizes of online groups shows that 40 to 60 people is the most common group size. I believe this accidental limitation has helped preserve intimacy and has been important in the formation of early Second Life culture.

We’re up to thirdly. Thirdly, Second Life is an international micro-economy. Real world limitations brought about by transaction costs do not apply in virtual worlds and products can be sold profitably for fractions of a dollar. More so than on the Internet where financial institutions take their cut and where delivery charges apply to physical goods.

Fourthly, we have here a whole new structure under which business models can be tested. Reseller network structures can be tested. Different ways of product sampling, different ways of involving your customers, different models of product support…

Fifthly, Second Life is part of a broader trend towards user-generated content. But whereas MySpace and YouTube have pre-defined structures for the content, Second Life is much more open-ended.

Sixthly; the compelling social experience. People also form very strong social links in computer game environments, but games are goal-driven and limited by the parameters set by game designers. In Second Life, the social experience derives from shared real-world experiences (eg groups of real-world librarians) or shared in-world experiences (role-play, concerts, clubs, controversies). The lack of an objective gives people time to pursue whatever interests they have – people have been known to flirt here. Self-expression, anonymity and beauty are key factors in the equation. Are you reading between the lines yet?

Seventhly. Interactive information. The ability to walk around a piece of mining equipment, press the button, watch the chamber fill with liquid and see the consequences of not correctly matching the PURGE and the FILL rate. Educational institutions and non-profits are pushing the envelope here. There are implications for business in how to communicate more powerfully.

Eighthly and I just love the way that word is spelt: Second Life in its early stages is a replica of the real world. People unthinkingly duplicate the way that things work in the real world, not understanding that the physical limitations which caused us to act that way do not exist in a virtual environment. There is no need for Sony to sell music packaged like real world CDs. They could sell you underwear that plays music. Through the imaginative use of this creative medium, real life companies can add value to their brands. Give me a call if you’d like to discuss. 714 656 4001.