Sam Martin

My New Strategy: Pair Up Prime Time TV Ads with Targeted Local Internet Ads

Friday, August 27, 2010 by Sam Martin

Simultaneously advertising on prime time TV and on internet sites may be a solid new strategy to touch consumers according to my analysis of The Nielsen Company's recently released 2010 Q1 Three Screen Report entitled, "What Consumers Watch: Technology Enhances the Video Experience."

The report provides information and data about households and their video viewing behaviors when using HDTV, timeshifting (DVR or OnDemand) devices, broadband internet, and smartphones. The findings are interesting for local advertising buyers for franchise marketing efforts, and they suggest a new strategy may be in order.

The report finds that DVR usage and penetration into homes has increased 14% to more than nine and a half hours per month. Interestingly, while DVR usage increases, the rate of commercial viewing during playback remains steady—good news for advertisers. According to the report, on average, "45% of commercials are viewed during [DVR] playback in Q1 2010 compared with 43% in Q1 2009."

Also interesting is that 58.7% of people are using TV and the internet simultaneously. This number astounds me and got the wheels turning. Perhaps, integrating a local internet marketing campaign along with a prime time TV schedule could be an effective way to target my audience and reach them where they are currently absorbing a majority of their advertisements. It may seem obvious, but paying attention to the data and placing advertising in multiple mediums where consumers are most receptive, in an integrated fashion, is a critical component to advertising success and is one of the Balihoo media team's strengths.

Whether you work in advertising or are on the other end as a consumer, I encourage you to check out the report.

The Basics Of Pay-Per-Click

Friday, August 6, 2010 by Sam Martin

One of my responsibilities at Balihoo is managing pay-per-click campaigns for several local franchisees. A couple years ago I knew absolutely nothing about pay-per-click advertising, but since then I have tried to learn as much as I possibly can, not only my personal satisfaction but to better serve our clients local store marketing efforts.

The one thing I have found about pay-per-click is that on the surface is it pretty straight forward but the minute you dive in a little deeper it gets fairly complicated. There are a lot of dials to turn and buttons to push in order to make a campaign perform at its best. The complexity of PPC creates a challenge when trying to describe how it all works to clients that have never been engaged with local internet marketing. To hopefully help in this area, I recently built a slide deck that gives a brief overview of what PPC is and how it can benefit local store marketing.

Google Adwords Overview

View more presentations from Balihoo.

The purpose of this deck was to provide a resource for our clients to reference and gain a better understanding of PPC at a high level. I also wanted to address a few of the questions that I get on a regular basis from clients who are just starting with PPC - Why isn't my ad showing or Why is my competitors ad above mine?

So, if you want to learn some basics of pay-per-click advertising, check out the presentation and don't forget to download our whitepaper to find out more about Balihoo.

A Year Ago...

Friday, June 11, 2010 by Sam Martin

A year ago this weekend stands out to me for two primary reasons. One, it was my birthday and I had to come into the office and work and two, perhaps even more important than the latter, the reason I had to work...we were releasing a redesign of our local marketing software. A release of this magnitude required a lot of testing to ensure that before we rolled it out to our customers it was smooth as butter.

I guess the reason I bring this up is because it brings on a feeling of nostalgia. To think of Balihoo a year ago today and compare it to what Balihoo is today we have, to simply put it, come a long way. We have brought on several new clients and helped many more local franchise owners implement successful marketing campaigns.

To revolutionize local marketing is what Balihoo is setting out to do and we are definitely making great strides down that road. To learn more about Balihoo and what services we can bring to you, download our whitepaper.

Here's to another year!

Ready, Set, Advertise

Friday, April 30, 2010 by Sam Martin

One of the brands here at Balihoo I get the pleasure of working with is ProTect Painters, a franchise group that specializes in interior and exterior painting. The brand has been around for some time, however back in January we were given the opportunity to kick off the local advertising efforts for 25 net new owners in various markets across the country.

As we drew closer to Spring, the primary season when a majority of paint jobs are booked, we knew we needed to get the ProTect name in the markets and get their phones to ring so we could start generating some revenue. We deployed a pretty aggressive saturation Direct Mail campaign that targeted highly qualified zip codes with various offers to see which one performed the best. Thus far, we have been pretty impressed with the results considering we have only been in market for a few months. That said, we were not going to be complacent with just Direct Mail as our only tactic we needed to execute more local marketing ideas.

So we hit the ground running. Our Balihoo creative team developed a great DRTV spot in a matter of weeks that we are are really excited about and will begin airing in the Raleigh market next week. Further, one area where we knew we needed to be was online. So, we developed landing pages for each individual owner where we will direct consumers from their PPC campaigns and other local internet marketing efforts. We also have some radio spots in the works and various other types of print creative that can be used at the local level.

Bottom line we are gaining advertising momentum with these 25 new affiliates. It's exciting to work with net new owners and really watch their business grow from the bottom up!

Advertisements and Me

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 by Sam Martin

For the last few days I have been trying to heighten my awareness to when and where I am being targeted by advertisers; I also wanted to try and hone in on when I am most susceptible to an advertisement.

Things first started out with my drive into work, pretty much everywhere I looked I was bombarded with local advertising, but was not in the mood or awake enough to comprehend or want to act on any of it. “Get an Oil Change for Less, 2 For 1 Hershey Bars, Stop In for a Random Flavored Coffee Drink,” – all of these line the side of the street I drive down and my lights illuminate them just enough to distract me for a second. Then it’s into work and there is a small coffee shop that does some local store marketing on learning how to take professional pictures and use photoshop to make them even better. I would love to do that, but I think my point-and-shoot digital camera is not the recommended photo equipment for the class.

It’s now time to sit at my desk and fire up the ‘ole Dell. My homepage is set to CNN.com, which I glance at and realize all the news stories are mini-movies and have 15 seconds of advertisements before them, so I get annoyed and move on to what I need to get done for the day. At this point in the day already I have been hit pretty hard with several different types of advertising and to be honest they have all been more of a nuisance than anything.

A majority of my day is on the computer, I see hundreds of local internet marketing campaigns all of which I glaze over and don’t react to, which I attribute to being at work and not really being in the right frame of mind. Lately I have been trying to bring my lunch to work, so I have successfully avoided a lot of the lunch time specials ($5 Dollar Foot Long!).

The work day comes to a close, and I get in my car to drive the opposite way down the same road I drove that morning. Then it happens, about a quarter mile in to my 4 mile commute a digital billboard grabs my eye. It says listen to such and such radio station, right now playing The Band’s, “I Shall Be Released.” I love that song! But not only do I love that song I was curious to see if that billboard was in sync with the what was actually playing on that station. So, I frantically turn the dial until I find the exact station and sure enough, “I Shall Be Released” filled my car and I thought, that’s pretty cool. We’ll fast forward a bit to later that evening when I am feeling lazy, have the TV on and the laptop open doing some work. When again, out of the blue a commercial for Beezid.com comes up on the TV. I sat and watched this and became more confused but again curious to what this site actually was. So, I reacted by hopping online to see what it was all about.

The moral of the story is, for me when advertisers can create a level of curiosity, you’ve got me; and if you catch me when I’m feeling lethargic even better! I don’t think this idea of capturing consumers with a curious message is new to the world of advertising but it was kind of cool moment to realize this about myself. I do a lot of local media buying for our clients and even though I don't have complete control over the creative message, I am interested to see how I can fit the lesson I've learned into my future media buying practices.

Non-Traditional Media

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Sam Martin

I had the wonderful opportunity today of presenting a media plan for a local cleaning service franchisee. The client was in a pretty unique market and really needed some creative local marketing ideas, which I was more than happy to provide. The great thing about planning locally is that the sky is the limit in terms of what

mediums we can use. I did some research and found this really cool idea that I thought meshed really well with a cleaning service, power washing your logo on city side walks! For one, it is an environmentally friendly form of advertising and two, its just a great idea.

I can't reiterate enough how great it is to bring in a new client and offer some non traditional media tactics, its what makes local media buying really fun. They are truly a great supplement to more traditional tactics like television and local internet marketing.

2009 - The Year For Online Advertising

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 by Sam Martin

Local internet marketing was a pretty big deal, being the "only advertising category not to see major declines in 2009" and as I reflect on my first full year of local media buying i couldn't agree more. I saw our clients start filtering dollars from traditional media to search and display along with my recommendations undoubtedly incorporated a consistent search campaign through the year. Online advertising "did sustain its first year-to year advertising revenue loss in seven years, it began to bounce back in the second half, becoming one of just two media categories (the other being cable) to see growth during the third quarter. That resurgence will continue in 2010, when spending will rise 5.5 percent, to $23.6 billion." This quote was taken from a really interesting article in Media Life Magazine that I encourage you to check out, as it gives a really strong recap of both internet and social website marketing successes in 2009.

As we look forward to 2010 internet marketing will continue to morph and maximize itself in the form of online video advertising. Giants like Apple, have already started getting into it and "if Steve Jobs does to TV a fraction of what he did to music with iTunes, life will be changed." Online video advertising is a pretty exciting concept and it will be interesting as a media buyer to start looking at its opportunities. Should be an exciting and challenging year, but I'm ready for it!

Forget to Send a Postcard?

Thursday, December 31, 2009 by Sam Martin

“Hey, send me a postcard when you get there!” Famous last words of family and friends as I leave for a vacation and I always smile and say “Will Do!” Problem is - I never do. I am notorious for walking into gift shops and perusing the spinning racks of postcards thinking 'HA' that one’s kind of funny or is that picture really from here because I have not seen anything that looks like that.

It has honestly been a while since I have handwritten and sent anything in the mail unless there is a check stuffed in it dated for the same day it's due. But this week I found a solution to all of this after reading an article on Adage.com. A company called Hippopost, located in Canada, has created a marketing software tool where you can upload a picture from either your computer or phone, write a message and they will print and send it to the recipient. And the best part is it's all for FREE!

So what's the catch, well there is no real catch for me as the user. The recipient of the card though is going to not only get an awesome picture of my vacation but they are also going to get hit with an advertisement from a brand sponsor of my choosing. Currently the sponsors involved are national brands, however their efforts will aid local advertising campaigns. By spreading brand awareness "Hippopost is hoping advertisers will find the sponsorship opportunities compelling, the pitch being that people won't readily throw away postcards that capture priceless moments from friends or family." Makes sense.

I feel like this adverting concept has a lot of growth potential. Being part of a company that works with local store marketing for franchises, I foresee this idea being a great addition to co-op advertising efforts.