Banner ads: Is it effective?

Talking with my friend working for the ad agency, I was surprised by the price of placing a banner ad on the YouTube's front page. According to my friend, it costs $60,000 a day on weekends and $40,000 a day on weekdays to place a banner ad on the YouTube's front page (only on Japan's YouTube front page). It is much more expensive in the States. The article mentioned that it costs $200,000 to place a banner ad in front page of the States YouTube. As well as the paid search, the Google appears to raising a lot of money from the banner ads. I was wondering whether this banner has the value the Google is charging. Considering the number of traffics the YouTube have everyday, the price might be reasonable, but it is still hard to tell whether the firms are gaining enough profits out from it.  

Browsing through the web I found this article that compares the ROI of paid search and banner ads. The article states that paid search has much higher ROI, where banner ads amounted to four times the cost of paid search. Just looking at this article, paid search seems much more cost effective, however, I think it really depends on the type of business. The paid search is affordable to various type of businesses from small to large, but the banner ads seems to target the larger businesses especially to the business related to broadcasting or apparel. To prove the point, ABC has their banner ad on today’s YouTube’s front page. The Google is really doing a good job of offering different types of ads to satisfy multiple needs.   

In the future, I wonder which ads will be the trend of the internet marketing or new form of internet ads might emerge by that time.

Klout.com introduce a new way of marketing

Because of the drastic improvement of technology in the past few years, various type of IT start-ups with creative business models have emerged. The Klout.com is one of those unique start-ups that attracts businesses with their unique marketing model. Klout measures the online influences of the person by using data points from services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google plus then they connect the people with high influences to the businesses to spread positive image for them.

I thought the approach taken by Klout really matches the raising trends where everyone in the world is using some sort of social media. The measures of the online influences appears to not reflect the real world influences (Justin beaver had higher score than Barack Obama). But according to the article, they are working on the algorithm of the influence measurement, promising to calculate more precise measurement. Considering the fact that there are many chances of new social media service to emerge in the near future, there are still a lot of potential of growth. 

I'm looking forward how this service will effect the trend of internet marketing. This service might be a game changer, giving more depth in marketing strategies where the service might be more cost effective than marketing approach like paid search where you need to pay decent dollars to the firms. 

"Social Reach" The Facebook's new advertising approach

Providing us no concrete evidence of their ads impact, effectiveness of Facebook's advertisements are questioned these days. Recently, the GM has dropped Facebook ads claiming the ads has low consumer impact. With such criticism, to improve the actual ads effectiveness, Facebook has implemented new method that displays user's likes on the other user's news feeds. More in specific, once you like a certain company's Facebook page, company can now advertise by displaying promotions and ads on your friends news feeds.  They calls this system the "social reach". This approach is actually effective, increasing number of likes, where most of the likes are clicked from smartphones (I couldn't find the source... It was mentioned in some TV program).

Myself being a Facebook user, I really didn't recognize this ads system until I read this article. I understand social marketing is still a new stuff and Facebook is experimenting the approach. However I think Facebook has an obligation to explain the users what they are doing. Facebook should of explain this system in detail to the users, telling them what message you are sending to your friends without yourself knowing it. The user have potential of sending unintentional message to others, resulting you to set wrong image of yourself unconsciously.

Internet Marketing for Luxury Brands

Learning both technical and business side of the Internet marketing, I was surprised by the fact the course covers a lot on technical side. Other than that, I was interested to learn how the marketing strategies evolved in the course of history. 



Browsing through the web, I found this interesting article about the Internet marketing for luxury brands. The article discussed the conflict faced by luxury brands using the Internet marketing. Unlike the normal brands, the luxury brands needs to keep exclusive image. They have successfully kept that exclusive brand image in the traditional marketing, but they seem to have not found sure strategies for the online marketing. In the class lecture, online marketing was described as strategies with low entry of barriers. However, for the luxury brands they seem to hesitate to engage online. For instance, in the article it was mentioned that the luxury brands are spending only 31% of their overall ad budgets online. As an Idea of social media marketing strategy, I thought arranging tie-up with celebrities with the Facebook account might be effective. In this way, the luxury brands can keep their exclusive image and at the same time they can attract new customers.

I'm interested in how the luxury brand will use online social media as marketing strategies in the future.


For more information check the following link.

What’s Next for Luxury Brands Online?

http://blogs.position2.com/online-marketing-for-luxury-brands-simplifying-a-complicated-relationship-part-1