Everyone Wants to Know Everything

It may be that we're just used to it, using the Internet every day and having all our movements tracked by either our History folder or random advertising Cookies, but something just doesn't feel right when you're tracked in the real world.

This year's Consumer Electronics Show has announced that every participant will have an RFID, or Radio Frequency Identifier attached to their name tags. The hope, on CES' part, is to understand where every attendee has gone during their time at the trade show and provide sponsors with a more exhaustive list of who's visited their booths.

This is all fine and good, for everyone but the attendees. The best you can say about this new plan is that a whole host of unqualified leads will be generated by it, the worst is that the invasion of privacy is ominous.

A simpler way of working this out would be to use AdSymetrix. Every booth could have its own set of tracking tools, and whenever someone came in to talk about their interest in the products, they could have been given one of these tracking tools as a way to get back in touch with the sponsor. The leads would have been higher-quality and would be tracked in a more opt-in, open manner.

AdSymetrix makes creating relationships with new customers easy. Give us a try. Sign Up is free.

Sometimes Your Marketing is Better Than Your Product

The old jokes goes that the secret behind Evian Water is that when you write it backwards, it spells 'naive'. While that may not be intentional, Aquafina finds itself today dealing with a similar problem: they have been forced to admit that despite their advertising methods, the water they're selling is merely tap water.

It goes to show you that a great marketing message can't go beyond the product you're selling. The relationship you create between your customers and your business is based on the integrity you bring to the counter every day. If you're selling tap water as something special, or high-end chocolate that is little more than repackaged bulk chocolate, you're not being truthful to your customers. And in the end, your customers will look for someone else to do business with.

A great marketing message can garner a load of attention. If you aren't able to fulfill on the marketing message promise, you'll find that all that attention will be in vain.

When you're building your next campaign, remember AdSymetrix. We've created a system to help you understand what marketing messages are generating the greatest interest, to let you know how your customers are seeing you and how they'll expect to be treated.

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Even Video Games are Advertisement Friendly

Marketing Charts today fronts a story about Nielsen - the TV rating people - launching Gameplay Metrics in an attempt to understand the size of the video game (and in-game advertising viewing) audience.

The idea is to use that data to create rates for advertising within games. It's an interesting first step. Why just buy a billboard on the highway that leads to your store when you can also buy a billboard within a video game that's played by people who are possible customers?

With millions of people playing games, and with the growing popularity of connecting those games to the Internet, new placement opportunities are being created. Whether it works for your business is a separate question.

AdSymetrix can help you understand whether those new placements are worth your while. Tag Your Ad, place it in the game and let AdSymetrix monitor the responses. Now go save that princess.

Creative that Makes a Splash

When buying an outdoor advertisement (a billboard, a sign on a bus, a park bench) it's important to do anything you can to first get the attention of the person traveling by the ad, and then get them to respond to the message in the ad.

The advertising weblog 2wenty 4our has a great example of a fantastic outdoor advertisement for Air New Zealand:


Aside from the question of whether the kayaker is going to crash into the ground, the idea of New Zealand being the land of extreme sports and Air New Zealand being the only way to get there is imprinted in the viewer's head.

But even this ad can use some AdSymetrix assistance. If Air New Zealand had Tagged Their Ad with AdSymetrix Tracking Tools they'd be able to know whether this beautiful advertisement makes sense to be on the side of a building or inside an art gallery.

AdSymetrix helps businesses who advertise make smarter advertising decisions. Sign up is free.

Playing The Dozens With Television Advertising

While you're sitting in your next meeting with some advertising agency, listening to their creative team explain to you how their latest storyboard for your next television ad will finally be the one to break through, keep in mind the limited amount of tools that they have to work with. As Slate fronts today, there are only 12 Kinds of Ads that you'll see on tv.


In the late 70s a creative director at Leo Burnett spent a year analyzing television advertising. He realized that there were only a dozen different ways that advertising sells on television. His idea, in slide show form shows just how little you have to work with when trying to get the attention of your potential customer.

AdSymetrix has been designed to help. When you're thinking about your next campaign, Tag Your Ad with AdSymetrix tracking tools and know who, how and when people are responding.

When Contextual Advertising Strikes Back

Google's brought the idea of context based advertising to amazing levels. Using their filter, people who advertise via AdSense can place an ad on any page that lists almost any word within its content.

This is great if you want to make sure that your modeling agency shows up every time a model is mentioned, or your restaurant shows up every time a particular kind of cuisine is mentioned, but what happens when the content you're advertising next to isn't the kind you'd want associated with your product?

AdPulp points out this disturbing placement of a Folger's Coffee Ad alongside a headline stating, "Coffee Might Trigger First Heart Attack In Some." Suddenly the best part of waking up isn't Folger's in your cup.

It brings to the forefront the need to know as much as you can about the placement of your advertising. And of course, AdSymetrix is here to help.

Tag Your Ad with AdSymetrix and watch the responses. You'll know where and when people are reacting to your ads and what advertisements are good advertisements.

Expermenting With Advertising

You want to reach that allusive 18-25 demographic. You make cars. You think, "hey, they play immersive video games, what if we were to create an immersive video game that made owning one of our cars the goal of the game?"

If you're Toyota, you're big enough to experiment. Sometimes, the experiment doesn't quite work out. Take for example the latest campaign for Scion. Toyota's hoping to launch a new 'trendy' car model called the xD by using a surprisingly violent message.

Slate looks at the new campaign and game today, and nicely points out that while the overall strategy may be worthwhile, the execution of that strategy leaves mixed messages. The goal of the game associated with the new xD is to kill as many "Sheeples" as you can, ultimately using their blood to fuel your new car.

Toyota would hope that the viewer (or in this case, the player) is left thinking that by owning an xD they've destroyed the sheep-like conformity plaguing the car buying public. But the feeling most people get is that owning an xD makes you a bad person.

Experimentation is good. It helps you understand the boundaries of your marketing message and find new ways to connect with your target audiences. The key to any experiment is to find a way to evaluate the results. AdSymetrix has been created to make that kind of evaluation simple and easy. Just Tag Your Ad and watch as AdSymetrix tracks and monitors your responses. You'll know what ads are working and what ads are wasting your time.

The Future of Local Reporting?

If your business thrives on local customers, you need to find ways to talk to them as directly as possible. In some cases, that means finding the radio stations that they listen to, or the television stations that they watch or even the billboards that they pass on their way to and from their homes. One of the most reliable ways to connect with local consumers had been to go through local newspapers. Notice the past tense in that sentence.

As newspapers continue to lose subscribers, that once reliable outlet for connecting with your local customers becomes less reliable. Smaller audiences mean smaller ad prices and smaller returns on ad spends. Newspapers know this and are looking for ways to regain the value of their local relationships. One way is to refocus their energies towards extremely local news.

The Washington Post is doing this with a new online local news site called LoudounExtra.Com. The website hopes that by bringing together "hyperlocal" reporting with online distribution, they'll be able to build a targeted and condensed audience. That audience would then be sold to advertisers looking to build their own customer base.

It's another example of publishers trying anything to grow their business while their audiences shrink. As an advertiser, these new 'hyperlocal' sites may be worthwhile. The best way to know is to use AdSymetrix.

Simply Tag Your Ad and watch as AdSymetrix tracks and monitors the responses. You'll know whether the hyperlocal news site is an experiment worth your advertising dollar.

When Blogging Becomes Dangerous

There's a lot to be said for keeping your clients aware of what's going on in your business via blogging. Open companies breed stronger relationships with the people that they work with. The problem comes in when the people blogging say too much.

Look at the latest problems that have hit the CEO of Whole Foods. He was posting inflammatory comments on stock message boards trying to bad mouth a competitor that he eventually succeeded in purchasing. Now the SEC is looking into the matter.

It's important to remember, as you'll find any of these CEOs will tell you, that when you're blogging you're still talking for the company. You can be open and honest and irreverent, but you have to remember that you're still the voice of the company. And every voice counts.

Still, operating blogs to goose traffic to your website or connect with your customers is quickly becoming good business. Nicely, the responses that you generate from your online activities can be tracked and monitored through AdSymetrix.

Simply Tag Your Ads and entries and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. You'll know who's interested in your business and get great feedback about your blog.

How The World's Largest Advertiser Does It

Proctor and Gamble is the world's largest advertiser. It knows a few things about the way that traditional advertising has worked for the last century or so. It also knows that as the audience becomes harder to find and the message more difficult to spread that experiments in new media are going to become more and more important.

That's why, when one of their marketers talks about how P&G utilizes Tech Marketing, it's worth your while to listen.

The crux of the interview is that audiences are more diverse, separated and split up than ever before and that the new opportunities offered by non-traditional media is cheap enough to allow for experimentation.

But with all that experimentation, you need to have a way to know what works and what doesn't. That's where AdSymetrix comes in. Simply Tag Your Ad before you place it with AdSymetrix tracking tools and let AdSymetrix track and monitor your responses. You'll know where your new business is coming from and how you can attract more of it.

With the world of advertising changing, you'll need some help making smart advertising decisions. AdSymetrix is here to help.

Watching You Watching Them

NBC wants to know what you feel about their programming. Really feel. On a deep, involuntary level. That's why they've set up a panel of people to watch fast forwarded commercials while hooked up to all manners of scientific apparatus.

The hope is that by learning the body's reaction to ads, NBC can find ways to cram more advertising into your world. It's another attempt by television to make up new ways to combat the shrinking viewer audience.

They're not so concerned about the message, as they are the medium. If they can raise the value of an audience, or at least double the viewable inventory of ads, they can maintain their profit levels.

If only they had an easier way to know whether an ad was working.

AdSymetrix is that easier way. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. It's a lot easier than wrapping someone up in sensors and hoping.

With Great Audience Comes Great Responsibility.

Google's finding itself in a bit of a snit these days. There's a new movie out from documentarian Michael Moore called Sicko. It focuses Mr. Moore's cameras at the health care industry in America. As you could probably expect, the health care industry isn't particularly happy about this new movie. What you probably wouldn't expect is that Google - via their Google Health Advertising Blog - is advocating that they provide a first wave of defense against the potential public uprising by offering ideas about how health care advertisers can utilize Google to supply their own information to anyone searching for Sicko based content. A point of view quickly retracted by the writer of the blog post.

The issue that arises is one of editorial conflict of interest. Any publication can set its own editorial policies, and choose what kind of advertising they'd like to have in their pages. Google's advertising network is agnostic, it cannot push one product over another nor one political ideal over another. Doing so diminishes the value of the network.

We bring it up because it is important for advertisers to know how their ad placement decisions effect the potential responses they get from their ads. It probably is a good idea for health care companies to advertise on searches related to the new movie, but thinking up that idea shouldn't be the job of the advertising network.

When you place an ad you need to know if its working. AdSymetrix is here to help. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. You'll know what ads work and what ads are just wasting your time and money.

Marketing With A Sense Of Humor

If the web did anything, it brought about a great appreciation of irreverent humor. With sites from The Onion to YouTube using humor to not only present entertainment but also present innovative advertising.

Brand Channel this week showcases how branding and humor go hand in hand. If anything, compelling content gets more attention, and advertising with humor is a way to get people to look at your message.

The important thing to remember is that while it may be hilarious to watch someone fall on their backside, it might not be the best way to get people interested in your product. Work within the limits of your brand and you'll have a better chance of getting not only more people to view your ad, but more people to remember your message.

And of course, when you're driving towards a response, you should have a way to know whether the ad is working. AdSymetrix has been designed to give you the information you need to know about your advertising. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses.

If you'd like to enter our private beta, visit AdSymetrix today.