Humor In Advertising

Many of the most memorable ad campaigns around tend to be funny. Advertisers use this strategy to attract customers to their product. Audiences like to be entertained, but not pitched. People will pay more attention to a humorous commercial than a factual or serious one, opening themselves up to be influenced. The key to funny advertising is assuring the humor is appropriate to both product and customer. The balance between funny and obnoxious can often be delicate; and a marketer must be certain the positive effects outweigh the negative before an advertisement can be introduced.

The best products to sell using humor tend to be those that consumers have to think the least about. Products that are relatively inexpensive, and often consumable, can be represented without providing a lot of facts, and that’s where there’s room for humor. Candy, food, alcohol, tobacco and toys/entertainment related products have proven to benefit the most from humor in their campaigns. One of the most important things to keep in mind is relevance to the product. An example of an extremely successful humorous campaign is the series of “Yo Quiero Taco Bell” commercials. The star, a tiny talking Chihuahua who is passionate about his Taco Bell got people repeating the company’s name across the country. The repetition of the company name and the actual content of the commercial reinforce the message in a relevant manner. Taco Bell saw a substantial rise in sales and their own mascot became a pop icon.

Another point to consider when using humor in advertising is that different things are funny to different people. A commercial that may leave one person gripping their sides from laughter may leave a bad taste in another’s mouth. The target market must always be considered. What’s funny in a client presentation may not be funny on an airplane, at a country club or in a hospital. An example of a recent humorous product introduction is Mike’s Hard Lemonade. These commercials feature over exaggerated and comical violence with the underlining message that no one's day is hard enough to pass up a Mike's. It failed, ranking as one of the year’s most hated campaigns by both men and woman according to 2002’s Ad Track, a consumer survey. The series of commercials are aimed at 21-29 year old males and the repetition of comical violence (such as a construction worker being impaled on the job and a lumberjack cutting off his own foot) gets less and less funny every time it’s viewed. Eventually the joke just wore out and the commercial became annoying and offensive.

Humor in advertising tends to improve brand recognition, but does not improve product recall, message credibility, or buying intentions. In other words, consumers may be familiar with and have good feelings towards the product, but their purchasing decisions will probably not be affected. One of the major keys to a successful humorous campaign is variety, once a commercial starts to wear out there’s no saving it without some variation on the concept. Humorous campaigns are often expensive because they have to be constantly changed. Advertisers must remember that while making the customer laugh, they have to keep things interesting, because old jokes die along with their products.

About the Author:
Mark Levit is managing partner of Partners & Levit Advertising and a professor of marketing at New York University. Partners & Levit's clients include Procter & Gamble, UnitedHealth Group, and GE Commercial Finance. For more information call 212-696-1200 or visit http://www.partnerslevit.com.
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Top 10 Tips For Using Pay-per-click Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising has completely revolutionized how advertising is done over the Internet. No longer must advertisers purchase banners or text link ads on sites for a flat rate per month, but with virtually no guaranteed results (not even a guarantee of a click); instead, they can purchase "pay per click" advertising through a massive contextual ad server service, such as Google Adwords.

Now, with this new ability to advertise effectively comes several responsibilities: in order to use it correctly, you must understand how it works. You can't simply purchase the top right corner of a site for a flat rate per month. Below, I've included 10 important tips for PPC advertising:

1. Actually browse through sites that serve your advertisements. Eliminate those that are low quality or that are likely to inflate the price of advertising by giving you too many clicks per 1000 views.

2. Remember to always determine whether or not it is cost effective to advertise on contextual ad networks; or whether you should restrict your pay-per-click advertisements to the search engine itself.

3. Use "day parting" features to determine when your advertisements will and wont be shown. If, for instance, you find that at certain times during the day, you get a lot of clicks, but none are serious buyers, you may want to remove your days from that period of time.

4. Use the statistics program on whichever pay-per-click advertising program you are using to determine the effectiveness of ads. If ads are not effective (or are too effective), replace them with something else.

5. Test and refine your ads until you have the best possible advertisement (i.e. one that pulls visitors, but not visitors that don't buy).

6. Determine how many clicks you can afford to pay for per sale. You should be able to mathematically determine the optimal price per click.

7. Use Google Adword's keyword tool feature to search for additional keywords to use in your campaigns. The more you have, the more traffic you will pull.

8. Remember to segment each campaign into a list of keywords and an advertisement that matches that list. The smaller the list of keywords, the more narrowly focused the advertisement can be, making it more effective

9. Remove keywords from your campaigns that are not cost effective. Many keywords will pull searches, but will end up decreasing your click through rate or not converting to sales after someone clicks through.

10. Use negative keywords to prevent freebie seekers from running up your click through count. For instance, get rid of keywords like "free" and "cheap," unless your product is free or cheap.

Follow each of these ten tips carefully and you will find that using pay per click advertising isn't as hard as it may seem initially.

About the Author:
Aurelius Tjin is The Publisher of The ’Unstoppable Internet Marketing’ Newsletter. Discover His Secret Strategies To Skyrocket Your Internet Marketing Business. To Find Out More Go To http://www.UnstoppableInternetMarketing.com
Posted: 19-11-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

Website Traffic And Search Engine Optimization: The Domain Name

Whether for business or personal use, before there can be a website, there must be a domain name, and one of the most important steps of a search engine optimization plan is to pick the right one.

So what IS a domain name? A domain name is that thing that people give you when you ask for their website. TexasToyota.com, for example, is a domain name. (That's a plug, by the way. They really treated me nice when I bought my car from them, so I thought I would pay them back a little. If you don't believe me, look for an article I wrote titled "If Michael Is Selling, I'm Buying".)

Some things to consider in choosing a domain name are:

1. Keep it short and simple. If your website is for your business, a short domain name has its advantages. Whether you want to print it on business cards or display it on a billboard, making the domain too long or too complicated may make it too hard for potential customers to catch in one reading or recall later, if they did not have a chance to write it down. An exception to this is if you can get a phrase which will be remembered into the domain name (Example: buytwogetonefree.com) ...which leads us to point number two.

2. Make it easy to remember. Your customer won't always have a pen with them, or maybe they won't even think about your domain name or website until later. Short, simple, and easy to remember can be important, but you normally shouldn't just opt for something like qdipe.com, and we are about to tell you why.

3. Relate it to your business or organization. If you sell bicycle parts, try to put "bicycle parts" in the domain name. This is not only for the eyes of internet surfers, but for the search engines as well. They use various factors to rank the pages they visit, and sometimes the words used in the domain can increase the rank of the page. This brings up another point.

4. Think about keywords. Although we are not going to get into Meta tags in this article, keywords are important. Even if hardly any search engines look at the "keyword" Meta tag any more, they are still searching the content of your site for keywords found within the text of the body, "alt" tags on the images, and "title" tags on anchor text and other links. Taking number 3 and number 4 together, the best of both worlds is to have a business name that is a keyword or phrase relevant to the business and use that as the domain name.

5. Cute's nice, but...! Some people try to make their domain name memorable by using puns, jokes, wordplay, or number combinations. Just be careful. A few years ago I needed a domain name for a weight loss product. I went through all the "short" and "easy to remember" names I could think of, but they all were taken! I then came up with the domain name NoDiet4Me.com. It made perfect sense to me! I went to have a magnetic sign made for my car, and the lady read it this way..."No die t-4-me?" and shook her head with a confused look on her face! The site worked fine and got a lot of traffic and made me a lot of money, but now I wonder if I lost any traffic because of my domain name.

6. To dash or not to dash. There have been a lot of discussions about whether to put a hyphen in the domain name. I can't honestly answer based on my own experiences, as I use both, but the consensus seems to be from my research that it is easier for a search engine to categorize and rank a site that has a hyphen than one where the words are run together. Example: chickensoup vs. chicken-soup.

There is one danger to be recognized if you choose to use the hyphen. You must make sure it is clearly shown in any printed advertising or representations, and if giving the domain name verbally, go to great lengths to make sure that your listener understands the hyphens MUST be inserted. Many people are not that internet savvy and will hear "bobs dash bicycles" and still type in "bobsbicycles".

7. Alphabet soup. Ever wonder what's best? Should you get a .com or .net? Will it be okay to get a .biz or .us? What the heck do those things mean anyways and does it matter? Well, in today's world, most people entering the internet world are familiar with .com and .net. After that, they tend to get confused. I will not get into country specific top level domains at the moment, as this article is primarily directed at those either doing business in the U.S. or those doing business worldwide with a generic type product where a country-specific domain name would not matter. So, in most cases, .tv, .ws, or .org will not matter one way or another. By the way, .tv is the top level domain for the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and .ws is the top level domain for Samoa.

Just to continue this discussion on extensions for a moment. When passing someone your domain name whether verbally or in writing, make sure they see or hear the extension. To use my earlier example, simply saying, "My website is bobsbicycles", will probably cause people just to type in the .com on the end as that is what they are most used to hearing.

8. Branding. In some cases, a domain name may be associated with an easily recognized, or branded, product. Wal-Mart and Ford do not have to worry THAT much about such niceties as keyword density or "easy to remember" names. However, if you are working with a product or company which has or is in the process of branding itself, some of the information given above about selecting domain names might not be relevant.

I am going to assume that most people who read this little article are probably trying to do some SEO (search engine optimization) themselves, and one of the best places to start is with the domain name itself.

About the Author:
Donovan Baldwin is a Dallas area writer and network marketing professional. Learn how to use domain names to make money online at http://donsdomains.ws/.
Added: 13 Oct 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/39217.html