Digital Media News

Unconventional, whacky marketing tactics like guerrilla advertising can have a massive impact. Guerrilla advertising is much like guerrilla warfare: placing ambushes, sabotages, raids and elements of surprise within the marketing industry. Despite it often being a low-cost tactic that delivers maximum results, it can be a risky business when the reputation if your brand is on the line. Guerrilla marketing undoubtedly provokes very strong opinions and emotional responses.

Experiential marketing works because it connects customers to brands through live, face-to-face experiences. This strategy carries an inherent risk: if your campaign isn’t engaging and compelling, the result is probably worse than that of a poor flyer, email, or TV ad. With the latter, more traditional marketing methods, users already have an element of disconnection - they can turn away, click a mouse or change their TV channel. But with experiential marketing your target audience is slap bang in the middle of your campaign. For that reason, it’s vital to know what you’re dealing with and how to do it well. 

When experiential marketing campaigns succeed, they usually do so in explosive, incredible ways. It’s useful to highlight a couple of brilliant experiential marketing campaigns to take note of the creativity.

Although brands are increasing their spend on social media advertising, only a relatively small portion of it is going to ads - according to a new survey of Ad Age readers.  

Ad Age and RBC Capital Markets jointly conducted their fifth major survey of marketer attitudes toward social media and the survey polled 1,682 executives at marketing, agency and media companies for their opinions on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (which was included for the first time).

It seems that marketing teams are spending slightly more in digital and social media channels than in previous years, but this spend is still a relatively small part of overall advertising budgets. So what’s the thinking behind it?

As Facebook’s lead ad planner, Kelly Maclean’s job is to watch people watch advertisements. In emerging markets, the heat is on to study local activity so that Facebook can come up with advertising methods that perform well in developing countries. She travels to places like Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa to get an inside look at what works and what doesn’t.

So what’s the main difference between Facebook advertising in places like this and countries in Europe and the US? In the US it’s fair to say that social media advertising is rife, to the point where it can sometimes get in the way of ‘socializing’, or it becomes a bit of an intrusion on your digital world. It’s a cluttered marketplace where brands battle for their piece of the action, but it’s a very different story in the developing World where it’s still a novelty to see and hear what big brands have to say. MacLean said:

Negative advertising or “poisoning the well” is the practice of attacking a competitor or opponent to make yourself look more credible. The logic behind the practice is that if the other party's reputation is damaged, you end up looking better. While poisoning the well is de rigeur in political advertising, businesses also use it as a part of their overall advertising strategy. It’s particularly popular in the tech industry, where rivalries tend to run deep. This smear tactic technique is also frequently used by a second or third tier competitor as a way to try to tarnish the market leader’s image. Below outlines a couple google examples of negative advertising.

Scroogled (Courtesy of Microsoft)

The personal qualities you have are just as important as the resources you attain to build your online business. It is very difficult to achieve success as an entrepreneur in general. It is even more difficult to achieve success without the 6 traits below. This article suggests 6 characteristics you need to make your journey easier and more productive.

It doesn’t matter if your business is big or small. You may be a startup upstart, using guerilla marketing tactics to capture any hearts and minds you can reach. You may be the established super-power business in your part of the world, marshalling enormous resources to conquer the world.

Whatever your situation, you cannot ignore Facebook advertising. It is a platform that is coming into its own because of its reach and accessibility.

Facebook has grown into one of the most significant social entities on the Internet, offering a powerful medium to expose your brand by leveraging Facebook Advertising capabilities . With reportedly over 1.3 billion monthly active users, Facebook’s audience is incomprehensibly large. In 2013, Facebook earned roughly $6.15 billion in revenue, a number which will be significantly larger in 2014. The overwhelming majority of that income came from advertising done by companies on the Facebook advertising platform.

The size of Facebook’s audience is a double-edged sword for companies that are not spending their money wisely on the Facebook advertising platform. While the potential return on investment and cost-effectiveness of Facebook advertising is impressive, it is important for any company investing in online advertising on Facebook – or for any Internet marketing plan in general – to create a well-thought-out media strategy before starting to purchase advertising. A couple suggestions are shared below.

Difference-making online advertising campaigns require innovative strategy, leading technology, careful planning and insightful analysis. ExactDrive’s Advertising Platform and strategic consultant team provides all four, making it easier for you to generate the results you want most. Retargeting coupled with dynamic ads is a very powerful combination. With that in mind we wanted to share with our readers a sample digital media plan that we recently created for a politically focused client.