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Fly­ing poul­try, Hol­ly­wood movies, desk­top adven­tures and light-up cereal. It’s no longer just about bill­boards and TV ads. The very way in which we inter­act with the world around us is becom­ing one long sales pitch. This week we look at how tech­nol­ogy is directly influ­enc­ing our per­cep­tions of brands, through video, mobile, TV and even our break­fast cereal.

Angry Cake

Ask any mar­keter, the best val­i­da­tion for your prod­uct is an audi­ence that adver­tises for you! Not only is this usu­ally free, but refer­rals drive bet­ter results. Now I’m not talk­ing about guer­rilla mar­ket­ing, although this has its place, but rather a prod­uct that influ­ences a move­ment… price­less. (See what I did there?)

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This week I had the oppor­tu­nity to speak at Search Engine Strate­gies Lon­don on the topic of search remar­ket­ing. If you’re unfa­mil­iar with the topic, it’s the idea of being able to show rel­e­vant ads to audi­ences that have vis­ited your site but not taken the desired action.

For exam­ple: let’s say you’re run­ning a B2B lead cam­paign, and you’re pulling in heaps of traf­fic to your web­site from search, email and dis­play adver­tis­ing. If you’re lucky, per­haps 5–15% of those peo­ple (and that’s pretty darn good) will fill in your lead form and press the sub­mit but­ton.

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Air­lines, dogs and whales. What do they have in com­mon? For one thing, they are all cur­rently the sub­ject of some visu­ally stun­ning or emo­tion­ally engag­ing ads. Whether you’re uncom­fort­able, fas­ci­nated or shocked, there is no deny­ing they make for com­pelling viewing.

The Space Invader

Don’t worry, I’m not talk­ing about the 80’s ver­sion of Angry Birds, but per­sonal space. We all like an empty seat next to us on a flight, and KLM have shown that busi­ness trav­ellers would even pay more for it! Per­sonal space is a big deal; it’s the rea­son you don’t squeeze between two peo­ple on a 3-seater bench, or sit at a 4-seater Star­bucks table with a stranger and his lap­top. KLM sent out their space invader to find out more. Feel­ing uncom­fort­able?

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In 2010 we saw plenty of inno­va­tion from the search engines and social net­works, but what’s in store for 2011? I expect the inno­va­tion to con­tinue with a fur­ther push into real-time dis­play, AdWords automa­tion and, ulti­mately, less focus on key­words and more on mar­ket­ing objectives.

Keyword-less search mar­ket­ing and Google Boost

Google is hard at work gain­ing more adver­tis­ers by low­er­ing the bar­rier (i.e. cost) for AdWords self-service. Over the years we’ve seen new mod­els such as cost-per-lead for com­par­i­son — and prod­uct list­ing —  ads. These, in my view, are only the first few steps into the keyword-less search mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence.

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With the B2B mar­ket­ing crowd get­ting increas­ingly excited about All Things Mobile, we’ve been ask­ing our­selves what we should be doing about our online con­tent, to make it acces­si­ble through mul­ti­ple devices, par­tic­u­larly our blog.

I thought it was high time we took action, so I had a look at our ana­lyt­ics to find out exactly which types of mobile devices were used to access our site, what per­cent­age of our over­all traf­fic they rep­re­sented, and what the growth rates were.

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