Why marketers need to create clever online ads

As an Internet marketer, I was entranced by the speedy progress of the notorious Claire Swire e-mail – in which her intimate sexual preferences were laid bare to the world by her naive boyfriend.

Not that long ago, marketers were patting themselves on the back over the success of similar viral marketing campaigns. Hotmail ran its “Get your private, free e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com” at the bottom of each e-mail sent from one of their e-mail accounts, which saw customer sign-up rates rocket.

It fulfilled an important maxim: provide something that potential customers truly want and leverage word of mouse. If the marketing message comes through a friend, the recipient is far more likely to trust the content of the message and respond in kind.

Virgin.net discovered how effective online marketing could be by e-mailing 25 carefully selected targets with the offer of free cinema tickets. Within three hours, it had reached 20,000 people – the target number for the campaign. It provided Virgin.net with a large number of names to add to its customer database and bolstered the company’s image as a fun, irreverent, value-led brand.

That was then (Virgin.net in 1998 and Hotmail in 1995), this is now. Viral marketing can no longer be relied upon to deliver brand and product messages quite so simply, quickly and at little cost, without the risk of irritating the recipient and creating a negative impact on a company’s brand.

There is so much more e-mail clutter these days, which inevitably erodes the power of viral marketing. We need a return to basics.

Research and a clear understanding of the market are the key ingredients when targeting a specific target audience. If you consider that a target is highly likely to forward an e-mail to friends of a similar demographic profile, you begin to appreciate that studiously identified targets are as likely to succeed as incorrectly identified targets are to fail.

Alongside this, there needs to be more creative input into messages, making use of strong and original communications that have a high impact on the recipient. One pioneering technique that has emerged from the US (where else?) is e-commercials. These are compressed attachments that can deliver hard-hitting video, audio and interactive messages to a carefully selected audience.

In short, online creatives will have to raise their game in order to drive their message home. Devising an intelligent piece of entertainment that also manages to communicate a company’s brand and message appropriately will become increasingly difficult, and the noise made by online marketing messages will only get louder.

Ben Mitchell is e-business consultant at 2Cs Communications