Tips for IM marketing success

Erin Coker
Apps Posted on December 20, 2007

The future of instant messenger campaigns is brighter than ever.

Approximately 66 percent of teens and young adults now send more IMs than emails. Additionally, Gartner Research has recently projected that by 2013, IM will be the default choice for enterprise-based real-time communications, serving as the nexus for voice, video and text exchanges. Three-quarters of instant messenger users are online everyday, and spend several hours per day live within their messaging application, attracting brand and advertisers to this new delivery system.

Instant messenger campaigns provide advertisers and brands with a unique audience and opportunity for meaningful brand interaction, without adding much time and work to the already stressful and labor-intensive creative design and ad deployment process.

Designing for the IM space is simplified due to its controlled environment. Unlike traditional banner ads, there is no surrounding content to be concerned with and no browser to troubleshoot. Combine the ease of implementation, the massive audience size, and the extremely compelling interactions available, and IM campaigns are a "sure thing" for advertiser and agency ROI.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating your own campaign, and thoughts on how to deliver creative branding and interactive tie-ins to engage and interact with the IM audiences.

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Comments

Erin Coker
Erin Coker December 20, 2007 at 6:04 PM

Great points, Roland.

In terms of the expense - I absolutely understand, and although we as EyeWonder have run several campaigns which spanned multiple different portal IM placements, ultimately its a decision you and your client need to make.

EyeWonder is a certified, tested provider on five different portal IM platforms and using just two different sizes you can cover 5 IM placements. Compared to even a standard ad campaign, this should improve the creative costs, instead of creating more.

Roland Reinhart
Roland Reinhart December 20, 2007 at 1:44 PM

Erin, thanks for the tips.

Our agency has run a variety of teen-targeted media on instant messaging platforms over the years. Here are a few notes from my experiences:

- Regarding the recommendation of buying across multiple platforms, that can be very expensive. In our experiences with AOL, Yahoo and MSN, they often required this to be part of a larger media buy.

- Plus, the custom formats vary from AOL to Yahoo to MSN, so there's added creative costs to customize for particular platform that often don't match the specs of other platforms. That adds to the difficulty of trying to create an ad unit or advergame that is compelling for the end-users to interact with.

- Also, while there may be some day part segmenting, we've never in the past been able to target by age/gender, especially on AOL. This article doesn't mention if that's changed.

By the way, you didn't mention anything about automated attendants. We had very good success with testing them in the past, particularly on AOL. They do require a great deal of planning and development to make they useful and engaging. We surveyed the teens that interacted with our deployments -- the majority reported that they were receptive to interacting with a brand through IM. But keep the lawyers away -- they try to stick an asterisk and 10 lines of disclaimer text anywhere they can. :)