Differentiate or dye
One genre of client that is reaping the benefits of custom advertising is the beauty brand. Encompassing fashion, personal style and women's lifestyle properties, there's no shortage of sites one might deem appropriate for a hair care or skin care ad campaign. In evaluating these, it becomes grossly apparent how similar most online beauty campaigns are. In order to stand out from competitors while meeting objectives like increasing product awareness, boosting trial and cross-pollinating product lines, one must explore more unconventional options.
On beauty sites, these might include:
- Custom microsites
- Custom videos (usually a series of editorial-style clips)
- Advertorials (product integration into editorial content)
- Home page reskins
Custom placements are generally packaged to include added value opportunities such as logo integration, newsletter and site page sponsorships and behaviorally targeted banner ads. At their core, however, they're about a single noteworthy feature too prominent and distinctive to ignore. The value of this feature should be analyzed based on six key attributes:
- impact
- contextual relevance
- coverage, composition (or audience)
- clutter
- uniqueness
These can be weighted as appropriate based on the nature of the campaign (in a campaign intended primarily to generate product awareness, for example, the model might be weighted to favor contextual relevance, coverage and composition).
For one brand that endeavored to increase awareness and trial of its interconnected product line, an up-and-coming beauty site recently had its editors review and demonstrate the advertiser's entire product line in a series of videos, which remained live on the site as part of its editorial content for three months. Associated written reviews, including one featured in the site's email newsletter, offered additional value.
Another campaign saw the client's products featured in 10 custom videos on skin care, which found beauty experts offering their experiences with the brand. The placement included links to the advertiser's site as well as to drugstore.com, where consumers could purchase the products. Featured articles also mentioned the product line, but did so in conjunction with third-party goods to ensure consumers received comprehensive and balanced beauty information. To promote the videos and related content, the site ran a Flash intro pointing to the page on which the videos lived.
Now, let's take a look at the agency's involvement in creating and maintaining custom placements.
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