Challenges and Solutions for a Tight Holiday Season
New Yahoo! research offers five tips for making the best of a tough sell
Hey, it’s a touchy holiday season this year. Though the economy appears to be seeing the proverbial light at the end of the clichéd tunnel, consumers are still feeling the pinch. According to new Yahoo! research, most U.S. consumers surveyed say that they expect to spend less this holiday season.
Sound bleak? Wait, there’s more. The research also indicates that consumers will be starting their gift searches online rather than in brick-and-mortar stores, are starting their shopping earlier, and, better still for online marketers, online spending is expected to increase even as overall sales dip.
Cut through the glut of typical holiday messages by promoting offbeat holidays in November and December
’Tis the holiday season again—and I don’t just mean the major ones like Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. I like focusing on the more obscure holidays, like National Rad Tech Week, Sandwich Day and National Tie Month.
These are some of the special months, weeks and days that business organizations or Congress have designated to promote various causes. Depending on your business, you might be able to turn these offbeat holidays into a new ad campaign and ring up some extra cash.
Last call to get your campaigns ready for holiday shoppers—the blitz begins next week
Previously we discussed the four major days that generally make up the holiday shopping season. Clearly, the opportunities for holiday advertising are plentiful, and if now is the time to get your holiday campaigns in order, so that they’ll be ready when consumers are.
Altered ad ethics; tweeting for fun and profit; get your phone to yodel; marketing that breeds like bunnies, and more
Should altered photo ads carry warning labels?
“Truth in advertising” is mandated by the Federal Trade Commission. And we’re all for it. But what if an ad does not contain an explicit promise—such as “contains zero grams of fat”—but merely an implied one? What if the ad is just an image of a pretty girl or boy plus a brand name? New York Times columnist Randy Cohen (“The Ethicist”) thinks ads that use digital enhancements to make fashion models look so thin they seem in desperate need of a sandwich should carry the equivalent of a warning label.
Tweet all about it!
Unless you live in L.A. or have an expense account fat enough for your company to fly you there, you’re probably missing the 140 Character Conference (#140), yesterday and today. Well, never fear, Twitter is here. Follow the Tweets by conference-goers, including our own Jeff Sweat.
Learn all about Yahoo! Search Retargeting and Smart Ads in this free webcast, Nov. 4, 2009
You may have heard of Yahoo! Search Retargeting and Smart Ads, which can make your display ads more relevant to users—but you may not know yet how these products can work for you. So we invite you to join us for a FREE webcast on these two Yahoo! display innovations, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009, 11:00 A.M. Pacific (2:00 P.M. Eastern).
In this video webcast, you’ll learn how to integrate these solutions into your campaigns to push brand awareness and build greater engagement with your audience. Register now!
Now there are even more shopping days to reach your customers
Soon, it seems, every shopping day between Thanksgiving and New Years will have its own title.
For shoppers and retailers, the winter holidays aren’t just a fun few days, they’re an entire event that starts the day after Thanksgiving and lasts right up until the end of December. “The most wonderful time of the year” is right around the corner, so let’s highlight the key shopping days to look forward to after Halloween and Turkey Day are behind us:
The story behind the video and our commitment to the creative community
Judging from the numbers, a lot of you have already seen the “Yahoo! Hearts Creatives” viral video. But here’s the back story.
Agencies and creatives make advertising. Copywriters, designers, directors—these folks and the agencies they work with chisel sizzle out of fizzle. It seems simple, sure. But anyone in the ad biz knows just how hard a simple message can be to create and get across. Remember the “Where’s the beef?” TV campaign? It became a national catchphrase, catapulted the brand into an industry phenomenon, and even influenced a presidential election. It may look easy, but it’s not.
And at Yahoo! don’t we know it. And we know you can’t just be thinking about TV when you create your campaigns. Back in the “Where’s the beef?” days, advertisers created their ads, put them on TV—it didn’t much matter if it was “Barney Miller” or “The Gong Show”—and prayed. With online advertising things are a bit trickier.
Beatin’ the Street; too much information (maybe); what social media’s good for; SEO’s bad rap and more
Yahoooooooooooo! Not to brag or anything, but we opened up a can of you-know-what on Wall Street yesterday, beating all expectations, says Kara Swisher.
Inundated by consumer data? Heck, who isn’t? But as this piece by John Nardone over at iMedia Connection explains, it’s possible to tame the data beast. It’s not a question of storage and computing power, says Nardone. Rather, “the challenge is identifying and leveraging what is relevant to your campaign from what is dross.” You might want to don your propeller beanie for this one.
Yahoo! and GroupM to help advertisers create online programming
Yahoo! and GroupM Entertainment announced today that they are teaming up to create online programming that helps marketers blend their brands with content for users.
“Yahoo! has a keen understanding of what makes our audience click, and this partnership will help advertisers develop deeper connections with our users,” said Joanne Bradford, Yahoo!’s senior vice president, North American revenue and market development.
Both Yahoo! and GroupM have experience building branded content: Yahoo! TV’s Primetime in No Time is built around Verizon as the advertiser, and the Yahoo! Sports Minute was developed for Dunkin’ Donuts. GroupM created In the Motherhood as webisodes for it clients Sprint and Unilever’s Suave, and the series was later picked up by ABC Television as a prime-time comedy.
For more about the deal, read the press releaseand watch CNBC’s report on it in the video below.
