Mykarma.in

This is one was specially asked for… So writing down what I feel should be done to attract advertisers.

1. Product - Get your product ready. The website should have a clean interface and well defined navigation. The ad space should be clearly demarcated and should not be adhoc. A poorly presented site never clicks with a advertiser and will be ignored. Most of the advertisers/agency neglect such sites because of a general perception that the site may contain offensive content.

2. Ad serving – Choose a good ad server and ad serving script… Most of the publishers loose money due to faulty ad serving and delays in ad display. Google ad manager and Openads are good options and are free. If going for a paid option you can opt for atlas, realmedia, doubleclick etc. The ad serving should also have a good reporting system built in. An advertiser/agency would love to get in depth details about the performance of his ads.. Like clicks, creative, day wise and mixmatch daywise creative performance etc….

3. Analytics -Use a good analytics software. You need to know your traffic before you start adserving.. A number of analytics services are availble. You can opt for a free open source or the google analytics (Google analytics may not represent a true picture of your traffic).

4. Contact – Provide a link in every page of the footer… “Advertise with us” This makes it convenient for the advertiser/agency to contact you. Make sure the contact number and email always work and are updated. A number of publishers just place email ids on their contact us form.. Due to that a number of advertisers/agency are turned away.

5. Presentation -Make a presentation or pdf based on your website with a download link on the “Advertise with us” page stating the Traffic numbers, Type of audience, Properties and placement, Screenshots, Innovations, Case studies, Clients, Rate card, Contact info and anything else that a advertiser needs to know about your site. Use charts wherever possible it gives the advertisers/agency a holistic view about the site. Send the presentation via email whenever a advertiser/agency contacts you.

6. Marketing – Every single site needs to reach media planners and advertisers…. Market your website on the industry related sites through banners, mailers. Exchange4media and Agencyfaqs are few of the trade sites for the internet industry. Sponsoring a industry related event is also a great way to gain mileage. give out some freebies (Pens, Card holders, Notepad etc) too so that atleast the advertisers/agency will remember you whenever they use the freebie. . Be an active member of a Industry related association it always helps. Take part in Industry related seminars, meets so that you can grow your network. Keep business cards handy (A good business card. Spend some money on it). You can also give your sales presentation in Business card kind of small CD’s

7. Team – No site can sell itself if they dont have a proper sales/servicing team in place or a sales guy or the owner himself etc. Always prioritise and give the advertiser/agency much needed attention to fulfill his requirement. The servicing people should be always pro – active like sending screenshots, reports etc. Hire a smart team (heavy on Logic) not dumb. They should know each and every part of the website and the stats regarding the site should be on the tip of their tongue. Smart Girls preferred (makes business sense).. It motivates the advertiser/agency to stay in touch. Keep your sales team updated about everything regarding the site. No dumb questions please !

8. Listings – Get yourself listed properly in every search engine or a business listing site. Google ad system categorises your site according to your site description etc.. So an ad network should be placed in a news category or a Horizontal should not be placed in a vertical category. (I found this problem in a number of site when I used the Google ad planner).

9. Creative support – Provide creative support to the advertisers to make banners, emailers etc. You can charge for it too… This can attract lots of unconventional advertisers/agency.

10. Value adds – If an advertiser is not satisfied with the performance of the campaign. Provide him with some value adds… (Make it a point to include text links in your ad inventory as they can be given away as value adds) This will make him happy even if it doesnt match up to the expectations of the performance. Atleast this will gain you a brownie point in the advertisers/agency mind and will help you to get back on board.

11. Personal contact - Keep bugging the advertiser/agency (Dnt take it literally). Keep following up with the advertiser/agency for new campaigns and keep sending screenshots of latest innovations or latest clients on the website or start of a new property. Go and meet the client/agency whenever there is a campaign coming up. This will help get the website a place in the media planning. Dropping a simple email will also do. . Take them out for casual dinner or drinks (Helps a lot).

1 more important point….

12. Pitching - Whenever you pitch for an advertiser/agency business always know about the product you are going to advertise. Get to know about the budget, the requirement etc.. In short a brief by email or over the phone. Send them a customized plan according to the need of the product. Give them a plan that suits the requirement of the product including properties, placements and innovations. And show them in a sample screenshot how their ads will look in different placements and properties on the website.

Go get some business !! I know this will have very serious repercussions.

If I have missed anything let me know !

A one off article that I read.. Liked it the way the job of the servicing guy has been illustrated..

“If you’ve ever been to a circus, you’d have seen a scary item in the programme where a man goes up to a fierce lion, which roars and shows its teeth. The next thing you know, the man has put his head right into the lion’s mouth! And yet he manages to come out alive. What’s more, he does it again the next day, and the next… till he dies, not as lion feed, but of old age, many years later.

Another species of humans that does such a brave act for a living is the client servicing person in an agency.

Sometimes the mouth is that of his client, a wild, fierce animal. Sometimes the mouth is that of the creative director, another wild, snarling beast. But despite these people constantly trying to chew off his head, he lives on, mostly because of a healthy diet of many, many management bestsellers on survival, bought and consumed at airport bookstalls.

Indu Balachandran

Client servicing people are also called “account executives”, and their parents often wish that their child had indeed joined a circus as a lion tamer, as they’d have a more definite idea about what he does for a living.
Admittedly, no parent is really happy about saying, “Our son, who studied words like incendiary, anodyne and preponderant from the MBA word list in preparation for the CAT exam, is now, after equipping himself with an expensive MBA degree from a leading management school, in the servicing department of an ad agency.”

Somehow, “servicing” gives the impression that their beloved, learned son is now overhauling cars in a garage down the road.

So, account executive is the more respectable label. But of course, even after explaining it 2,783 times to one’s parents, they can never understand that “accounts” stand for client’s brands, and not a pile of ledgers that must be balanced before nightfall.

Well, the main reason why agencies employ servicing people is to help grow business, the dress code for which is a suit. What they do grow, at a faster rate than they grow business, is ulcers. But then, they also keep an entire parallel industry thriving – pills, potions, medications, mantras… and other stress busting activities that this ulcer-ridden profession has helped grow.

However, the real purpose for which God created servicing people is that they too can leave their mark in advertising history by writing something called “the brief”.

This is the starting point of every great piece of advertising in the agency. After collecting tonnes of research reports and market figures, and chewing over sales targets, competitive findings, target audience demographics and psychographics (all of which can be swallowed only with three pints of beer), the servicing person has the important task of putting all this enormous information into a pithy, tight, smartly worded, one page brief for the creative team.

This sensational, Reader’s Digest style condensed, one pager makes such inspiring reading, clearly laying out a sparkling, incisive, single minded, dead right strategy (that often in itself deserves an award, for the award-winning ad that matches it), that agencies, in order to get it bang on right, usually write the brief after the campaign has been created.

Which is completely justified, when you think of it, for looking at a servicing person’s day, where is the time to write a brief??

A life in the day of a servicing person

A client servicing person’s day often begins with a wake-up call from – you guessed it – the client himself, who, even before the poor servicing chap has inserted toothbrush into mouth, calls to ask about a missed insertion in that morning’s paper.

“WHERE is my ad for LifeSaver Rejuvenator?? You SAID it would appear in this morning’s paper!!” will holler the client.

The groggy servicing person will open his own copy of the newspaper, holding the phone between ear and shoulder, and say, “But it IS here. Page 4. Right below three obituaries…”

Mad Client: “WHAT!! You put my launch ad for LifeSaver on this page?! What happened to front page solus??”

Quick-thinking servicing person: “But don’t you see? We’ve done some innovative positioning for your ad here. Your LifeSaver ad has more impact now in the context of the obituaries…”

Client: “Hmmmm, er, I guess so. Hey thanks! You just saved my life…”

And the relieved servicing person gets past another blunder created entirely by somebody else, and happily begins brushing his teeth.

After charging off to the printer’s to re-check last night’s redone colour corrections for a poster (since the art director never wakes up till 10 am), and stopping by at his aunt’s to pick up six cookery books when she’s not looking (the copywriter has to compile a cheese recipe promotional booklet, but has no idea where one can find recipe books, poor thing), and charging to the bazaar to buy 12 multicoloured kites (the creative director has a shoot today and he needs a kite as a prop, but has no idea where to get the things), and running to a store to buy a dozen red roses (the client mentioned that his wife had finally got her driving licence and hinted that it would be cool to be congratulated by the agency), and zooming into a store to buy a set of bath towels (his Mom arrives tonight to visit his bachelor digs and would faint if she discovered that he uses bed sheets to wipe himself), our dashing servicing man dashes into the conference room for the Monday morning meeting – a ritual for all servicing people – with the manager.

And then you will understand why he slogged to get his MBA degree from that top management school before landing this job, because this is how the meeting will go:

Manager: “There’s a billing shortfall of Rs 2.37 crore on your brand. What do you propose to do about it?”

An ordinary client servicing person might have replied: “Donate my legs to medical science, swallow two packets of Tik-20 cockroach killer, and never regain consciousness…”

But an MBA would reply: “No problem. We’ve proactively generated below the line market activity that will interdict the descendancy, parallelly prorogating competitive denigration with stonewalling tactics that I’ve already apprised our client of and we’ll be presenting creative work for all this, this afternoon…”

And then off he goes to wrestle for time on the Mac in the digital studio to personally complete the leaf motif on the label design for a cough remedy (to ask the art director to do so would take three more days, and what did he learn time management for, if not for this?), and while the file is opening up on the computer, writing an ad for a free tongue-cleaner with every deodorant (to ask the copywiter to do the headline would mean she’d stop that other job for the recipe booklet, and what did he learn work management for, if not for this?).

In between, he will rush up three floors twice to cajole/threaten the media guys for a make-good free release of his client’s ad, which appeared yesterday, but without any telephone number (the ad said Free Ice Creams To All Those Who Call This Number Today!), and after stopping by to fix an appointment with the dentist who has to whiten the teeth of the pretty model for tomorrow’s toothpaste shoot, our young hero will be off to the exhibition grounds in the outskirts of town where his client has a stall, and be right on time to catch the awning that collapses under last night’s rain.

And it’s still 11.30 am of the first day of the week.

(Indu Balachandran is a travel writer and also runs creative workshops in advertising and creative writing. She secretly adores all client servicing people and has a few names she’d like to recommend for the next Param Vir Chakra awards.) “

Via

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Some of the after effects of Internet. The Internet advertising industry is facing one. I came across this article which shows how users are finding ways to block ads…..

While the Internet has decidedly emerged as a key advertising medium, with more people spending more time on the web or directly downloading content, including music and video, it may not be easy for advertisers to force surfers to watch the ads – unless they are ready to.

You could say that spamming by ads is not on. Less than a week after Google-owned YouTube started embedded advertisement overlays on the video content downloaded from the sites, a high-tech software developer has found a way to block the ads, technology blogger and consultant Amy L. Webb reported on her site mydigimedia.com.

Netscape developer Chris Finke made the software which can be downloaded as extension of the Firefox browser popular with those seeking more privacy and efficiency on the Net. It is appropriately called TubeStop.

“…it’s obvious that we’re avoiding online advertising unless something — interesting content, say — compels us to watch. Marketers will continue finding ways to insert ad material into digital content, but programmers will always find a way to block it,” she added. The dilemma of ad blockade is not easy to resolve for those seeking money from advertisers keen to hook surfers.

Google’s own search-based advertisements involve payments only when surfers click on the links that lead up to the sites of the advertisers. Market research firm Zenith Optimedia forecast in March that Internet advertising expenditure would grow to $42.9 billion by 2009, from $31.3 billion in 2007.

The WSJ reported that the phenomenally popular social-networking website Facebook Inc. is quietly working on a new advertising system that would let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves. Facebook, which is already being discussed as a potential takeover target for companies, is yet to clearly capitalise on its popularity. MySpace has already launched a targeted ad platform for its social networking site.