Our Question of the Day today is:
Do you include classic banner ads in your marketing campaigns? If so, why? If not, why not?
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I hit the launch party for the latest TorStar Digital venture, “Olive Canada Network”:http://www.olivecanadanetwork.com/ last week. Here’s the dish, first on the party and then on the company.
The party was held at swanky A-list club, “This is London”:http://toronto.com/bars_clubs/listing/000-124-544. There is nothing more uniquely urban than entering a hot club through a garbage bin-lined unmarked door down a dimly lit downtown back alley. The party was packed with maybe 700 people, mostly an attractive, under-35 crowd. There was an over-the-top 70’s cover band in full regalia, “Maxim girls”, hotdog cart, private limo’s, open bars and lots of branding for Olive and their featured properties.
Insiders say it was as much of a recruitment effort for new talent as a launch party for their target customers. Olive GM, Simon Jennings (formerly of “Yahoo! Canada”:http://www.yahoo.ca), cracked my favorite joke of the night when he exclaimed from the microphone to a loud and inattentive room, “For the four of you from media buying agencies, thanks for coming, for the all of your cousins and friends who tagged along, enjoy the drinks.” All in all a well-executed launch event with all the details covered.
ROS(Run-of-site) ad placements can be hard for interactive marketers to resist. Offered by most site publishers, these buys are widely available and provide access to a broad audience of Internet users. Because they usually involve remnant site inventory, they’re also highly cost effective and can stretch an online ad budget far beyond expected means. All of this has led ROS buys to become a mainstay of many online ad campaigns.
If you think ROS is a risk-free advertising option, however, think again.
Last week, the New York Post ran a lead news story about the terrible sexual assault and murder of a female graduate student. The article appeared on its Web site as well. As reported “in an online marketing publication the next day”:http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=40713&Nid=18919&p=181626, the story was accompanied online by the most inappropriate ad imaginable: a banner for online dating service True.com that featured a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to the murder victim.
According to reports, the ad had been on a run-of-site rotation.