DIscussions
Question 1: Current as well as past Super Bowl ads are available at www.superbowl-ads.com. Access the site and compare Super Bowl ads for the last several years. What types of message strategies were used? What types of appeals were used? What types of executions were used? Who and what types of endorsers or spokespersons were used? Compare and contrast these four elements of ads over the last three years of Super Bowl ads.
Question 2: Assume you are a marketing intern for a local clothing boutique retail store. List the benefits of cause-related marketing for the retail store. Identify two causes in your community you think the store should become involved with. Explain why. Should the clothing retailer become involved in green marketing? Why or why not? Identify at least one way the store could become involved in green marketing.
Question 3: watch the video and respond
Question 4: Are sales figures important when evaluating integrated marketing communications? How should marketers use hard data such as redemption rates, response rates, and store traffic in the evaluation of marketing communications? In terms of accountability, how important are behavioral measures of IMC effectiveness?
Question 5: The Federal Trade Commission's mission is to protect consumers and promote competition among companies, both domestically and globally.
• Visit the Federal Trade Commission press releases website. Find a press release regarding a case where one or more advertising, marketing, or communications regulations were violated and acted upon by the FTC. Summarize the issue, the FTC's findings, and the consequences for the violator. Provide the URL for the press release you read. How could the company have avoided violating the FTC regulation(s)?
Question 6: Read this audio and respond
Speakers: Carol Webster, MBA CAROL WEBSTER, PMP: One of my very favorite books is Alice in Wonderland. Alice asks the Cheshire Cat, "Which road do I take?" The Cheshire Cat replies, "Where do you want to go?" And she says, "I don't know" to which he replied, "Then it doesn't matter." Establishing marketing objectives is an important part of knowing where you want to go. What are your goals as a company? Do you want to increase sales, focus on profit, gain brand awareness or market share, ensure high levels of customer satisfaction? All of these are valid. By establishing smart goals and by that we mean specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, or results-oriented and timely, marketers can create a road map which will guide them as they develop their marketing plan. But it doesn't stop there. Once you decide on objectives, you have to establish corresponding metrics to help you determine if your marketing programs are successful. This is especially important as more and more markets use online marketing strategies including social media. Without specific metrics and goals, it can be difficult to measure ROI and campaign effectiveness. One of the best tools available to help with measuring marketing performance is a marketing dashboard offered by a number of software providers. Companies such as Marketo can help you analyze marketing program revenue, evaluate email campaigns, and monitor your lead funnel. Setting marketing objectives and metrics can help you know where you're going, know when you need to take a detour, and know when you've arrived. [End of Audio]
Question 7: read this audio and respond
Speakers: Brian Critchfield BRIAN CRITCHFIELD: My name is Brian Critchfield and for the next few minutes we're going to talk about performance metrics in digital marketing. Now traditional advertising has offered us very limited ability to measure success. Our focus has largely been on two measurements; reach and frequency.
Reach measures how many eyeballs had the potential to see an ad. Frequency measures how often those eyeballs had the potential to see that ad. The problem with these measurements is that they only measure potential.
In the case of this billboard, 200,000 people may drive past it per day. That is a reach of 200,000 and a daily frequency of maybe two times for as long as that billboard is up. However, how many are paying attention? For those that are paying attention, does the message register in their minds?
Beyond reach and frequency, we've tried many other options to track those who engage with an ad. Now these methods include tracking coupon redemptions like the McDonald's coupons that you see there, surveying the public, tracking how many people mention an ad, placing unique phone numbers on specific ads, or simply observing and just seeing if advertising causes a bump in sales.
This can be a very frustrating proposition because it is difficult to track what impact your advertising actually has on your target audience. John Wanamaker was a famous merchant of the late 1800s - early 1900s. He was a marketing pioneer and a US Postmaster General.
He expressed this sentiment best when he stated that half of his advertising was wasted. He just didn't know which half.
Measuring advertising, it's not an exact science and it can be very difficult to connect the dots between exposure, interest, and action. The beauty of digital marketing is that you can track almost anything. The downside to digital marketing is that you can track almost anything.
This means that there are many great measurements available in digital marketing but the key is finding the ones that are actually relevant to your business. For instance on Facebook I can track the number of impressions or number of times my ad was shown, the actual reach of my ad, the number of people who clicked on my ad, and even what each click cost me.
I can even track the demographics of my audience, how many of them are single or married, and even their hobbies and interests. Some of these factors can be great for targeting but the question is which of these measurements will drive tangible results.
Once someone reaches your website, the number of things that you can measure increases exponentially. Tools such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics can help you analyze a myriad of factors such as how that person arrived at your site, what keywords he or she used, whether the person was on a smartphone or a desktop, what language that person was using, and much more.
To be truly effective in digital marketing, you need to learn how to separate nice to know data from the need to know data. Now to begin with, let's discuss some of the more common metrics that are used to measure digital advertising.
The first measurement is impressions. Now this is similar to reach in traditional advertising. If an ad unit was shown, no matter where on the page it was shown, that's an impression. If the same advertiser has two ad units on the same page, that counts as two impressions.
Now clicks are a little bit more simple and mean simply how many times people clicked on an ad. Click through rate is the measurement of the ad's effectiveness. Calculate this by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions.
Now the average click through rate for a banner ad is between .04% and .06% and for text ads on a search engine, it gets a little bit better there between 1% and 2%. But click through rate or CTR is the most common measurement for banner ads but it's an imperfect measurement.
The latest research shows that only 16% of all internet users click on banner ads. However, 8% of internet users make up 85% of all of those clicks. This means that CTR for banner ads measures only 8% of all internet users.
Most users see an ad and recognize the ad but are more likely to pull up a search engine and search for that company. This means that search gets the last attribution or the credit for driving the traffic.
Another way to measure effectiveness of advertising that is a little more sophisticated than CTR is a method called view through and it consists of placing a cookie or a piece of code on your computer when you view an ad. If you end up on the website for that advertiser within a certain period of time, it counts as a view through and the banner ad gets come of the credit.
The final measurement that is common in advertising is called cost per click or CPC. It measures how much it costs to drive each click, especially in search marketing. You calculate this by dividing the money spent by the number of clicks that are driven.
Now once someone reaches your site, as I said before, the level of tracking increases exponentially. You can track what they do on your site, how long they spend, and where they came from.
Here are a few common metrics once a visitor reaches your site. Page views measures the number of pages on your website that were viewed during a certain period of time. If you had a thousand page views, that means it could have been a thousand people viewing one page or one person viewing a thousand pages.
This is where unique visitors comes into play. Unique visitors measures how many unique or different people visited your page or site. That way you can calculate how many pages on average a typical user will visit.
Time on site is a simple measurement and it counts - it calculates how much time on average a user spends on your site. The more time they spend on your site, the more engaging that it is.
Now bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that visit only one page on your site and then leave. Now typically the higher the bounce rate, the less relevant your page to what the visitor needs. This ties directly back to the time on site measurement that we discussed previously.
Finally, one of the most important measurements is conversions. However, this is a customizable measurement. With your analytic software, you can setup a conversion to meet everything from when somebody fills out a form, downloads a document, or simply visits a certain page. Whatever you think is the most important thing for them to do on your website, you can set that up as a conversion and track what traffic drives, keywords that drive it, an activity that drove that conversion so that you can optimize for the future.
Here are some additional measurements that you'll see frequently in the digital world. Channels or traffic sources, where the traffic came to your site from. For instance, did it come from an organic or paid search? Was it referred from another site? And how much traffic did that site refer?
Mobile is also becoming an increasingly critical measurement since it is the screen of the future. Across the board, mobile traffic is seeing enormous traffic increases in comparison to regular desktop or laptop traffic.
You can track what percentage of your traffic came from smart phones, tablets, what percentage came from desktops, which operating systems the traffic came from so that you can identify if iPhones were where your website was primarily viewed.
Geo or geography can be broken down into various pieces that you can see what cities, states, countries your traffic came from and are you more popular in Miami, Florida or in Mesa, Arizona?
Behavior shows you statistics such as most visited pages on your website and even which landing pages are the first visited by users once they get to your site.
Finally you can find out which keywords search engine users are typing into a search bar to find your site once they reach you. Now unfortunately, this measurement is becoming more difficult as Google is shielding more of its keywords for those of its users who are logged in with a Google ID. It is becoming more common in your analytic software to see this giant bucket of keywords called not provided. This means that Google has not given you the particular keyword used by a visitor.
When it comes to social media, there are two primary metrics used to measure success; subscribers and engagement. The number of likes, fans, or followers you have identifies the number of people that choose to subscribe to your channels.
Engagement measures those who actually interact with those channels and this usually happens in one of two ways. They may mention you in a post or they may share your content or posts.
Accountability and marketing is an age old problem as pointed out by John Wanamaker. With digital we're much closer to identifying which marketing efforts drive the results and which don't but despite this, there will never be 100% correlation between marketing and revenue or profit simply because there are so many other factors that go into generating these numbers.
Whether you use traditional marketing or digital marketing, I recommend that you introduce a three part marketing accountability model. For the first part, ask what are the things over which I have a direct impact or influence?
These would be things such as website traffic, ad placement, clicks, etcetera. For the second part, what are the things over which I have an indirect impact or influence. This is where revenue and profit should come into play.
The third is the key part. Ask what are the external influences that can have a positive or a negative impact on the results. These would be things like the customer experience. You can drive traffic into a store but if the experience is terrible, the customer doesn't buy, doesn't come back, and tells all of his or her friends.
Other things such as pricing, current events, or competitive pressures can positively or negatively affect the indirect impacts.
The way that you use this model is you choose three to four direct impacts that you think will truly move the needle so to speak. If those are going well and this is not translating into revenue or profits or the things that are on that indirect impact list, then look at your externalities. One of those things is likely causing the disconnect.
Once that is fixed, there will likely be a positive correlation once again. [End of Audio]
Assignment:
This assignment is designed to align with specific program student learning outcome(s) in your program. Program Student Learning Outcomes are broad statements that describe what students should know and be able to do upon completion of their degree. Signature/Benchmark Assignments are graded with a grading guide or an automated rubric that allows the University to collect data that can be aggregated across a location or college/school and used for course/program improvements.
Read the following scenario:
You have just been promoted to the Lead Marketing Director position within an advertising company. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently investigating one of your advertising campaigns for "Mike's Meatless Burger" which has been accused of using deceptive marketing practices due to the unsubstantiated claim of being "the tastiest meatless burger in the world." In addition, the independent taste testers used to validate this claim have been found to consist largely of paid company employees. Your task is to: 1) replace this slogan with something that can be more easily substantiated, 2) develop a new IMC that focuses primarily on younger consumers in an online environment, and 3) establish evaluation metrics that can be used both to validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of your advertising campaign.
Write a 1,300- to 1,400-page paper in which you include the following:
• Summarize the issues presented in the scenario.
• Determine whether the claim should be considered deception or puffery, and provide justification for your answer.
• Determine whether or not the advertising practices should be considered unethical, and provide justification for your answer.
• Develop a new slogan for the advertising campaign, and explain why you think this new slogan will be more effective and easier to substantiate.
• Select three or more digital marketing or social media tools around which to build your new advertising campaign, and explain why you believe these tools will provide you with a competitive advantage for your particular market.
• Determine metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of each tool in reaching its intended target market, with a focus on the value each tool provides to both the consumer and the business.
• Discuss two marketing communications, regulations, and standards with which the company must comply in order to use the digital communications you have presented.
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also Include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.