Nanotargeting marketing messages
My brother Josh Koster works in politics. He does “new media” at Chong & Koster, which means that he handles doing viral and Internet marketing of campaigns — not the presidential ones, but downticket ones… like Al Franken’s. (If this interests you, they are always looking for new advertising talent).
Ars Technica just posted an article about something Josh wrote for Politics which he calls “Long Tail nanotargeting” of marketing messages. I thought both were a great read, and have relevance and applicability well outside of politics.
People don’t go to one place, looking for one thing. Their whims take them to a million places. The trick is to be everywhere, with tightly targeted messages. It’s about showing them highly relevant factoids/ads tailored to the whim they’re currently indulging, which if clicked, will redirect them to a relevant part of your website or related off-site content. In short, long-tail nanotargeting takes those little gems—be it an endorsement, video, news story, or ask—and shows it to the people who would care.
— Josh is Managing Partner at Chong & Koster
9 Responses to “Nanotargeting marketing messages”
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If I were advertising an MMO on Myspace and Facebook, I’d emphasize the social aspects of the game. I’d provide a different emphasis to tech sites, and yet another to achievement-oriented gamer sites. It would definitely help to have multiple viral campaigns going at once, though managing that could get tricky.
In the context of our socialization discussions, we could do a better job of matching up recruits and guilds with more targeted search capabilities. I would love to log into a game, fill out a short survey about my gaming habits and preferences, and be able to match that to the profiles of guilds that would best suit my playstyle.
To take an example that’s on the fringes of virtual worlds, but is something I’ve been playing quite a lot of lately; Rock Band 2 in online mode will place you in a random band based solely on which instrument you’re playing. Often I find myself in the midst of a group of black-clad kids in gas masks expressing disbelief that I haven’t downloaded the latest nu-metal track pack. It would be a great relief to be able to enter, “Expert vocalist, classic rock”, have the program crunch my downloaded content, scores and rankings, and get a targeted placement in a band at my skill level and style.
Marketing in the MMO market is still pretty infantile, so looking at what works in other industries is a good way to improve on this. Currently marketing for MMOs consists of posting screenshots, videos and interviews with some money thrown at PR firms and blanket advertising. People get the brightest heads together in the ‘creation’ part, but then lack all and any innovation when it comes to getting it out to the public.
Take Eve Online for example – everyone marvels at their steady growth and wonders how that happened. Explanations like ‘good game’ and ‘has its niche well covered (space)’ get thrown around. People tend to overlook that EVE Online is the only MMO which runs an affiliate program – and provides some excellent creatives for it. They’re literally the default ad on most smaller MMO networks when there are no paid advertising orders. The constant exposure they get is invaluable… and they hardly spend anything on this ($7 per new subscriber!).
The marketing side often gets overlooked in this business. Companies might be well advised to get rid of their CPM-buying, traditional PR writing force and look into new methods if they don’t want to continue being the next WoW-success-imitation-failure. Niche marketing and opening new publicity channels like described here, could very well be the way to go.
“Impressions (the number of time your ad actually appears) are also important because of a psychological phenomenon known as source amnesia. Simply put, people remember “facts,” but not where they heard them. If someone reads a factoid in one of your text ads while skimming the headlines, that fact can become as real as the headlines themselves. (It’s the same phenomenon that makes attack ads work.)”
This is pretty scary stuff when you think about how newspapers are failing and now we’re all supposed to rely on blogs for news and commentary — when in fact it looks like our Google search will lead us to “news” which in fact will merely be a nano-targeted niche ad.
What would I have to do to get Al Franken out of my search results?
-“Al Franken”
Michael, that’s not going to work obviously, as when I go searching for, say, something about gas tax in my state, I can’t know in advance that Al Franken’s people are lurking there trying to pounce on me with a political add in my search results, such as to negate him out of the search.
You can after the first time you run the search and get oodles of Franken.
For instance, every couple of months I run a Google search on an old friend’s name hoping I’ll locate her. But it happens that there’s a pianist of some caliber with the same name whose music sheets are apparently all over the Internet. So I run the search, and then, being pretty certain my friend is not said pianist (and the score wouldn’t help me find her anyways), I add in -piano or -music or -score.
You can do the same thing with Al Franken or any political ad you don’t want to see.
[…] is a shoutout to my younger brother Josh (who has featured on the blog here before) — his firm Chong+Koster, which does political new media services, has just announced a […]
[…] is a shoutout to my younger brother Josh (who has featured on the blog here before) — his firm Chong+Koster, which does political new media services, has just announced a […]