Make Way for eBooks and Book Ads

Last month, Barnes & Noble launched an online store for digital books with 700,000 titles. Moreover, they intend to stock more than a million eBooks in the coming 12 months. To read them, you can download the free eReader from their website which is compatible with iPhone, iTouch, BlackBerry, PC and Mac. It is interesting to note here that it is not compatible with either Kindle from Amazon or the Sony Reader. To get ahead in the battle of eBooks, Amazon recently released a free software to turn our iPhones and iTouch into Kindles.

If all this wasn't enough, now there are talks of placing ads in e-books! Imagine scrolling down Pride and Prejudice to find an ad for a toothpaste. Thankfully, the ads will try and be contextual or be based on the customer's user profile. As if that is any relief.

Don't get me wrong here. Though I love the smell of a brand new book and lose track of time in a bookstore, I am not really averse to the idea of eBooks. I am all for technology and moving on...and of course, marketing.

I see the bright side like how ads in eBooks will bring down the cost of both the books and the reading devices.

The ad revenue will positively impact the author, the publisher, the e-book store, the device manufacturers.

The competition between Amazon and Barnes & Noble will result in more and more eBooks and also a better reading experience.

The printing world is anyway trying to revamp itself through this digital revolution. One more change wouldn't hurt.

But what if this trend trickles down to print? According to Austin Modine in The Register, it is a possibility for anybody who wants to avail of a lower price in an on-demand book from Amazon.

Now that may be taking things too far. Or is it the future of reading?

Advertising Budget in a Slow Economy

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As the cartoon by Tom Fishburne suggests, this is exactly what some premium brands are doing or thinking of doing. My advice: DONT! In times of economic downturn, the last thing you want to do is lose your premium advantage. Instead,

1. Focus on your core brand value and maintain it.

2. Try and avoid advertising budget cuts as much as possible. When the economy revives as we all know it will, you think it will do your brand any good if you had zero consumer contact during the slowdown.? Naah! I didn't think so.

3. No need to get all sappy. Just maintain brand loyalty through presence in multi-media. Nobody likes to be patronized, right?

4. This maybe a good time to go digital. Saves you money, expands your reach. According to Advertising Age, Procter & Gamble slashed U.S. ad buys 18% in the first quarter but more than doubled digital spending. "Our media strategy is pretty simple: Follow the consumer," said Marc Pritchard, global marketing officer. "And the consumer is becoming more and more engaged in the digital world."

5. Brush-up on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO (Social Media Optimization). These are the advertising tools which will rule the coming years.

6. While buying media, this is the time to take advantage of the low cost of entry and increase your share of voice across categories.

The points mentioned above are not new to many as is evident from the fact that brands like P&G did not slash their advertising budget even during the Great Depression. According to TNS Media Intelligence (via Media Post), U.S. media spending declined 14.2% in Q1, mainly because of automobile brands. But companies like GE, Sprint, Johnson & Johnson and Verizon increased their media spend during the same period! Apart from financial gain, these companies will be perceived as stable and consistent, both desirable qualities for any brand. Don't you think?

Relevance is the Soul of an Advertisement

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Source: http://www.adoholik.com/ Via [adsoftheworld]
Agency: JWT London, UK
Creative Directors: Nick Bell, Russell Ramsey, Howard Wilmott
Art Director: Mark Norcutt
Copywriter: Laurence Quinn
Photographer: Mike Russell
Account: John Mitchell, Nick Jackson

Lengthy is out. Brevity is in. Email is out, IM is in. Expressing yourself within 140 characters via Tweeter is in. Attention span of the average consumer is fast decreasing. Time is the new currency - proclaimed JWT, as part of their revamping efforts in 2005. They also started "one-line brief" where the account managers compress a three page-long brief into a line and presents the same to the creative group. This practice led to hilarious situations and plenty of confusion. Glad we came out of that one. Sometimes information helps. And then there is too much information. How do we strike the balance?

Keep it relevant. If "Brevity is the soul of wit", as the Bard would like us to believe, then "Relevance is the soul of an advertisement". And of course, credibility is every bit as important. As I have said earlier, nothing speeds up the failure of a bad product like a piece of good advertisement. Simply put, you don't want people to know how bad your product is. Anyway, let's go back to relevance.

Being relevant should not be confused with typical idea-killers like "making the logo bigger" or "mentioning the brand name thrice" or "listing benefits". Relevance do not stifle creativity. Take the above Kit Kat ad as an example. They have even showed the product for crying out loud!

As we move towards digital advertising, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) becomes one of our most important tools and relevance the key factor. If the right words and the right tags are not used, wouldn't we find ourselves lost in a sea of digital information? CDA, a digital communications consultancy carried out a study that revealed the importance of both keywords and carewords in SEO. Keywords being the short precise words used to search for a particular information and then carewords being the more descriptive words on the webpage itself which invoke action.

Traditional media may have been kinder towards lack of relevance but there is no place for irrelevant ads in the future. Consumer profiling is becoming more specific and advertisers are choosing their images and words with care. True, mindless ads will still exist but it will get that much harder for them to sell the goods.