Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category
May
29
While 2007 newspaper advertising revenue dropped 9.4% – the biggest plunge in 50 years (source), internet advertising gained an incredible 26% (source). The total revenue for newspapers still dwarfs internet ($42 billion compared to $21 billion) but with 25% gains year over year, it’s still a matter of time before internet catches up. How did other media types do?
- Cable advertising was up 11% (source)
- Local broadcast TV advertising was down 4.4% (source)
- Radio advertising was down 2% (source)
- Outdoor advertising was up 7% (source)
- Magazine advertising was up 6% (source)
More and more advertisers are migrating to the mediums that can target by niche. This is reflected in the growth of internet, cable, and magazine.
Posted in Advertising, Service Industry, Web & SEO
May
12
On Friday, I attended a luncheon hosted by the Tampa Bay Chapter of the American Marketing Association held at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center to learn how Disney’s theatrical production, The Lion King is promoted through marketing, advertising, and public relations. Whether or not you enjoy Broadway shows or anything to do with Disney, there is much to be gleaned from the incredibly successful marketing of this production. To date, the show has generated more than $3.2 billion and attracted 30 million theatergoers around the world.
The presentation was delivered by Scott A. Hemerling who currently oversees the marketing, advertising, publicity, and promotions as the National Press Representative for the national tours of Disney’s THE LION KING. Prior to this, he worked in the same capacity representing the third national touring production of The Phantom of the Opera.
Some of the more interesting aspects of Scott’s presentation detailed their careful selection of those cities in which they perform, and how they tailor the marketing strategy for each location. This can consist of everything from messaging to displays to involvement with the community. For a 2nd-tier city like Tampa, their marketing and advertising budget consists of around 12-15% of gross revenue or roughly $125 – 150,000. Much of this goes to carefully selected ad and banner placements and media buys. Surprisingly, none of this budget goes to online marketing, but that is something Scott admittedly said needs to change.
Where The Lion Kings gets its greatest reach, however, is through the strength of their brand. Media outlets want to be associated with the show regardless of whether they are directly receiving ad revenues. They will hold contests and promotions with ticket giveaways to demonstrate a link with the show and their community. Scott and his team are happy to oblige as long as these partners adhere to their branding standards.
It is such a powerful community event that they would be remiss not to be involved. Aside from the entertainment value, the economic impact of the show generates an additional $3 for every $1 spent. Just think about an entire stage crew living in your town for 2 months, let alone many other ancillary items and expenditures.
On top of the marketing budget for each city, there is also a general budget for the creation of tchotchke items like you see in the picture. Notice, by the way, what seems at first like such a simple logo for such an extravagant production translates so well no matter the medium. You could see the lion on a giant billboard, or the head of a tack.
Right now, The Lion King is entertaining audiences in two locations. As soon as the Tampa show comes to an end the crew will be packed up in 24hrs and on to the next location, continuously leapfrogging the other production from one destination to the next. It is an impressive undertaking that requires more than a dull roar to fill seats and perpetuate the show. Aside from an aggressive online strategy, Scott and his team have a great formula, and it was very interesting to learn how they have constructed their marketing strategy.
Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Member Orgs, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO
Mar
13
The annual ADDY Awards ceremony was held this past Friday night, and a few of us here at Twelve Horses attended. If you remember from last year, there is always a theme. This time it was all about the t-shirt. Just use the “A” in ADDY to come up with a phrase of your liking. Anything goes. Here’s what Twelve Horses rolled with at the event.
All in good fun, and despite our snarky anarchy behavior we managed to walk away with a couple of awards of our own.
We received a gold ADDY for the design of the Monterey County Convention & Visitors Bureau’s website, as well as a silver Addy for an email design done for Incline Creek Estates, which is located on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe in Incline Village. If we ever decide to recreate superman’s castle all in lucite, these will go into the construction.
Thanks to A2N2 for a fun event!
tags: advertising, awards, web design, nevada, lake tahoe
Posted in Advertising, Email, Humor, Reno-Tahoe, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO
Sep
5
Want to know about one simple SEO strategy that takes less than five minutes to implement and can have a very positive result in regards to rankings in the search engines? If so get ready to change the footer on your website.
The footer on your website usually simply contains a copyright statement and sometimes some other links. Many websites have a two line footer where one line is devoted to links and the other is devoted only to the copyright. Adding a company statement to your footer is an easy way to implement an seo strategy that is simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. Here is an example:
Previous footer: © 2007 Twelve Horses
New SEO Friendly Footer: © Copyright 2007 Twelve Horses – A Web Design, Development & Search Engine Optimization Company in Reno & Utah
It usually works best when you have the text footer [non-link footer] fit on one line. Here are some key points that this new footer accomplishes:
1. This particular website or business is focused on providing web design, web development, seo or search engine optimization, email marketing, and social marketing services. Although that is a very long list sometimes you have to pick and choose what you can fit in a footer. The above example ensures that every single page of the website contains the keyword phrases of ‘web design, development, and search engine optimization’. This will help the search engines recognize that this website is related to those key terms since they appear on every webpage. This strategy not only assists search engines in knowing what services you may provide but also human web visitors. If a website visitor can not figure out what the website is all about they general do one of two actions; either leave or look in the footer for an ‘about us’ link. Having this line of text in the footer ensures that if they do glance at the footer they will be able to know what the website is about without having to click to another page.
2. The above example also contains ‘Reno and Utah‘ in the sentence. Twelve Horses has headquarters in Reno, Nevada with a secondary office in Salt Lake City, Utah. Having these terms in the footer lets the search engines know what geographic area this particular website primarily provides web services to. You may wonder why the footer contains Reno, a city, and Utah, a state. Through some keyword research it was discovered that people in Salt Lake City generally search for ‘utah [keyword]‘ rather than ’salt lake city [keyword]‘, maybe because Salt Lake City is too long or time consuming to type out and Utah only has one major metropolitan area which is the wasatch front. On the other hand Nevada contains several metropolitan areas such as Reno, Las Vegas, etc. which are spread out from each other. From keyword research we discovered people in Nevada are more likely to type in the major metropolitan area they are in compared to just ‘Nevada [keyword]‘. Again, this also provides website visitors information on the geographic area the company is based in by glancing at the footer.
3. This is a very simple and effective SEO strategy that literally should only take 5-10 minutes to implement on your website and will have a profound effective compared to the investment of time that is required.
If you enjoyed this SEO strategy and would like us to post more please post a comment and we will be happy to share our knowledge with you.
Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Reno-Tahoe, SEO, Salt Lake City, Utah, Web & SEO, Web Design
