What device did Harold P. Brown invent in the late 1880s to help Thomas Edison publicize the dangers of alternating current?

If you know the answer to this question, and you are an rf or wireless engineer, you would be part of the way towards entering a drawing for a Kindle.

For one of our semiconductor clients we’re running a campaign that features a number of brain-teaser questions like the one above. It’s part of a broader celebration of a significant milestone for the company, and our job is to help turn out the right audience.

Less than halfway through the program, we’re about to hit our overall campaign goals.

How did that happen? Well, we can’t reveal all the special sauce, although Jeff Hardison would be glad to discuss them with you one-on-one.

But here are some of the things that are going right.

• Knowing the audience – engineers are smart, competitive and of course geeky. Technical trivia questions are naturally alluring to them.
• Using an integrated effort – with our broad marketing toolset, we are able to strategize the campaign, develop the microsite, design and run ads, produce and distributed eDM messages, and get the word out on social media channels. Let’s see your specialty agency try that.
• Having some fun – the theme, look and tone of the piece are somewhat more playful than the day-to-day communications from the client. But we’ve learned that engineering audiences enjoy a little humor, as long as it’s done intelligently.

Once the campaign is over, we’ll create a case study of this program and put it with our other case studies on our website. You can read all about it then.

Oh, and the answer is the electric chair.

In past posts, we’ve explored how banner advertising remains a workhorse for deep tech marketers.

We explained how your banner ads get greater share of mind as other advertisers go dark. We also showed you an example of a powerful ad we did that pulled in an astounding 15% click-through.

Later, we referenced a B2B Magazine article about how banner ads are becoming a stronger marketing tool. We’re already seeing how the new formats and tracking capabilities mentioned in the article are helping to refresh our clients’ programs.

In both posts, we stayed pretty close to the hard-and-fast measurable of click-through. After all, banner ads are typically considered as the front end of a lead generation campaign. But secretly we wanted to tell you all about how they do far more than that, building awareness and recall as well.

Thanks to this article in the Silicon Alley Insider, we can do just that. The article quotes a study of 80 big-brand campaigns that should expand your opinion about the humble online ad – or as they called them, “display ads.”

• Improvement in awareness. Exposure to a branded display ad made Web users 50% more likely to search for that brand one week later. That lift carried on for weeks, with a 38% increase a full four weeks after seeing the ad.
• Improvement in site engagement. Viewers of a display ad spent 55% more time when they eventually visited the advertiser’s Web site, compared to those who did not see the ad.
• Improvement in ecommerce results. When comparing Web site visitors who had seen the display ads to those who did not, the former group spent 7% more, on average.

Our own measurement of client campaigns shows similar effects within electronics markets. In one instance, a semiconductor client had targeted an increase in brand awareness of 10%. After a worldwide advertising campaign dominated by online advertising, audience familiarity and top-of-mind recall were up across the board. In one particularly important market, familiarity jumped 83% and recall shot up 70%.

Great results, not even counting the clicks.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davichi/ / CC BY 2.0

“Life. Give my creation life!”

Who among us hasn’t screamed that sentiment to the heavens? We’ve labored long into the night, fervent in our belief, undaunted by doubters. We’ve launched our Web site, social media campaign, advertising program or lead nurturing effort. Now, show us signs of life!

I was reminded of that feeling as one of our teams described the activity of a blog we manage for a large IT industry client. They had worked for months to develop the strategy, cajole contributors, prepare the site, coordinate all the moving parts and deliver it to the world.

And now, a pulse!

• Traffic has jumped in the last few weeks.
• We have more contributors, and more people interested in posting.
• Even though the comments are few, the ones we’re getting are substantive.
• We’re starting to see important keywords creep up in the search engines.
• We’re able to track how the blog plays with other marketing programs, such as the email newsletter and Web site (and vice versa).

There is still much work ahead of us to raise this toddler to its full potential in the client’s marketing mix. But oh, those first steps on its own are sweet.

Photo: Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.”

After a vigorous day in the office, there’s nothing I like more than kicking off the heels, shaking up a cocktail, sinking into my favorite couch… and picking up The Economist.

That’s how I discovered “Here We Go Again,” which looks at the parallels between this recession and the last one to rock the IT world in 2001. Certainly some of the distress seems eerily familiar. But the article is quick to point out that growth of some form is still expected in global IT spending. The recession is real, but it is affecting our industry in different ways and in different niches.

One phrase piqued my interest – “cold technology.” The antithesis of “hot” new technologies, these cold wares are established products and services that save money and allow for more flexibility. For IT managers, the article mentions “commodity hardware, open-source software such as the Linux operating system and programs offered over the Internet, or ‘software as a service.’”

If you sell to IT buyers, this may be a good trend to consider. Downplay the newness of your products or services, and focus on how they are proven to reduce costs and increase flexibility.

But there’s another wrinkle here. Like your IT buyers, you’ve made an investment in your marketing infrastructure. You’re probably thinking about means to lower costs and increase your options – the cold wares of marketing.
Let me give you an example. How much have you already invested in your lead database? Why not leverage that investment through lead nurturing programs? Develop new offers and assets for those leads. You’ll spend less than if you tried to generate new leads, and you’ll open up new options to reengage your sales team with prospects who have already expressed interest.

How much do you invest in advertising? Add a microsite to give your prospects more reason to respond. A microsite can give prospects multiple options to engage your company, from a simple download to a full-blown demo, and increase the impact of your advertising program.

Before long, you’ll have it down cold.

Could there be a better time for online advertising? Perhaps not.

In Advertising Age, Steve Rubel comments on how lousy banner advertising has become in “Banner Ad Quality Takes a Dive With The Economy.” That’s because the companies that do good online campaigns are cutting back, so banner ads picturing “big bellies” and “credit scores” are moving to the forefront.

When other companies pull back on communications, your online ad campaigns have a clearer field to play on. Read more about this phenomenon and our high-tech marketing strategy for the recession in our newsletter.

Rubel’s article concerns the entire online ad industry. Let us add our perspective as deep-technology advertising experts. Our experience, like Rubel‘s, confirms that online ads do build brand awareness. But we’ve also shown that, contrary to Rubel’s assertion, online ads can do a great job at direct response – if they are created within an effective strategy focused properly on the audience.

Check out this semiconductor company online ad we created last year. Working closely with our client, we determined the best strategy, placement and content to get engineers to take action. Then we put our big creative guns to work on it. According to numbers in Rubel’s article, a 0.15% click-thru rate would have beaten the industry average. A 1.5% rate would have been remarkable.

The ad achieved a 15% average click-thru rate in a three-month run.

No one can guarantee a killer result like that. But it does prove that, with targeted strategy and great creative execution, online advertising can drive measurable results. With today’s lack of competition in online advertising, this may be the best time to prove it for yourself.

Sure, you say. Of course marketing pros recommend maintaining your marketing investment during a recession.

After all, they’re marketers.

Yet several research studies have shown how companies that maintain marketing perform better during a recession. More interestingly, they continue to outperform their peers for years afterward!

In the recent Deep Tech Thoughts newsletter, McBru CEO Kerry McClenahan examines this lesson and lays out several more about how deep-tech companies like yours can tailor their marketing programs for the times. Why to keep your optimism. Where to focus your investments. What role advertising should play. How PR and social media may fit in.

Kerry should know.

Over 16 years, McBru has ridden out several business cycles, and helped numerous semiconductor, software, and IT companies to jump on “the new opportunities arising from tumultuous business conditions.”

In a crowded, noisy marketplace, here’s an approach that may help you break through the clutter:

Think inside the box.

In other words, as you compete for share of voice and a few fleeting seconds of customer attention, don’t forget the common sense connections you may already have with your audience. Sometimes that’s all that’s needed to get their attention.

Case in point: We developed a number of print advertisements for one of our clients last year. In one campaign, the primary message boiled down to “still the leader with the best selection in this corner of the market.” After exploring a number of ways to embody the idea, we agreed on a concept that was, shall we say, in the center of the box.

Product shots and specs.

These are the bread and butter for electronics engineers. So when the readership studies came back at the end of the year, guess which one of last year’s ads broke into the top 10 for this market?

Very often there are strategic reasons to explore powerful new means of expression. Indeed, in other years and market segments, our most creative campaigns have brought home the honors. But sometimes we have to be smart enough to remember when to stay firmly in the box.

According to a study done by Starcom USA, Tacoda and comScore, the majority of CTRs are generated by only about 6% of the total online population. This means that the CTRs are really measuring a very small percentage of the population and do not accurately represent a company’s overall brand affinity. Another interesting finding the study uncovered was that there is “no connection between measured attitude toward a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked.” If I’m not supposed to measure our brand awareness campaigns by CTRs, what should I base it off of?
We should link the amount of “online exposure to sales,” or correlate the online presence with the sales figures of a company. CTRs are better metrics for direct response advertising campaigns, not brand awareness.

Google has finally gotten the present it’s been hoping Uncle Sam would finally pony up. Today the Federal Trade Commission voted to let the online giant go ahead and buy up the ad company DoubleClick. Read more »