By Anya Khait In June of this year Ask Jeeves (ask.com) plastered 100 million stickers on bananas to replace the usual Dole labels. The stickers asked questions such as "How do I make banana cream pie?" or "When is a banana ripe?" The California-based Fruit Label Co. sold the space to Ask.com, as well as 15 million stickers on apples and 60 million on oranges to other advertisers. In November of 1999, Jeeves had stuck 15 million stickers on apples, asking questions such as "How do I make California Wrapples?" This fall the Fox Family Channel will follow in these footsteps and advertise their spine-tingling event, "13 Days of Halloween," featuring over 100 hours of frightening and fearsome Halloween-themed programming from October 19-31, on 25 million apples to be labeled and shipped to stores across the U.S. from October 1-31 with the aid of the Fruit Label Co. The fruit label craze was started by Kirshenbaum Bond and Partners for Snapple in 1993. KB&P was assigned to launch a new flavor but with a limited media budget. The Media department negotiated with fruit wholesalers to advertise Snapple Mango Madness by placing a sticker that stated "Now available in Snapple Mango Madness" on 30 million mangoes nationwide. After that the Fruit Label Co. took over and brought to life, among others, a campaign for Jim Carrey's film "Liar Liar" with the actor's face plastered on some 12 million California apples. Back then, The Wall Street Journal filed the whole concept under "humor," but the idea caught on. And why not - the labels cost only about $6.50 per 1,000 apples. Since then, bananas have featured ABC's "Another fine use of yellow" and "TV. Zero Calories" stickers, the "Lost World" was found on some apples, and CBS welcomed shoppers home. How long before someone thinks of Halloween pumpkin stickers? - MediaPost staff writer Anya Khait may be reached at anya@mediapost.com
By Jim Meskauskas It amazes me every day when I see RFPs come back for one of our shop's most recent buys. We send out RFPs requesting some specific information about a site, a proposal for inventory and placement, acceptable creative units, and some pricing. We even give a range of what we are looking for in terms of inventory type and level of spend. Most of the time our spending levels are dictated by a strategy applied universally to our clients when they are going onto the web for the first time. That "categorical imperative" (forgive me, Immanuel) of online advertising is "testing." When pressed, nine times out of ten, a client will always come to realize that the buy you put together for them needs to satisfy a direct response strategy because their success (read YOUR success) will be judged by a cost-per-action metric. Yet many times, sites continue to advance proposals to clients that seek significant monthly spending commitments above and beyond what seems like a reasonable test. Many of these sites are unproven and in this day and age of accountability, advertisers are expecting to learn from their advertising in ways they'd only been dreaming of before. What messages resonate with audiences? Which turn them off? What combination of placement and ad unit yields the most efficient cost per action? Which sites drive customers with the highest lifetime value? The list of all the things advertisers want to, and can, learn about their advertising and about those to whom they advertise is long. Ad vendors have hawked their wares for years using the claim that their audiences are the best suited for an advertiser. In traditional media, when asked to prove this claim, planners and buyers were inundated with reams of research and subscriber studies to demonstrate the intrinsic value of a vehicle. Surprisingly, this was enough. But that isn't good enough for a medium as accountable as the web is (and it won't be good enough for traditional media, either, in the future). Advertisers need to be able to test the vehicle before buying into it big. They need to be allowed to minimize their financial exposure at the outset and learn just whether or not a given vehicle works. So for the first month's buy, pick the sites that have the audience you are looking for and come at a low CPM. I understand cost isn't always the reason to make a choice for or against a site, but you really want to minimize your exposure first time out of the gate. If sites are performing well, bully for you! If not, well, at least it didn't cost you a small fortune in branding opportunity sponsorships to find out. This approach is in everyone's best interests. - It's good for advertisers because it retains their enthusiasm for the media at large because of its flexibility and utility. Making expenditures with some smarts doesn't look too bad to a board or a balance sheet, either. - Sites win because, if, indeed, they turn out to be for an advertiser w