What if marketers could find a medium to place their advertising for little to no cost, be in an environment perfectly attuned to their message, and be seen by an audience there is nearly all their
target. Do you think they would immediately jump at the chance? Well most of the top 100 brands from 2000 haven’t figured it out yet.
You know those big-name marketers who spent in the
neighborhood of $25 billion in advertising with about two-thirds of it spent in television. Of these brands, only 19 of them have the vision to use their OWN website to run their own TV spots. That’s
right. Over 80 percent of the nation’s leading brands are passing on the perfect venue to run their decision-influencing commercials, a place that for many is a final point of purchase (79 of these
brands sell their product or a type of merchandise online).
In fact, this isn’t the only missed opportunity these high-flying marketers are making. With the assistance of Sara Eisenman from the
MediaPost Research Department, I analyzed what these top 100 brands are actually doing on their own websites to market themselves.
First off, 95 percent of these brands are using a URL that is,
or is close to, their brand name—only five are using the consumer unfriendly “parent company” URL. This is obviously a good start to helping your customer find you on the web.
As I mentioned,
only 19 brands were playing their :30 and :60 spots online. However, of these, we only found 12 sites that made the viewing or downloading of the spots easy. The rest were cumbersome and long. Also,
most sites only supported one type of player, with the vast majority being QuickTime.
I’m sure many of 80 brands not showing their spots are waiting for the broadband revolution to come along so
their commercials can be viewed like the ones seen on TV. I might buy that reasoning for a moment if it wasn’t for the fact that these same brands are doing very little else to showcase their
advertising to this prime target audience. In fact only 59 percent are doing any sort of advertising at all. Here is just a sample: 25 percent have their brochure online, 12 percent their catalog, 6
percent their radio ads, 5 percent their magazine ads, 2 percent their newspaper ads and 1 percent their billboards. Interestingly enough, only 9 brands even placed a banner ad on their own site to
provide some internal cross-promotion. Gee, last time I was in Burger King, I was surrounded by posters promoting special deals.
In terms of promotions on these same 100 sites, only 63 had some
sort of promotion to reward a visit or encourage return visits: 48 percent had sales or special pricing, 18 percent were running a contest, giveaway or sweepstake, 8 percent had a special promotion,
and 2 percent made gift certificates available.
Despite the billions being spent in traditional media, brands need to consider their own websites for these high-impact branding messages, because
there is a generation coming of age that is not viewing as much TV, reading as many magazines, or listening to the radio as frequently. They are on the web and on your site.
Next month, I’ll take
a look at a couple of innovative brands that are really using their websites as advertising vehicles.