Advertising Today Jan 18 - The Bad and The Ugly

Time for this week’s installment of The Bad and The Ugly courtesy of two articles I read yesterday and today.

First The Bad

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there is an article interviewing Richard Castellini who is VP, Consumer Marketing for CareerBuilder.com. The article describes CareerBuilder.com’s strategy for advertising on this year’s Super Bowl. Among other topics covered is using monkeys in advertising and their strategy for running the ads. And, that’s when I started thinking about monkey business for Super Bowl Advertising.

The rationale for running last year’s ad was that brand perception in the marketplace lagged competition (ie, Hotjobs and Monster) and the ads were a great way to get the message out and energize the company. Plus, when they looked at the results they saw record gains in traffic and search the week after the Super Bowl. They seemed very proud of these accomplishments and looked forward to this year’s advertising.

Hmmmm – it seems to me that they should have used the advertising dollars on improving their product (when was the last time you used their site?) instead of spending $2 million per 30 seconds to drive traffic to their website and jazz up their employees. No wonder marketing departments sometimes get a bad reputation in companies.

Now The Ugly

In yesterday’s MediaPost there was an article that WhenU and 1800Solutions are bundled with download disasters. What this means is that these two marketing tools are bundled with - you guessed it – Spyware. This makes my stomach roll around in fits.

What makes advertisers think that they could use WhenU.com to get legitimate traffic? With all of the improvements with ad serving and legitimate behavioral targeting, why not just avoid these types of Spyware companies?

Are you using either of these two for your internet advertising? Unless you are in the porn or gambling business maybe you should just stop it. Once you get 1800Solutions stuck on your PC and can’t remove it, maybe then you’ll try a legitimate alternative.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric