Dell Uses Social Media to Promote Brand

By Dave Fidlin

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, companies had one primary method of connecting with consumers, and that was through advertisements within the traditional forms of media: print publications (newspapers and magazines) and broadcast outlets (television and radio). The Internet, of course, has altered the playing field, and social media has become a prevalent method many companies have been using to reach out to new and existing customers.

Computer manufacturer Dell is among the companies that have been embracing social media to market new products. In fact, the company employs a chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, who is responsible for a swath of sites under the banner name Direct2Dell.

DMB’s Dave Fidlin recently spoke with Menchaca, a 17-year Dell veteran, about social media, and how the method will continue to shape the company’s marketing and outreach efforts in the future.

Can you explain your role as chief blogger for Dell?
My role is to keep things moving with our external network of blogs. Direct2Dell now exists in five languages. Direct2Dell is our main corporate blog. Beyond it, we have 7 additional blogs. Our latest is Direct2Dell India, which focuses content on one of our fastest-growing countries in Dell’s business.

How is Dell marketing beyond established, traditional methods? Is the company getting the word out about its products through such avenues as Facebook and Twitter?
Yes, very much so. We have two main pages in Facebook — Facebook for Home, which focuses on product and service information for consumers and Facebook for Business, which focuses on reaching business customers there. We’ve been very active on Twitter as a company since 2007. We use Twitter in 4 main ways: 1) to keep our customers informed 2) to engage our customers from different areas of our business 3) to sell to our customers who opt in to sites like @DellOutlet and 4) to support our customers. We now offer 24/7 support to customers on Twitter via @DellCares. See Dell.com/twitter for more details

Aside from the two big companies — Facebook and Twitter — how else is Dell using social media?
Our core strategy in social media is to go where our customers are. That means we maintain a Dell presence in many other social sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, Scribd and outside the US in Sina’s microblogging service. Beyond our own blogs, our forum site and all of our presence on outside social networks, we’re also focused on responding to comments on other places on the Web, like third-party user forums or blog sites.

Can you quantify, percentage-wise, how much of Dell’s marketing and outreach efforts go toward social media (versus traditional marketing) in 2010?
Our social media marketing budget is very small compared to our traditional marcom spend. Outside of some ad credits to drive awareness to the Dell Facebook for Home pages and drawing attention to some of our social media efforts via Dell.com, we spend very little to promote our social media activities.

Do you have an idea of what the ROI (rate of return) is for Dell’s social media efforts?
Yes, we do, and that’s an area where we are still working on. In the early days, we measured social media’s impact on customers’ perceptions and found a pretty strong correlation—at the low point in 2006, about 48 percent of what was said about Dell was negative. We were able to get that into the low 20+ percent range. Today, we’re able to track all the basic traffic numbers you would expect, but beyond traffic, we’re looking at things like reach, engagement, brand reputation and more. We’re also starting to use more of the same tools on the social media side that we’ve been using to measure Dell.com like Omniture. There’s still more work to be done, but we’re making progress.

Where, in your opinion, is social media heading into the future, and how is Dell going to stay on the pulse of this still-growing method of communication?
I really think over the next several years, social media will become an integral part of how companies in many industries will do business. To me it’s a natural progression to add from things like telephones, e-mail, the Internet, chat and beyond. Just like many other aspects of business, it all comes down to execution. In my view, companies who learn to use social media to really connect with their customers will have a huge fundamental advantage over companies who don’t.

Do you envision a day when social media might completely replace traditional marketing methods, or is that an extreme statement?
No way do I think that social media will ever replace traditional marketing methods. I do think that social media can and will continue to augment traditional marketing methods. I think social media will make companies smarter in how they market to and engage with customers, and I think that’s a good thing. Like many others in social media today, I’m glad to see the era of one-way push marketing giving way to something different – a place where customer feedback shapes the direction of the company.

A Good Chew: Orbitz’ Dirty Shorts Go Viral

By Ken Liebeskind

Product integration is the technique used to incorporate a sponsor’s product into branded videos, but the Wm Wrigley Jr. Company has gone over the top with the product inserts in the Orbit Gum Dirty Shorts, which debuted June 10. The Prom Date, a five minute video starring Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, incorporates the gum into the humorous video as it’s passed from the characters on numerous occasions, sparkling at one point to indicate an attitudinal change that prompts the parents to accept their daughter’s vile teacher as her prom date.

Actually the product integration in the dirty video is emblematic of the brand, which has been “cheeky and over the top on purpose,” according to Jeff Adkins, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Energy BBDO, the agency that has incorporated the dirty videos into its campaign for Orbit. “It breaks the fourth wall and allows you to have fun in the story, making the transition from a dirty situation to a clean one. It’s goofy fun.”

Prom Date is the first of three dirty videos for Orbit that will star Arnett, Bateman and other comedy stars. They are produced by Electus, Ben Silverman’s new media company that is partnering with celebrities to create branded content. Arnett and Bateman formed DumbDumb, the production company that created the Orbit videos.

The videos are playing at Youtube and Collegehumor.com, with 196,099 views recorded so far.

The dirty shorts are the first branded videos from DumbDumb and represent a driving force in contemporary marketing. “Major brands recognize that the media landscape is changing quickly and their success relies on their ability to expand well beyond traditional advertising,” said Drew Buckley, COO of Electus.

Adkins said Orbit gum is a favored brand among teens and young adults, so branded videos should be popular. “We’d been hoping to do something entertaining with Orbit for online content. We’ve done 25 TV commercials over the past nine years. This was the way to extend what we do in long form stories.”

The Future of Google’s Technology

By Barbara Gengler

Sara Kleinberg, Google’s head of marketing, leads Google’s marketing team for established industries. Sara’s team works with marketers from the retail and technology industries to provide insights into the value of online advertising and how marketers can connect with their target consumers through Google’s advertising platforms.

Prior to joining Google, Sara was a product marketing manager at American Express. Previously, Sara was a strategy consultant at The Parthenon Group in

Boston and worked in business development for various internet companies.  Sara holds an M.B.A. in Marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated magna cum laud with a B.A. in Communications from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Sara lives in New York City.

Could you talk about Google’s multichannel marketing and where the technology is heading?
Think about yourself as a consumer and when you’re thinking about buying something. More times than not the easiest thing to do when you’re first considering a purchase is you go to Google and search to get more information,  about something you’ll buy or something you’re planning to buy. So that’s kind of where it all begins and you might then search at the broad category level. Hey, I’m interested in re-doing my kitchen or you might say I’m ready to buy kitchen cabinets, and that would be product information, the second type of search. Then you might say how much do kitchen cabinets cost? Should I buy at  Home Depot or Lowe’s or should I get them custom? The fourth thing may be do I want to search because I’m about to drive over there and need directions to get there?

It all starts with the consumer and their interest in researching something and buying something. And because Google is a place consumers go to determine what they want to buy, it’s also a good place for retailers and other businesses to market their products and services. Because it is where in-market consumers are looking and researching and shopping. So that kind of ties in back into Adwords and why Adwords is successful and a useful forum for businesses that are trying to reach out to customers.

So the idea is because consumers are on Google search asking questions and stating their interests, Adwords platform enables businesses to place the right ad to the right user for right time to answer those inquiries. So that could be anything from big Fortune 500 companies or the Mom and Pop shops. Adwords can really serve the big to small and do that same service of connecting the right ad to the right consumer at the time based on the searches.

Now thinking about ecommerce I gave the four things that people look for. They look for category information, product information, price information or the link to the store. And so getting into multichannel, sometimes you’re looking online or searching online because you actually want to buy something online and that’s ecommerce.

Is the gap between expectations and capabilities in multichannel marketing significant? What challenges do companies face in planning, deploying and measuring campaigns?
Where the multichannel marketing approach comes into play is with the fourth type of search that links to the store offline. So again back to kitchen cabinets, if you need custom kitchen cabinets you may order them online or you may feel more comfortable going to store to talk to a representative. What we find in our consumer research is you still go to Google to search to do the research online but then you’ll actually visit the store and that’s what we call  (or a business thinks about) as multichannel.

If you think about retail overall and how big that market is online and offline, according to Forrester Research, 45 percent of all retail sales are impacted by online. So it’s not that the purchases are made online but the impact online, Forrester is recognizing how much of general business is impacted by this online research.

If I’m a pure-play ecommerce company and online search company, search marketing is a smart online marketing vehicle for me because that individual is searching online. If I’m a multichannel retailer that means I have ecommerce but I also have a physical store. Even if I’m just a physical store and I don’t have an ecommerce platform, (like a lot of local record shops that don’t have the  infrastructure to sell on line), but because like Forrester said 45 percent of sales are impacted by online, so even if I’m a record store that doesn’t have any ecommerce, that’s what multichanneling marketing is all about.

It’s about using the online channel to market your products and services even if the sale is made in the store. And as marketing is evolving and as consumer behavior is increasingly turning online into search ads the critical research piece to the purchase, it’s smart marketing for these multichannel or even offline businesses to use the search marketing to reach the consumer.

And so the whole Adwords platform or concept of search ads on Google is a way to enable that type of advertising. It’s a self-serve system that even a small cabinet maker or record shop or a big multichannel conglomerate can all access to run these search ads and respond appropriately with the right message to the right companies.

What are some of the most effective ways to get the most optimized campaign possible with Adwords?
At Google we encourage what is called test and learn. We do have some general pointers about ad copy and making sure that the ad copy is directly relevant to the search term that is typed in. And making sure it’s very clearly written and that it can have a special promotion reflects that in your ad copy because that’s going to attract attention.

So there are certain tips that we make available for how to write smart copy and then the other thing we encourage is trial and error so that the Adword system enables you to put several different variations of Ad copy and then you can see which one wins. You can trial and error and see what works best for you and see what works best for your business and your product set, or which products you should be promoting more heavily than others through this self-search system. Not only is it a way to place ads but it’s also a way to be strategic and to learn about your campaign because you get the feedback.

Another advantage of search advertising is the real-time feedback about what’s working whereas in traditional advertising it’s just not an option, like television advertising or newspaper circulars which are all traditional marketing vehicles for driving purchases. It’s difficult to know if the green circular or the blue circular works better, or if the picture of the bicycle or the picture of the tricycle is going to sell better. But on the Adwords marketing platform you can learn real time what’s going to be the most effective advertising for you.

Could you talk about measurement and ROI? Online marketing efforts are claiming a lot but without proper measurement, it doesn’t mean much. So what does Google think about ROI?
That builds on what I was going to explain - that one of the advantages and more unique attributes of online marketing is the ability to see results, to see who’s clicking on what. What online marketing provides is hard and fast data and real time reaction.

If you think about ROI, that is the return on your marketing investment, it depends on your marketing goals. So, for example, when we’re talking about ecommerce, one of my goals would be to get people to my website, and that’s something that I can easily measure on Google’s Adword platform, just by seeing who is clicking and the traffic that I’m getting. If you want to see the return on investment, clearly you’re interested in the sales or the actual transactions or the products that you’re able to sell, based on your advertising. And again that requires a little more analysis but Google has tools to help you do that.

You can sign up for free to get some of these tools that allow you to optimize based on your transactions and learn about that and that way you can better optimize your marketing so you can figure out which ads not only bring the most traffic to your site but you can also figure out which ads yield you the most purchases.

Google has these tools, conversion optimizer and conversion tracking. What Google offers is limited to online transactions. It’s possible but more complicated to also measure offline transactions so let’s talk about the world of online transactions.

Google has these free tools that any Mom & Pop or any major corporation can set up. One is called conversion tracking and one’s called conversion optimizer and if I were a retailer on my website I would set up some tracking links and input some of the information and set it up so that the tool tracks the search terms that are coming in or the ads that are getting clicked. It tracks in this online world on the back end, what kind of things are sold or what kind of transactions made on the back end and its all propriety to the retailer.

So if I’m the record shop that’s selling online and decide to sign on for one of these free tools that Google offers nobody else see that information, that’s my private information.

There are plenty of tools and products in the marketplace offered by many different companies. So again the advantage of online marketing is that it is trackable and it is accountable and it provides a lot of data to be able to make smarter marketing decisions based on the impact the ads are having. And now tie it back to ROI, if you understand the effectiveness of your ads, and you’re able to make smarter marketing decisions about which ads to run, you can optimize to get greater yield, more sales, more transactions or whatever your marketing goal is and then that yields you higher ROI versus the kind of traditional market model, its guesswork. You can try to figure it out, and there are ways and data models to help figure it out, but it’s much more complicated; it’s certainly not real time and it’s certainly not as accessible as implementing a free tool from Google’s.

Could you tell us about the vision for the Google Retail Blog?
At Google we have specialists to address different industries because we want to make sure we’re giving the best advice to businesses based on whether they are retailers or in the travel space or whatever it is. So I look after retail and technology, and we have this blog, the retail blog, for retailers whether they be Mom & Pop shops or large multichannel and this is where we provide tips and advice for smarter, more effective online marketing. For example, at the blog’s entry for April 7, which is called Get Ready for Outdoor Entertaining, there’s a trend that we noticed people searching for patio furniture, what kind of patio furniture and what’s on sale.

And by this blog we track and communicate these trends to help marketers be more effective. And in March there’s an entry about Mother & Father’s day coming up and we took a look at when are people searching for gifts for Mother’s Day and when are they searching for gifts for Father’s Day. This is all based on human behavior and we know that consumers start to search when they’re thinking about making a purchase or when they’re ready to make a purchase.

And so by revealing that information about these consumer insights and the learning we have about how consumers shop and how they research, it can help guide advertisers into when people are shopping, if they’re shopping more for Mom’s than Dads or Dad’s more than Mom’s. The blog is a forum for us to help by revealing some of these insights. And we can also provide information on the types of terms people are searching on. There’s an entry on March 25 for fastest rising search terms or things that people are typing into the search engine, what’s bubbling to the top of frequent new things. Here we see graduation party invitations and dresses for graduation. Because search is what consumers do when they’re thinking about shopping or what’s going on in their life right now, we can come up with a lot of insights on consumers behavior and consumer shopping behavior.

Brick Marketing

• Location: Boston and Medford, MA
• Number of Employees: 10
• Notable Clients: Somerset Industries, Data Direct and Century 21
• URL:Website:  http://www.brickmarketing.com/

Brick Marketing is a full service search engine marketing (SEM) firm that helps companies of all sizes and types increase sales through SEO and internet marketing.  With offices in Boston and Medford, Massachusetts, the firm is comprised of a knowledgeable team with vast experience in a broad range of business backgrounds, allowing them to effectively execute marketing strategies based on the needs of each individual client.  Sitting on a diverse portfolio of solutions, Brick Marketing has a little something for everyone, whether it is a start -up or Fortune 500 Company.

Contel Bradford of DMB recently caught up with Nick Stamoulis, Brick Marketing founder, to get his thoughts on marketing in the era of the social web.

What keeps Brick Marketing thriving in the highly competitive internet marketing business?
The internet marketing industry is very competitive, but we have built a nice niche by staying small, providing great results and service for all of our clients.  I think another nice aspect that we have built is our helpful SEO newsletter (with over 100,000 opt-in subscribers and my SEO blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal.  Click the link for more information about the Brick Marketing SEO newsletter – http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs044/1101650496996/archive/1102429142755.html.

Click the link for more information about the Brick Marketing SEO Blog.

In your opinion, how could a business benefit by implementing a three-pronged marketing strategy that involves email, search, and social media marketing? And what are the challenges of such an approach?
Search engine optimization, opt-in email marketing and social media marketing are all long term internet marketing channels.  They all help build trust and a solid reputation over time.  I think the biggest challenge of building a newsletter list or your organic visitors from the search engines is that these approaches take time and an extreme amount of commitment and patience.  This is an area that I see many clients’ struggle with, but overcome as well!  Personally, I think these approaches together are truly a triple punch that works well for most businesses.  But to clarify, SEO is something that works well for EVERY type of business, it’s not a matter of should I optimize my website it’s a matter of when!

How is Brick Marketing helping organizations capitalize on the social media frenzy?
At Brick Marketing, we offer 3 different types of service:  Full Service, Custom Training and Custom Consulting.  For social media marketing, over the past several years we have provided companies with these customized solutions based on their specific business and needs.  There are a few mistakes that I always see companies making with their social media marketing campaigns.  The first challenge is they don’t personalize their social media outlets.  Social media marketing is about people and communication. The second area of improvement for many companies is they tend to waste too much time on certain social media activities.  Social media marketing is the type of medium that you get out what you put in, but it is very easy to waste time on non-performing areas and/or not give it enough time to work.

What are the challenges of measuring social media marketing ROI?
Measuring the ROI of social media marketing is always very challenging because of the long term and sometime intangible nature.  I think social media marketing (like all other forms of internet marketing) has its place within each organization and is not the end all be all.  Many people are under the impression that social media will solve all of their sales problems.  This is generally not the case.  When you measure your social media, in my eyes it is simple, are you looking to increase your brand awareness in your industry?  Or are you looking to communicate to your customers and potential client?  Or are you looking to increase visitors over time?  The point here is measuring social media marketing is very different for every type of business but it should be tested accordingly.

With the social web continually changing the marketing landscape, what improvements do you think can be made to better measure campaign performance?
That is a loaded question and honestly I am not sure.  I think social media will certainly continue to change and the reporting metrics will change with it.  The bottom line in my mind and the best advice that I can give companies looking to building the social media or search engine presence is NEVER put all of your web marketing eggs in one basket, diversify your marketing portfolio!

AOL, Google: Searching for the Benjamins in Display Advertising

By Sheila Shayon

The first online advert ran on Oct. 24, 1994, on HotWired, the forerunner of Wired Magazine. It was 468 x 60 pixels and asked:

“Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”

And we did. The click-through rate was 42 percent. (For the record, Global Network Navigator ran the banner two or three weeks earlier, but HotWired garnered the coverage.)

Today’s display ads are virtual micro-sites, replete with interactive, social elements, animation and video. An example of an award-winning rich media ad:

In three days, this campaign earned 170 million impressions, 50,000 clicks and 17,000 hours of brand engagement, according to Google.

JPMorgan analyst, Imran Khan, predicts an $8.3 billion display advertising economy in 2010. The name of the game in the digital space has moved from search to advertising as the big brands step further into open access platforms with suites of tools and metrics to make it easier for advertisers and agencies to create and ’self-serve’ display ads and track and measure their effectiveness.

DMB spoke with Jeff Levick, executive vice president, AOL Advertising; and Rachel Nearnberg, Global Communications & Public Affairs, Google, about their advertising platforms.

AOL
AOL recently launched a beta version of Advertising.com Ad Desk. Levick was on the floor of Ad Tech San Francisco, where he said AOL’s presence in the middle of the exhibition was attracting traffic and attention. “It’s the most exciting experience at AOL you can imagine. We’re still testing Advertising.com Ad Desk, and learning as we go. It’s a huge leap forward, as it opens up all the inventory we have as well as gives access to a massive number of properties across the web through Ad.com.”

The AOL network has 78 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers and 70 of comScore’s Top 100 publishers. ‘Lead-back targeting’ is a distinguishing feature for AOL’s new platform, which allows advertisers to target their ads, and once it’s seen, re-target the same ad across the web. AOL’s suite of tools allows for retargeting consumers who have:

• Visited your website (Advertiser LeadBack)
• Seen or clicked on your ad creative (Creative LeadBack)
• Visited a webpage that you’re sponsoring (Sponsorship LeadBack)
• NOT visited your website - a great way to reach more unique visitors (Reverse LeadBack)
• Searched for a relevant word or phrase on AOL Search (SearchBack)

Formats include rich media, video and widgets, and AOL Advertising’s ad serving platform, ADTECH, manages campaigns across multiple platforms for web publishers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers.

“Transparency and control are the future of online advertising,” Levick says. “Providing clients with a greater level of personalized control over digital marketing campaigns is paramount as organizations continue to look for innovative ways to promote their brands and evaluate their ROI when planning campaigns.”

The build-out of Advertising.com Ad Desk over the last 10 months has deep-dived into technology to create the ‘lead-back targeting’ capabilities. Ads uploaded by the users are virus scanned and monitored as they run, as well as reviewed for ad spec compliance, quality and content.

Next up, Version 2 will deliver increased Reporting and Insights tools and metrics. “We’re connecting the advertising experience to the publishing side of the house. Church and state are talking,” Levick added.

Google
We all heard Eric Schmidt’s prediction that display advertising would be Google’s next billion-dollar business. According to Nearnberg, “In such a fragmented media landscape today, with users on social media sites, e-commerce, blogs or online games, the challenge is where best to reach people and how to tailor ads across thousands of sites and track performance.”

According to Google data, US users spend 12 hours online per week, about 32 percent of their media time. But online advertising comprises only 13.6 percent of US advertising spend. “Scale and reach are the key challenges, and serving display ads is a more sophisticated and complicated process than search,” Nearnberg says. “Our Content Network enables keyword, contextual targeting between ads and content.”

The Google Content Network serves hundreds of billions of ad impressions to more than 500 million Internet users worldwide every month. It includes several Google properties including Google Finance and YouTube, and reaches 100 countries, with ads in 20 languages. Major publishers include New York Times, LinkedIn, Univision, About.com, and Food Network. “94 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers have run campaigns on Google Content Network - display not search,” added Nearnberg.

For smaller businesses, Google’s Display Ad Builder, offers designed templates that enable the creation and distribution of an ad in minutes. The goal is to make display advertising as simple as search, those functions being complementary. “20,000 advertisers using Display Ad Builder are first-time users. We are adding the science of search to display advertising,” commented Nearnberg.

According to Comscore, “average lift of search activity when display was added to a campaign was 155 percent.”  Douglas Anmuth, a Barclay’s Capital media analyst, predicts that display ads will account for $1 billion in revenue in 2010, or about 4 percent of Google’s total sales.

Experts agree that the gold rush towards display advertising is still early stage. Predictions for the advertising landscape in the near future include: data will be more valuable than awards; ROI will be the metric of success; engagement will trump creativity; and the technology deep dive will continue - with those who can afford to own their own - in the driver’s seat.

In April 2005, DoubleClick released a white paper, “The Decade in Online Advertising (1994-2004) - Online Advertising.” The summary included: “Advertisers still lag consumers in their adoption of digital media. As broadband reaches more American homes, as entertainment companies develop more digital content, and as televisions, mobile phones and other devices further blur the distinction between “online” and “offline,” all advertisers will be forced to adapt faster to the new media environment or struggle to stay relevant.”

Five years later, the struggle continues - but advertisers are adapting faster, listening more to their consumers, and making online engagement a more worthwhile endeavor.

Jenn-Air cooks up webisode series to promote new kitchens

By Ken Liebeskind

What’s cooking online these days? How about 11 new webisodes promoting Jenn-Air kitchens starring a celebrity chef and contestants in a cooking competition.

In the Kitchen webisodes debuted March 26, were created and produced by RedLever and star Tori Ritchie, the celebrity chef, who has hosted Ultimate Kitchens on the Food Network and cooking segments on the CBS Early Show. Ritchie introduces the contestants and oversees their preparation of gourmet meals that are served to their special guests. Viewers vote on their favorite contestant, who will win a Jenn-Air kitchen prize. One of the viewers will win another Jenn-Air prize.

The webisodes run five to seven minutes each and all 11 play on the site simultaneously.

Richard Shore, RedLever’s chief operating officer, says the webisodes were shot at a Los Angeles studio and follow a standard episodic format structure: “Act one introduces the candidates, the second act is a set piece in the Jenn-Air kitchen and the third is in a dining room where the contestants throw the occasion on an intimate table setting.”

RedLever pitched the idea for the webisode series to Digitas, Jenn-Air’s agency, which is using them as an online element of a campaign that includes magazine ads and live events.

The webisodes offer brand integration, with the meals prepared in a Jenn-Air kitchen with Jenn-Air product mentions from Ms. Ritchie. The scripts were written by RedLever with guidance from Digitas.

Digitas was drawn to the webisodes by a 25 million per episode audience delivery guarantee by the Adconion Media Network, RedLever’s parent company, which runs an ad network with more than 2,000 sites. The webisodes run at the home site and in banners at sites in the Adconion network. Digitas selected sites that behaviorally and demographically fit the Jenn-Air target, according to Justin Newby, vice president group director at Digitas. “We’re not just throwing it into the air and hoping it works, there’s a guaranteed performance in place,” he says. “We hope as many people as possible watch the whole series, so it plays out like TV programming.”

The 25 million isn’t a viewer number, but an impression number, he notes.

“We have a proprietary ad server and in-house technology that provides us with the targeting capability to identify the right audience. We use third-party data and Comscore overlays to look for the appropriate sites within our network,” adds Nick Higgins, Adconian’s director of global video.

The webisodes are the key element of an online campaign that also includes Flash and rich media units at HouseBeautiful.com, BonAppetit.com, Epicurious.com, PointClickHome.com, Kitchens.com, FoodandWine.com and Yahoo. Magazine ads have appeared in national and regional publications, including House Beautiful, Food & Wine and Texas Monthly. Live events including the Architectural Digest Home Design Show and the Pebble Beach Food & Wine event have also been used. “We’re looking for ways to create the brand experience and engage the target who loves to cook and entertain,” Newby says. “It’s a 360-degree program and the webisodes are the most important component.”

Adconion declined to discuss the specific sites or the number of sites that will guarantee the 25 million impressions. The number of webisode impressions that have been served during the first weeks of the campaign are unreported. “We do not disclose campaign results, but the results are positive,” Newby said.

The webisodes will continue to play through 2010 with a contest winner announced in July.

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