Marketing and advertising managers can significantly improve the quality and effectiveness of their advertising campaigns - and thus make their dwindling advertising budgets work harder - by applying the secrets and principles at the heart of 10 of the world's most successful advertising campaigns for dotcoms. These include American companies Monster.com, Drugstore.com and Hotbot.com.
These secrets have been revealed in the very first best practice study on effective dotcom advertising. This landmark study analyzed 10 advertising cases studies awarded with an Effie (or similar award for advertising excellence) in the last three years. Each company's prosperity can be factually traced back to its successful advertising campaign. Campaigns analyzed here include American companies Monster.com, Hotbot.com, and Drugstore.com; the German company AOL.de; Confetti.co.uk, Moneyextra, easyJet, FT.com, and Scoot.com (all companies from the United Kingdom); and Letsbuyit.com (a European company).
The findings strongly challenge past practice in dotcom advertising. While most of yesterday's dotcom advertising focused on promoting name awareness, these cases illustrate that the key to success today is to promote brand understanding. This is accomplished by explaining to consumers not only what the benefits of the site are but also how the site is able to uniquely deliver them.
Some of the principles found in this study include:
| Do | Don´t |
|
1. Promote brand understanding | 1. Assume name awareness is enough to drive traffic |
| 2. Use multiple benefits to drive traffic and explain the overall brand positioning | 2. Assume consumers will take the time to find out for themselves who you are |
| 3. Take advantage of relevant consumer motivations to surf the Internet, mainly information seeking | 3. Assume the consumer´s main motivation to surf the Internet is to "shop from home, 24 hours a day" |
| 4. Connect your brand with an emotion, a negative experience with the competition, a belief, or an attitude that is relevant to your target audience | 4. Assume that the purpose of the creative execution is just to break through the advertising clutter |
| 5. Be different, in meaningfully breaking the advertising conventions of your business category | 5. Be different for the sake of being different in breaking the wrong rules |
| 6. Make sure the brand delivers the promise you make in your advertising | 6. Assume effective advertising automatically means business success |
Most of the campaigns analyzed here used a multi-benefit and multi-execution approach that helped to drive traffic while simultaneously establishing a clear brand proposition. Benefits were usually information-based (a product search feature, relevant content, quality of information, etc.) and thus naturally played upon consumers' inherent motivations to use the Internet. This finding is in direct contrast to the generic "convenient shopping from home, 24 hours a day" theme of most e-commerce platforms.
Each of the 10 successful campaigns connects the advertised brand perceptually with a relevant consumer characteristic, such as an emotion, a belief, a negative experience with competitors, or an attitude. By doing so, these campaigns usually reminded consumers that they were not satisfied with their current brand choices and established the advertised brand as the better alternative.
| Company | Description | Country | Year of Airing | Award |
| AOL.de | ISP | Germany | 1999/2000 | German Effie 2000 |
| Confetti.co.uk | Wedding site | UK | 1999 | IPA Award 2000 |
| Drugstore.com | Drugstore | USA | 1999 | US Effie 2000 |
| EasyJet.com | Budget airline | UK | 1999 | IPA award 2000 |
| FT.com | Financial news | UK | 1999/2000 | IPA Award 2000 |
| Hotbot.com | Search engine | USA | 1998/1999 | US Effie 2000 |
| Letsbuyit.com | Buying club | Europe | 1999/2000 | Euro-Effie |
| Monster.com | Job search site | USA | 1999 | US Effie |
| Moneyextra.com | Financial information | UK | 1999/2000 | IPA Award |
| Scoot.com | Information directory | UK | 1999/2000 | IPA Award |
*The IPA is the Institute for Practitioners of Advertising, the British advertising authority.
Creatively, each campaign helped the advertiser to break through the clutter and establish a distinctive, appealing brand personality. However, these campaigns did not do so through mere shock value, as many have done in the past. Instead, each one meaningfully shattered the advertising conventions of its business category by using interesting and surprising visuals or situations.
The most important finding from this study however is that effective advertising does not guarantee business success. This, again, challenges the assumption that advertising equals brand building. Many of the companies analyzed in this study are struggling today either because they are suffering from the overall economy downturn or because they are based on an ailing business concept (such as Letsbuyit.com in Europe).
Ullrich Appelbaum is an independent brand consultant. Before starting his own consulting practice in Germany, he was Director of Strategic Planning and Research of BBDO Germany, the largest communication holding in Germany.
