Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Radio ads are notoriously difficult to track. You know the reason - it's because your saying something to people in one medium and wanting a response in another.

It's incredibly hard to do - and when it's hard, that means it's expensive and wasteful.

Now Howie Jacobson has a sideline in information gathering. He also charges a lot of money for this - and those sitting around the same table as him are annoyed that his advertising doesn't generate the sort of money that he's being paid! Only what they didn't realize is that he wasn't being paid for results, he was being paid for the information he was able to gather.

He did this online using the Google display network (my all-time favorite advertising medium). He simply threw the ads into the pot and let the visitors chew as they chose. He then found out who was chewing, what they liked chewing and why they liked chewing it.

This could all be fed back into other media for more power.

Now - back on topic. You need a tactic to bring your radio advertising in line with your online activities. Here's one that might just work. Because we're dealing with people whose attention isn't focused. It needs to be something that goes "under the radar" so to speak - so do a little brainstorming and come up with something whacky like "blue igloos" or "red beds" or "noisy alligators" - something where there's no other search results on Google.

They can Google that - and guess what! There's your ad in position one, and you're also ranking at #1 because nobody else wants to, let alone be daft enough to want to. Unless of course noisy alligators happens to be the latest Xbox smash hit ... ?? Do check these ideas first ...

It bypasses the need to have a URL or whatever - and it keeps your competitors at bay too.

Unless they're listening to the radio of course ... but then they might be in for a shock?

Back to Howie. He did all this online work so as to refine what should be said in TV ads (again, something as difficult to measure as radio). So take a leaf out of his book, and ask your demographic what they would do.

My hunch is that the call to action (URL, phone, brand mention) won't matter much unless there's a time limit to do so ("the next 10 visitors/callers will get a free...."). "Visit us" online can a problem for people who aren't good spellers. URLs take up too many syllables (you could use a URL shortening service, but it'll likely be less mnemonic). People will find the company if there's a vested interest in them doing so.