Google pioneered a change wave from traditional advertising techniques to an era of measurable marketing with its Adwords product. Google possesses one of the best tools marketers of any size can use to measure immediate return on investment (ROI). ROI has been difficult to tie to the effectiveness of marketing efforts in the past due to poor measuring tools.
Adwords created an opportunity to reach more specific groups of people. By piggybacking advertising to customer intent through search queries Google was able to establish a lucrative business model enabling advertisers to engage directly with the buying process. The result of Google in advertising has been nothing less than a change wave for the industry. Complicated areas of marketing, such as consumer behavior and psychology, are now being considered by even the smallest marketers. Not to mention a more even playing field for smaller businesses in areas traditionally dominated by larger corporations.
Google will have a strong influence in advertising for the foreseeable future. The company is constantly developing new products and pushing the limits of technology. Moving into the mobile space is an obvious goal of the organization and one they are pursuing at all costs. The company has a vast array of mobile products and partnerships.

Google is masterful at data mining user data and behavior. If the premise of
behavior based advertising is true, tying offerings to the intent of the consumer will lead to profitability, then Google’s destiny is secure. They closely hold more valuable behavior data then any company in the history of the world.

Integrated marketing differs from traditional advertising in several key areas. The primary difference is integrated marketing tends to focus on return on investment(ROI), where as traditional marketing techniques leave larger questions of measurability and effectiveness. The promotion function of marketing offers the most insight into the difference between the two marketing approaches.
Traditional marketing often uses media outlets that reached broad markets and multiple demographics. Integrated marketing promotion techniques aim to increase the efficiency of communication. Targeting more specific groups with measurable tactics allows for a return on investment to be established.
Along with ROI, integrated marketing offers some benefits over traditional promotion techniques. For instance, budgeted dollars can be quickly reallocated toward more successful efforts and pulled from less effective areas of a given project. Another advantage is that most integrated approaches send a unified message across multiple channels. Creating a singular message across multiple promotional channels tends to filter through the entire organization as well. Although consensus is difficult, the singular focus and combined effort tend to have positive effects. Identifying areas of the organization that move off message or topic are easier to identify and remedy. Most businesses reap rewards from the internal focus the integrated approach brings.

In Texas, asking a waiter for a coke probably means you want a Dr. Pepper.  Growing up in Texas it is rare that I actually want a Coca-cola Classic.  Having traveled to other parts of the country, this is not the norm.  Most people identify a coke by the brand name and skip the formality of the back and forth asking what kind of coke.  Another way of looking at this is that the brand of coke sold in Texas is Dr. Pepper.

Dr. Pepper cultivates this brand awareness through symbolism throughout its marketing campaigns.  In fact, the cool beverage I sip right now has the Dr. Pepper colors of maroon combined with a football.   Basically, the can looks like a football. Playing football and living in Texas symbolically go hand in hand.  Most marketing efforts of Dr. Pepper lean toward football integration.  Sponsoring half-time shows with Dr. Pepper gimmick throws is just one way the brand cultivates the symbolic meaning of what it means to be Texan.

The company has gone far to put the brand into the hearts of Texans.  It placed the official Dr. Pepper museum in Waco, TX.  As a child, one of the places I visited on a field trip was the Dr. Pepper bottling facility in Dallas, TX.

Recently I decided to stop drinking beverages made with corn syrup.  Some literature I read pointed me in a different direction and I have stuck with what I believe to be true.  Corn syrup attributes to weight gain and I am not in the position to add anything more to my dainty frame.  But, through some cosmic goodness I found the original Dr. Pepper available down the street.  The original Dr. Pepper is made with Imperial Sugar.  Although it is still bad for me the brand fell back in line with my believe system.  Funny how a belief can make the extra weight gain not feel so heavy.

American Express is going through an interesting time.  Choosing to keep its traditional position of luxury in the market place resulted in a brutal pounding from Visa/Mastercard.  Visa/Mastercard hit AMEX with such a thorough routing several lawsuits are in place claiming anticompetitive practices.

Ignoring the anticompetitive behavior for a moment and isolating the bigger problem American Express didn’t predict was that the credit card market trended toward ubiquity.  The credit card displaced money as a tool.  Predicting this trend might have been difficult, but for better market position the company should have been on top of it.  AMEX traditionally marketed exclusivity, which doesn’t work at scale.  The problem with American Express now is that its product is no better than its competitors, yet it still tries to market exclusivity.  The interest rates are the same or higher.  The service is good or a bit better.  The protection the card offers is decent, but not that much different than a credible competitor.  Overall, AMEX is just another credit card company.

The brand still holds some luxury feel to it, but in reality it is just a brand image.

Please be more…

When my wife and I married we went through the process of combining resources.  At the time we each had an American Express card.  Phoning AMEX to find out the best way to proceed in combining the cards it became clear that the card with the earliest ‘Member Since’ date was the worst card to choose.  The interest was high, the card offered limited benefits, and considering the overall credit card offerings at the time, it was a poor choice.  The catch, in combing the cards we would lose the ‘Member Since’ date.  If there is an anchor to the AMEX brand image, it is the Member Since date.

Going through this situation was tense.  The way the operator phrased the question making the right financial decision against a status symbol became hard.  In mulling it over, I bit the bullet and asked the question everyone wanted to know.  ”Does the ‘Member Since’ date mean anything or do anything for us?”  The operator replied in a very matter of fact voice, ‘well, when I and other operators here see that date we know what it means.’  Let me finish what he wanted to say.  ’Hmmmm.  No.  Nothing at all.  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch.  Naught. No.’

Brand deterioration is a sad thing to see.  Needless to say, I don’t base my financial decisions on status symbols.  Although, I am sure the sales pitch from AMEX has worked well for them.  In fact, it clearly has.  But, is impressing my status on AMEX operator when I call in to find out my credit card balance worth paying more for?  Hmmm.  No.

The tech industry has a bad habit of taking technology companies off of the street and turning them into invincible entities with enough capital to last a lifetime.  The notion that any major player in technology will be gone in the near future is naive.  Google’s revenue for the year is close to 25 billion.  Dead Dell has over 11 billion dollars in cash.  Facebook has over 500 million ‘active’ users, we’ll circle back to these guys in one second.  Myspace, which no one in their right mind will touch, has over 100 million active users.  Yahoo, which is as dead as they come, controls just under half of all mobile search queries in the United States.

Out of all of these brands, the two we need to discuss are Google and Facebook.  As a professional SEO, it is my job to decipher what exactly prevents my customers website from floating to the top of the SERPS.  It’s hard, it changes every day, it’s tricky, and most of the time what was right for my last customer isn’t right for you.  And, to confuse the situation even further, even though it all changes it really stays the same.  In the path of this lunacy lies road bumps of truth I have the privilege of coming across.

For example, recently Facebook has been in some hot water over the whole privacy thing.  No need to summarize here, as a hearing impaired person could hear the media screams.  But, for the record, I personally am saddened by the trend I fear Facebook has started.  The blatant disregard for vital information about people breaks an established trust and people should be concerned.  Not because Facebook is bad, but because they are willing to sell your information to people who probably are.  A quick scenario for you… You switch your FB profile from Dating to Engaged..Yeah for you.  Wedding advertisements come, you save a bundle, get married quickly, and you are off to the next phase.  You have a child.  Fast forward to her 18th birthday.  Of course life is hard and she has been through some hard times recently, but she too has a FB profile just like mom and dad did.  She uses the tool to discuss her issues with her body image.  Combine some keywords from your local self-help psychology book which combined with the right variables such as S, F, 18 (for you parents, that’s Single, Female, 18 years old) triggers some ads.  Now she is going down the road of making $2500 per day for ‘modeling’.  Targeted ads save soooo much money.  But since it came through on Facebook, as parents, you’re not worried are you?  Cuz they’ve got your back.

The question of whether or not this is serious should be answered by now.  If it’s not, then I don’t know what else to say.

But, should Facebook be like Google?  The perfect image.  Smart.  Started by actual college graduates.  In fact, doctorates.  They give to the world.  Free.  Free email.  Free searching for exactly what you want.  Free profiles to remember all of those searches.  Free maps.  And now, safe searches.  Free analytics to track all of the wonderful searches they bring.  All you have to do is take a gander at a small text ad (hey look it’s clickable!).  The Google brand image is so strong the next point is actually going to take longer to explain than it should.

Google is genius.  As a company, it is better at data mining than any other institution on the face of the earth.  But, even though it has all of the data, it doesn’t use it against you.  It uses it for you.  Facebook, take a note here.  Google protects your privacy.  Well, better yet, it behaves in a way that makes us think they protect it.  As long as we don’t ask why.  Like why do they need to keep our data?  Oh, I see, thanks for the crayon drawing, I wouldn’t have understood otherwise.  Google tends to find the most important crossroads of technology and human behavior and pursue it with absolute vigor.  Combining its expertise in technology to use the collective power of group patterns to offer more insight into the world.  It is wonderful when the results work.

The point here is that Google really isn’t any different than Facebook, other than a better PR strategy.  The only difference is the brand image and how the company presents itself.  Google really doesn’t use information for you.  It uses the data for itself, as any business must, and in spite of you it makes choices it believes will allow it to continue.  In one way, Google is like the happy alcoholic:  Everything’s fun as long as the juice keeps flowing.  In this case, the juice is ad revenue.  As all technology companies realize at some point: easy come, easy go.

When a massive entity matures it becomes what it was always meant to be.  Call it destiny, call it fate.  But the reality is that Google must survive at all costs.  It must extract value on behalf of its shareholders.  These are the rules of the game.  And, regardless of the bad publicity, it will do what it must to stay alive.  For example. One might look at a privacy slip up and see a simple mistake.  It’s not.  Privacy problems are inherent to large companies that must launch projects that instantly gain millions of users who already have a user base in order to maintain good press, reach critical mass quickly and continue reasonable growth.  It’s a business problem.  How do we convert current users into new users?  With all of that data, all of the insight the world’s most complicated and comprehensive system, what does it have to offer?  Do you think that Google knows the end is near?

I do.

Free, free, free!

The internet is a great place. Everything seems to be free! Free news, free stock quotes, free memberships, free offers, free games. Is there any better place in the world than the free internet?

Unfortunately, the old aphorism: “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”, definitely applies here. Every online business advertises free stuff, but is it really free? Let’s take a closer look.

Blogging:

Let’s begin with blogging. Every day, more and more people are discovering the online world of blogging. If someone wants to start his own blog, he will soon notice numerous “free” services at his disposal. Blogger and WordPress are probably the two most popular of these.

The first thing that a person might notice when he signs up for one of these free services is that he doesn’t get his own domain name. So, rather than www.myblog.com, his site is something like: www.myblog.blogspot.com or www.myblog.wordpress.com.

Now, if you are one of those people thinking about starting your own blog, you might think: “that’s fine with me, I’m not doing this for commercial purposes, this is my own personal blog for my thoughts and ramblings, I don’t care how the domain name looks, I just want it to be free.”

The problem here is that the fate of your blog is forever tied to the fate of those services. What if, 5 years down the road, the Blogger or WordPress services are discontinued? If something happens to to the blogspot.com or wordpress.com domain names, your site will go down with them.

Wow, so after 5 years of hard work, your site could vanish in an instant! What a rip off: you would probably want your money back. Oops, what money?

One way to avoid this is to buy your own domain name. This is very cheap (about $10 per year), but then again, that means it isn’t “free” anymore.

Another limitation of these free blogging services is customization. Normally, you are restricted to a small set of “templates”, which dictate the look and layout of your blog. These are great if you are unfamiliar with html coding, but your blog will look just like everyone else’s blog across the internet who use the same service as you. This seriously hampers your ability to stand out.

It is possible to get around this limitation by downloading one of a number of “free” templates on the internet. Here, though, we run into problems again. While the free templates provided by the blogging service may have been bland and uncustomizable, these free downloadable templates take full advantage of your lack of html knowledge. They are often filled with unnecessary code, which often promote the creator of the template. They could also be stuffed with malicious code that causes pop-up advertisements or contain viruses. Worse, if you lack html knowledge, they are equally as uncustomizable as the free but bland templates.

Other Internet services:

So you’re thinking, “all that is great, but I’m not a blogger, so I don’t really have to worry about that. I just use YouTube and Google.”

Ok, let’s take a look at those services. I have just pulled up a YouTube music video of one of my favorite artists to watch for free. The first thing I noticed is that at the 10-second mark, an ad popped up asking me to please buy the ringtone of the song for my mobile phone. The next thing I notice is that the entire right side of the screen is filled with an advertisement by Microsoft. This ad is is flashing at intermittent intervals, desperately trying to draw my attention away from the music video. That ad remained there for the entire duration of the music video (about 5 minutes).

Directly beneath the Microsoft ad was a smaller ad for Warner Brothers, the music label which produces the music video. Finally, when the song ended, the cell phone ring tone ad reappeared and remained on the screen until I selected another video. Now, you may think – “hey, that’s cool, I never click on those ads or anything, they don’t bother me.”

Well, any marketer knows the phrase “mind share”. Mind share (from Wikipedia) is: “the development of consumer awareness or popularity, and is one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion.”

Your mind is a limited resource. There are only so many brands that you can be aware of at any time. Even if you don’t click on the advertisements, the advertisers are still achieving their goal of filling your head with their brand.

What about Google, that wonderful search engine that we all use every day? Most people think that Google is a company that provides search services. Those people are only partially correct. Google’s shareholders know that Google is primarily an advertising company. They provide the search engine as a means for you to view advertisements that they serve to you.

When you perform a search on Google, you will always notice the “Sponsored Link” highlighted at the top of your search results. There are usually even more sponsored links running down the right hand side of the page. This is how Google gets paid.

Google also provides other services, like Google Maps. When I typed “Boston” into Google Maps, they showed me a map of Boston, with “Sponsored Links” to hotels in Boston.

What about the Blogger service that we talked about earlier? This is the “free” blogging service provided by Google. If you sign up for this service, Google will urge you to put their ads on your site, from which they take a large cut. Google is primarily interested in providing their Blogger service so that more people will create free content on which they can serve their ads. If you are a beginning blogger, there is a good chance that you are the only person who even sees your blog on a regular basis. If you put ads on your blog, YOU are the only person being advertised to!

Free isn’t Free

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that free isn’t really free on the internet. Every business that is offering these free services are trying to make money in some fashion or another. It is important to understand how they make their money, and why they are offering their service for free. If you can do this, you can avoid getting duped, and you can make your internet experience as efficient and pleasing as possible.