I know my last post referenced a ClickZ article, but I just couldn't pass this one up. This article, http://www.clickz.com/3632238, highlights how Frito-Lay is leveraging its investment in sponsoring the Fiesta Bowl to gain more exposure, and more engagement with its customers. I won't go over the article in detail, but a few of the key items I see that display successful use of Web 2.0 are:
Media migration: The working title for "Digital Engagement" when it was being written was "The Digital Media Migration". Bob and I wanted to show how the web has enabled companies, major packaged goods companies among them, to start moving their media dollars off of television on to the web. I know you've seen the articles about newspaper ad spending decreasing, classifieds ad spending decreasing precipitously (thank eBay), and online spending increasing. Frito-Lay is making good use of its media dollars by targeting them on Facebook and allowing a relationship, or migration, between television and the online to develop. This goes beyond simply placing their url on their television ads. They've created an event around which their prospective customers can rally, or take a stake.
Targeting ads: In the early days of web advertising, we longed for laser targeting of ads. This was in the mid-90s. The industry was forced to take a kind of broadcast or print approach, which made assumptions about the kinds of customers a site was able to aggregate, based on their content, or email list, and make a cpm (cost per thousand) buy based on that. Now, Facebook is able to provide targeting down to a specific school. This, coupled with their ability, and many others on the web now I might ad, to target ads down to the ZIP code level, brings incredible power to the marketer.
Meeting the customer where they are: Much is being written about how social media advertising isn't paying off for companies. There's a great article we reference in the book (thanks to my webmaster and friend, Robert Erin Leeper, who sent it to me) that posits that customers on social media are there to chat and to connect with friends. They're not on the social media site to go anywhere else. They've arrived at their destination, and thus, don't want to click on an ad to be taken somewhere else. Frito-Lay's promotion used advertising on Facebook, but they only encouraged members of the community to participate in the promotion by enrolling to become team members or fans. This is a better approach than sending them to a site to simply get a coupon, or tell them about a new shape or coating for a corn chip.
The bottom line is, as an online marketer, you need to think about where your customer is congregating, and what their primary objective is for being on a particular site, then engage them in that context.
