Public Relations Pioneer and nephew of Sigmund Freud

One of the most amazing things in the face of this world, to me, was the life of Edward Bernays. Born the nephew of Sigmund Freud, he would use his uncle’s ideas along with crowd psychology to pioneer his way into the world of public relations. He would tackle problems with the consideration of the behaviour of masses of people. Perhaps the days of Bernays are over and the things he did would be considered appalling today, but certainly there is much insight on grasping the tendencies of a seemingly irrational crowd/society/mass of people.

The biggest crowd I could ever imagine taking form in a relatively practical sense is the internet. Undoubtedly we browse through it individually, yet, the thinks we like, the pages we visit, are completely biased and influenced by other …internauts.

Relating to an actual memory of mine, I remember when a friend told me I should make a profile in a site called ‘myspace’, ‘it’s a place to meet people’ he said. I remember thinking at the moment: ‘ What a silly domain name’, there was nothing on the site that motivated me to use it.

Months went by and the site became super huge and popular, it certainly didn’t look it at the time! Since, MySpace became the pioneer of the Social Web era, it achieved critical mass at some point unbeknownst to me and apparently before I joined. The term ‘critical mass’  (for the web), is generally understood by website owners but I’ve found the perfect example of what critical mass is in the following YouTube video:

Dance, guy!

Watch how at 1:18 in the video, the dance achieved critical mass, afterward he would just have to keep dancing and everyone would rush to the impromptu party, at least till the song ended.

Well yeah, I feel I’m deviating from the point which is that the popular sites we visit are actually visited because peers in the social web have recommended them to us, otherwise we would just visit them that first time. Examples of how this process is used to persuade you to register and use a site is the ‘bouncer effect‘:

Used by Facebook, you could only register if you had a @hms.harvard.edu email, they later accepted students of US universities, later any school or job and finally it was open to the public. People rushed to creating accounts as soon as they were permitted much as people would rush to a club when they have an ‘IN’ on the list. The whole situation was a tactic used on an irrational mass to create a need tied to the feeling of belonging. At the point were all universities were accepted, Facebook reached critical mass and everyone wanted in.

As of May of this year, it is estimated there are over 109.5 million websites. It is unarguable that there are probably much better websites than what Facebook was when it was only open to Harvard, yet it is perfect proof of how Edward Bernays practices can still be applied in any new medium. Much the same way there are a lot of practices used in the internet that can be twisted for a purpose, depending on the way the internet matures some have become popular, like:

Sending website invitations to a registered member’s contact list with the email subject “John Doe wants to meet with you in SomeSite.com”. This benefits from a marketing strategy called the ‘tie-up’ or ‘tie-in’ where before first-contact the site would have a third’s recommendation to use it.

So, there you have it; 2 case studies, a silly dancer, and one of the best minds of last century. I insist you discuss with me points made in this post in the comments area below, thanks for reading!

Today’s demographics are way more diverse and extended than the usual; gender, age and economic status. Our market is full of different niches, which divide into sub niches, groups and cliques. Most people  see this as a problem while others see it as an opportunity, which translate into different ways of advertising products and the creation of new products.

I once heard a celebrated ad-teacher say, the creative process of an agency stops when the rules and regulations of the FCC start. Lets face it, this isn’t Europe, where creative is a no-boundaries department that can use a topless woman to sell milk or create a whole interactive veggie-city, like the case of burger king’s ad agency in Amsterdam, to take the whopper experience out of the restaurants.  We live in a conservative society, with conservative values and conservative regulations. We are accustomed to dull ads that rarely over-pass the “noise” that is created by all the media surrounding us. Even when your product or ad campaign can be better represented with that great idea that is not so “conservative”, you have to be satisfied with what the mass media lets you communicate to your client.  Let’s take ZUJI’s, an online travel agent from Australia,  help a friend take a break campaign as a perfect example on how a company can interact, in a humorous non conservative way, with its clients through the internet to pursue their “take a break” concept. We don’t have to go to the farthest corners on earth to find some innovative and risky ads, Samsung’s London based agency just caused buzz all over the web with its, YouTube streamed, HD camera trick challenge which couldn’t be aired on any other medium due to its long running time,  and other media’s lack of interactivity. Samsung caught viewer’s attention span for more than one minute and half paying only for production.

Even locally the Internet has been able to generate excellent traffic results with relatively minimal effort. During this year’s Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, Open Mobile hired us and our sister company WiFiwyg, to stream live from the festivities. We set up cameras around San Sebastian street capturing all 4 days, real time, day and night, and transmitted it through fiestasdelacallesansebastian.com, which directed to a SanSe themed version of Open’s website with the Live streams running on it. By streaming live, straight from the street without censors or delays, Open ran the risk of capturing all sorts of non-PG content from the revelers down below, but through the combined efforts of a premiere domain, compelling content, and a little risk-taking, Open received over 20,000 unique visitors during the weekend (orders of magnitude above their regular weekend traffic) which resulted in a considerable spike of phone calls and conversions.

Instead   of kneeling down and cutting short the creative process, agencies should try different solutions and methods to get the clients’ message out. We should start following high end marketer’s trends like Nike and Sony’s Europe web methods.

The internet is our savior, with channels like YouTube, networks like twitter and thousands of sites with advertising space our imagination can go wild without leaving out the strategy.

Its time to start selling creative solutions here in Puerto Rico. Where there’s a will, the internet is the way.

Here in just a week, I learned of all the possibilities that the internet has to offer. This is the most dynamic medium out there without a doubt. In its never-ending evolution, the web offers marketing and ad executives measurable, innovative and relatively cheap solutions for this modern and volatile market.  From reaching and knowing your target market; with networks like Facebook and Twitter, to literally doing whole campaigns and making your product move out of the shelf, the perfect example being, the controversially creepy Burger King “King”, which was so successful that it became it’s main campaign after running online. The world wide web is replacing ratings and CPM with CPC’s and Cost per leads, which are more inexpensive due the need of user interaction before a client has to put up a single dime.

In conclusion, there is much change to be made. Nowadays people are spending less time in front a television set and buying newspapers because all past media now are all mixed and mashed together in this thing we spend most of our time surfing. The Internet.

Wow, first blog post ever in my life. Lets make this happen.

In the internet, we immediately thought of the following two that had sparked our curiosity before:

1. Google adwords
2. Facebook ads

The thought process for choosing these two for our online ads was that the wizards for creating them were super easy and yes… fun!

Well actually, Facebook’s was real fun; Google’s was systematic and organized but not as fun as i had to do a lot of work to find proper keywords.

Facebook Ads Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. You can choose the exact demographic you want to target in a super friendly user interface. It even tells you the maximum number of people in the targeted group.
2. Limit your daily budget whenever you please.
3. Stop campaigns at any time.
4. Ads are prominently placed in the site (My Opinion).
5. You bid for how much you are willing to pay on a daily basis.
6. Billing is timely.
   

Cons:

1. You are only really targeting people from Facebook.
2. The bidding system is creative but sometimes Facebook just wouldn’t place my ads, even if I bid 50 cents per click.
3. You can’t edit ads! This was very frustrating as I had to go through all the creation and ‘waiting for approval’ process just to change a typo.
4. The analytics area is ok, but I hoped for more. Graphs specifically are buggy as they approach the current date.

Google AdWords Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. Your ads will show in all corners of the internet. Their propagation is truly ubiquitous you see adSense ads throughout the internet and your Granny’s site.
2. Create a monthly budget. This is so-so but still a pro; I would rather be able to change daily budgets on the run.
3. Stop campaigns at any time.
4. You can edit ads. As dumb as this sounds it is really nice to have.
5. You can easily link this to your Google Analytics account. Analytics can’t get better than that, you’ll have conversion rates, link sources etc.

Cons:

1. Google ads are the poster boy for ignored dead space of the internet.
2. There is a world behind AdWords that often gets shady and smelly the reason is keywords, as you are associating your ad with search results and web page content some people try to outsmart Google with keyword schemes and it is really very confusing as I for one can’t interpret Google’s contradictory stand point on this. I should make another blog post about this subject.
3. When will they bill me? I remember reading it when I created  the ad, but where’s the bill? This was a big no no as I forgot about the ads. That meant running the ad for a couple of months more that the specific week I chose for making this blog post.

If I have to choose a winner it would be facebook and you can find my reasons in the following chart:

Results of ad campaigns.

Furthermore, as I chose a targeted demographic I’m certain those clicks were more relevant than Google’s, in fact conversion rates from facebook were higher too. However I had to measure all effectiveness with the  Google Analytics tool.

So these are the pros and cons I found, please tell me what you think and alternatives to online advertising.

The new tv ad for Banco Popular’s E-account created by Badillo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi depicts a couple of scenes were someone sees something and immediately touches it, at that moment everyone near the person yells “don’t touch it, its a link”.

Hahaha I could’t stop laughing, immediately after the commercial I was glad all my accounts were with this bank (They bought Citibank’s presence in PR a while back).

So Pablo and I started thinking about how cool it’d be if random things were links. We thought about people with slow connections arriving late hahaha. Well, it was funny at the time.

So far, from the looks of the logo and presentation; there is something very “web 2.0″ and modern about the project. We are very eager to see this company develop into something grand and are certain that Hector’s expertize in the field will “drive” them towards this goal.

So, as part of that which is web, we welcome the Kranios Marketing Think Tank.

Kranios Marketing Think Tank

I can’t stress on this enough; all attempted professionalism that went into paying less than $10 for a domain name went down the drain once you agreed to exclude a site in the domain, or worse, include this:

big no-no

I’m sorry, ok, were biased… we make web pages; the following is my youngest sibling:

Seriously guys, don’t do this.

See? even a child agrees. Why you might ask?

Cause of a thing called web presence, large amounts of money go into protecting this, companies will often want/need extensive web presence in order to be available to their clients. Want to do a weird experiment? Google the top 10 advertising agencies in Puerto Rico and see what turns out. Really, they should be ashamed…

Many times you’ll notice headlines about how employers are more often each day using social community websites such as MySpace and Facebook to track employee sick days only to find binge demence-paloozas.

You thought your company was exempted from this? No, and hey I mean this in the most positive of ways. My brother and I have never gone into a meeting in which we do not have a clear scope of whom we’re meeting with. We’re not spies or anything it is common business to ask your associates and contacts about a certain someone. Being part of an industry involves your image, contacts, and proven expertise within it. Not knowing anything about someone only proves their lack of commitment or experience in an industry.

So… seriously people! I might end this in the cheesiest of ways: “Buy a website from us, this is our portfolio” but no. I’ll leave on a high note, there are other web-agencies in Puerto Rico (Nobox, Populicom) consider them too, but get a website.

Ah… yeah.
They are effective, of this I’m certain, but c’mon; is this even legal?

There are many ways to advertise websites and although you can print on a cardboard and stick it on the grass, there must be new more dignifying ideas. Such as:

• Facebook ads!
• AdWords (Google Ads)
• Use guerrilla but be creative
• Start a newsletter
• Link other websites and ask for the same, crosslinking
• Use traditional advertisement

Facebook ads
Hey I can’t really say I love the place, I hate it, can’t stand it! But people use it all the time on their phones, in the workplace, during meetings… And we have to agree, Facebook is a huge place, but when you can direct ads to niches and small communities you can reach a client fast! Unlike Google ads which are content driven, Facebook’s are also socially specific. This means that reaching real estate agents for our classifieds page was fairly easy as they were approached on a time when they were actively participating on real estate matters in a light social context. After our classifieds campaign, I started seeing the latest web-giant/web-trend in a new light.

AdWords from Google (Our fair and noble giant)
Not to be mistaken with AdSense, AdWords are site-targeted advertising banners placed by Google on relevant sites. You basically tell Google, “Hey google, I’ve got this site that sells rubber chickens” and Google will try to match your ad with web pages that have to do with clowns, a circus, or Monkey Island. You might say: “Wait, I’ve no interest on selling my chickens to Russian clowns”, you can also target by region and a bunch of other criteria so just choose Latin markets or Puerto Rico in our case. I’m reaaaaally being vague here and there is a plethora of articles on the subject but I suggest you start directly from the horses mouth or this wiki.

Guerrilla Marketing
One of the most important aspects of guerrilla marketing is being creative, having a creativity-driven campaign outside of traditional methods. Planting cardboard that visually and literally pollutes your environment is not guerrilla marketing, its honestly dumb and unimaginative. In my book, guerrillas have grown to include viral marketing, fairly famous on last year’s 2nd quarter… Including your viral campaigns in sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can be productive and creating viral content and posting to YouTube was the craze of all viral marketeers. There are also new companies, web advertising agencies, that can help you with innovative ideas; a local one is Populicom. An example of their work was a location specific bluetooth campaign that took me by surprise, to this date there are new companies that specialize solely on bluetooth ads but Populicom were the innovators in Puerto Rico.

Start a newsletter
Your clients will appreciate it and you’ll achieve one of the most important concepts on advertising: “top of mind”. Reaching your client base on a weekly or monthly basis will earn your company a front seat on your clients RFP’s and relevant decision processes. Furthermore, most of the time business people will want a “what’s up” from their suppliers and relevant industries.

Crosslinking
It’s not just for us geeks these days. There was a time when each website had a weirdo that lived in a dark and creepy lair and everyone called a ‘webmaster’. It’s such a dumb name and silly concept. People fail to understand that websites have companies behind them, business people that made a website to make business. Unless you step into a wormhole that spits you in the 90′s most of the time you contact someone through their web page, you’ll find a real life person eager to exchange links with you. It helps you create a web of contacts in the internet, which by the way, is the most important ingredient in search engine ranking. Ooh! that’s a polemic statement, comment on it and Ill back it up.

Use traditional media
Yes the monster, it’s there for you! Many people overlook the growing rate of new spots each year. Its a healthy growing industry driven mainly by large companies with huge budgets but all this growth, in capitalism, means that new media companies have to compete with new fair prices. Maybe your project can’t afford the largest led billboards but mesh advertising is sneaking over this industry fast. They can be placed almost anywhere with few infrastructure investment. Bus shelters and banners are fairly common, digital signage is easy to deploy, cheap …and considered traditional in some regions.

So really… you can’t imagine all the hard work government-paid, tax-funded employees have to go through to remove uncreative ads from signs, telephone poles, and private property. PLEASE advertise responsibly and use all this new and available media.