Marketing has suffered changes that are closely related to media’s evolution. At the beginning of marketing, billboards, newspapers, and magazine’s ads were the only way to sell an idea to the customers. With the arrival of the radio and thereafter television, a new form of audiovisual ads was possible. Internet has revolutionized the way to promote a product. In this article, the author gives an idea of the different types of advertising that have existed since the appearance of the Web until our days. Starting with the annoying banners and pop-up windows, through search advertising to sharing content, it can be differentiated the distinct types of web ads and the acceptance and success that each one has. This article also raises a study case about Margaret Foley, brand manager of UnMe Jeans. Foley needs to choose one of three marketing campaigns based on the social capability of Zwinktopia, Facebook or YouTube. I’m asked to evaluate and suggest an option as well as the metrics that I could use to assess the impact of the campaign, and finally identify the possible risks of that decision. From the three proposed options I will go with Facebook. Facebook’s social orientation is broader than the one from the others. It’s well known that Facebook was created to simulate the social life of university students in first place, and almost every web surfer today. The first advantage that I could gather from the Facebook perspective is that they have all the demographic and preference information of each user in the network. From the detailed profile information, they could get data such as age, nationality, marital status, etc. From the interaction with the site, they can get the preferences and networks in which the user is involved. With this information, Foley could manage a well-targeted campaign in order to maximize profit. In the same way, I consider that the Zwinltopia proposal doesn’t necessarily will turn into an increment of pants sells. The idea of having a virtual store will indeed reinforce the brand recognition but since it doesn’t involve any link with the real life pants, it will not contribute to the first goal of the campaign (sell more pants). YouTube is a huge network and sounds as a good option but the main disadvantage that I consider is that in that network is not to easy to track the demographic information of the user, so, it could be harder to optimize the campaign.
In the business world the success is always evaluated with the increment in the profit after the application of the campaign. In the reading the author states that it’s harder to track the success of a social network campaign since you don’t have control over the posted content and also the success measuring metrics such as the click count and the unique user count are not too easy to sell to managers. With that in mind and from the business perspective, I think that the best idea is to split the proposal into campaigns, implement the cheapest one and evaluate the return of investment for a short period. By doing that, Foley could evaluate the acceptance of the brand into the social network and then go with a more aggressive and maybe not so cheap strategy, re-evaluate, and so on.
All marketing campaigns are risky, and even more the social network ones since you don´t have control over the content posted. For example, a user could use you fan page