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Cats vs. Bears vs. Sharks vs. Darth Vader – The 2011 Video Link Bait Smackdown
Ryan Farrell | January 23rd, 2012
2011 may forever go down in history as one the best years ever for online “best of” lists… there were a lot. However, amidst the kerfuffle of “best of’s 2011″ banter that pervaded the online space this season, there was a particularly insightful piece run by Adweek about the top 10 commercials of 2011. Aside from essentially being an aggregated list of the top viewed YouTube videos of the past year, the Adweek post gave a pretty comprehensive rundown on the best of the best in anthropomorphic viral phenomenons of 2011. From bear skin rug French directors (RSCG), to cats with thumbs forming street gangs (W+K), to sharks with a taste for “peanut butter Snickers” flavored humans (BBDO), the best of advertising in 2011 was dominated by animals with human like characteristics… and a diminutive Darth Vader (Deutsch L.A.). And, of course, being a link builder, I could not help but first wonder: “How many drugs are the dudes at BBDO on?”. But then I wondered, “hmm… which (if any) of these respected advertising behemoths is screwed together tightly enough to actually maximize such a ridiculous amount of user engagement into bonafide links?” First up to the competitive analysis gallows is Cravendale and their excellent “what if cats grew thumbs video” (Wieden Kennedy London). Aside from the fact that W+K may have done the impossible and made a cat video worth watching, the capable crew did the smart thing and embedded the video into a landing page on the Cravendale site, Continue reading…
Japanese Government To Launch Largest Link Bait Campaign In Search History
Ryan Farrell | October 11th, 2011
The Japanese Government is in talks to give away 10,000 flights to influential bloggers and social media experts according to yahoo news: read more
Creativity in Digital Advertising? Eat My Shorts Don Draper!
Ryan Farrell | August 2nd, 2011
In a perfect world of advertising, each and every single solitary piece of digital marketing content that somebody has uploaded to the internet would pass through a Don Draper like filter, conceived from that wondrous moment of introspection that leads to the perfect tagline, that super bowl half-time show stopping commercial, or that perfect piece of Billboard copy that causes bumper to bumper traffic on the 405. Lucky for those of us that work in online advertising…the world does not demand that level of perfection. Yes, it’s a glass half full industry out there: one filled with 5 dollar blog posts, 10 dollar web banners, 8 dollars sliders and spelling mistakes galore…the world of digital advertising is a world of : “eh…it’s fine…post it” The bar is set gloriously low when businesses are more concerned about how many people are viewing their advertisements rather than whether their advertisements are actually worth seeing in the first place. In a great many cases…the bar doesn’t even exist at all. “Who’s Your Copywriter?” And therein lies the conundrum: All business owners who are considering a digital marketing campaign must one day sit down and ask themselves honestly “Do I budget for web traffic? Or do I concentrate on conversion?” and for the small but potent minority of online marketing professionals who actually take a vested interest in the quality of content that they unleash upon the internet, the answer is simple: you plan for both. Contrary to popular belief, it is still possible Continue reading…
Tags: advertising, creativity, digital, digital marketing, don draper, madmen, ryan farrell, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in Online Advertising | 3 Comments
“Google+” The End Of SEO As We Know It?
Ryan Farrell | July 6th, 2011
The social signal revolution has begun folks… and not a moment too soon in my opinion. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I personally am not going to lament the loss of spammy garbage showing up in search engine results pages right next to my SERP query for “baby monkey riding pig” or “most effective way to remove a hamster from a mason jar”. Google has opened the floodgates with the release of Google+ and the people are primed and ready to take back the Internet, order in the universe is about to be restored. Now, you may think I’m being overly optimistic… and you’re probably right. For a few weeks now, people (mostly people involved in internet marketing) have been clicking the Google +1 button on websites and wondering where the geeks of Google are going with this “+1-derkind”. Our answer arrived mid last week when Google launched the social networking tool “Google+” to… well… to a select group of experimental chimps like myself. It’s still in the beta testing phase, and it’s far from perfect, but I have to admit… it’s kinda bitchin. A screenshot: Now, why am I so excited about another social network that looks and acts the same as Facebook minus the cheesy Farmville/Mafia Wars games, overly intuitive ads (seriously, the fact that Facebook knows I like Douglas Adams books is just disturbing) and Movies by Aaron Sorkin… you ask? Because Google has openly admitted that social signals collected from Google+ will Continue reading…
7 Secrets For Writing Effective Website Content
Ryan Farrell | June 9th, 2011
Forget everything you’ve ever learned about writing when it comes to generating copy for your blog or website, kick punctuation and sentence structure out of your house and set fire to all of the pictures of you and it together in effigy, write a nasty bold typed and grammatically inferior e-mail to your high school English teacher and take a baseball bat to the grammar check on your word processor if it tries to give you any guff. Because the truth of the matter is, when it comes to writing effective Internet content…the rules have decidedly changed. I used to be a copywriter before I came to rest here in the hallowed halls of Wpromote. I’ve written more convincing blogs on topics that nobody cares about than I desire to remember. But over the course of my tenure as a professional wordsmith, I learned some essential tips on how to generate copy for websites, and today I would like to share my 7 secret tips for writing effective Internet marketing content. 1. KISS: Perhaps you are familiar with this acronym, or perhaps you are just a massive Gene Simmons fan, either way you know the value of the lowest common denominator (anyone who has every heard Paul Stanley sing can attest to that.) KISS stands for: keep it simple…stupid. As copywriters writing for a website, it is our job to craft a message that will be easily digestible for all visitors to a site regardless of their reading comprehension level. Continue reading…
