If you are discussing online advertising with an ad agency at the moment and their plans don’t include any seeding of your collateral on social networks, virals and blogs, walk away.

In fact, I’d go one step further and say, if they’re activity is less that 70% seeding, 30% bought advertising, walk away.

I’ve said it before, I will say it again - online advertising is dead money. If you want to spend your money, give your advertising spend to a charity and PR what you have done in the press. You’ll get better return on investment than with banner advertising.

Okay, there are always scenarios and executions that break the mould but my thinking still holds true in 99.9% of cases.

Get away from thinking online advertising is about traditional media buying. Users make media work hard online and therefore your advertising must either work harder OR work in synergy with the user.

Send time working out where your audience go and participate with the rest of world be it through forums, blogs, social networking sites. Seed your brand in with them by adding value or buying on their discussions.

Tropicana Smoothies have just done this very well with their new advert featuring Nina wall singing “Catch a failing star.” They found out where in the web it was being discussed and then got involved with the discussion adding more comprehensive information to the discussion and link to their site where the advert and track were available to listen to.

Don’t force your brand unless you can genuinely assist. If you’re a building firm, find out the best building forums and post advice. A hairdresser? Go to fashion sites and throw in your opinion.

The key rule is if you give something to users, make it clear who the ‘titbit’ came from and, even better, include a link back to your site or micro site.

Online advertising can work but just needs to approached differently to the lazy banner ad that invisibly grace most commercial sites you visit.

Tags: getting the most from online advertising, online advertising, seeding on the web

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.