I’ve got a confession to make.  I’m a PPC turncoat!

I’ve changed sides in the last 12 months on one of the most controversial issues in PPC marketing.  It’s a debate that’s generated a lot of virtual column inches in the search engine forums, and I’ve done a complete u-turn during 2010.  The issue is whether you should be bidding on your own branded terms, and I can recall throughout 2009 passionately arguing that clients shouldn’t pay for clicks that they would get anyway – for free – through being number one in the organic listings.  They would simply be cannibalising their own natural search traffic.

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Red C Account Director, Steve White, he’s a funny one. Not content with banging on about how Spurs are now effectively European champions following their victory over Inter Milan the other week (pffft!), he’s now on the verge of making an even bigger fool of himself with his “online is better than offline” tirade.

The thing is, what Mr White fails to grasp is that Online Vs Offline isn’t a boxing match, or a playground scrap, or a my-dad-is-bigger-than-your-dad-type argument. No, no this is bigger than that. This is about war.

Preparing for battle

See, your online marketing is like your infantry, your ground troops. These are the communications you send in to do a job and report back instantly. And that’s what they do. You send your email, people respond, you get results. Job done. You’re in and out and back home in time for cigars and a debrief.

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At Red C we were chuffed to bits when we were shortlisted for the NatMag 100 award, which is a new initiative that gives agencies and their clients the opportunity to win a multimedia ad campaign across the entire NatMag portfolio of 24 brands, including Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Men’s Health.

As part of the NatMag 100 Award, media and creative agencies were invited to devise the most innovative, creative ad campaign for an individual brand, utilising a combination of the brands in the NatMag portfolio and platforms to target women or men in the UK.

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I’ll admit it to you all… I love Star Wars. And I’d love to have the powers of a Jedi. If I did, I’d use my Jedi mind-trick powers to stop unwanted ad clicks. Or better, I’d use my mind-tricks on an imperial storm trooper and get him to tell people to move along.

Ah well a man can dream… a man can dream.

Google does have a few tools, however, that we can use to help us direct our PPC ads at the people we want to see them and hopefully by-pass the ‘looky loo’s’, saving us money and improving our return on investment.

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At the beginning of every year marketing experts begin to predict what they think will be the next big thing in marketing and advertising. In the past we have had the year of the mobile, the year of Twitter and the year of Social Marketing. Yet in 2011 in the UK, it could be that it’s not something new and technologically advanced that is the next big thing but something tried and trusted… the VAT-free direct mail pack.

Thanks to George Osborne’s planned rise in VAT on 4th January from 17.5% to 20%; it could be that the marketing departments for financial services clients turn to the good old VAT-free pack to help stretch their budget further.

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What's not to love!

Monopolies are a bad thing, we all know that. It is a universal truth that greater consumer choice creates competitive pricing, innovative products and a fairer world for all. Giant corporations that merge, acquire, undercut and annihilate their way to total domination are looked upon with fear and distaste. I remember, as a student, reading ‘No Logo’  by Naomi Klein and being enraged by the plight of the independent coffee shops, delicatessen’s and family run enterprises that had been crushed by the giant corporations.

As a result I, like most people, have an instinctive predilection to root for the plucky underdog as a response to the dominance of a competitor. It is this basic human instinct that companies like Virgin, Apple and Airbus have used to their advantage to become the global corporate giants they are today. In all areas of my life I will always give the little guy my business, even if it takes more of my time and comes at a premium. All areas, that is, except for the search engine I use. When I’m looking for anything online I’ll always choose Google.

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On a recent scouring of the web for marketing news, I stumbled across this fabulous story about copywriter Alex Brownstein. Fed up of not being able to get in front of some of New York’s finest Creative Directors, he devised a PPC strategy to get himself noticed by the likes of Scott Virtrone and Ian Reichenthal… by playing on that egotistical moment when these guys would Google themselves!

Marketers have for a long time now realised that by focusing on long-tail keywords that have less competition, not only will you pay less per click, but you will also have a higher conversion rate. In fact this conversion rate can be as high as 200% when compared to short-tail, or generic, keywords.

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Have visitors to your site added items to their basket only to abandon it before checkout? Has someone gone to your ‘request more details’ page only to leave before requesting said details? Has someone rung your doorbell and run away before you could answer?

Well Google can help. Maybe not with the doorbell thing, for that get a dog, a BIG dog… either that or sit behind the door for hours on end just waiting, patiently waiting for that foolish doorbell ringer. For the other problems Google have added a ‘Google Audiences’ tab to your AdWords account.

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We've come a long way baby!

TV ads. I have to say… I love them. They are the main reason I got into this business in the first place… to create some arresting TV Advertising that my mates might talk about down the pub. One thing that has always infuriated me about TV Advertising, however, has been the inability to really effectively target them like you could other forms of advertising.

Well, it looks like those little niggles I have could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to the thing that has been nicknamed Smart TV. Its real name is Targeted Substitutional Advertising (TSA) and it looks like it could be the thing to deliver accountability and personalisation that digital media advertisers have enjoyed for years.

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To entice the Freemans customers online and to get them to start thinking about Christmas early, Red C developed a fun game to provide some theatre around the daunting task of Christmas Shopping.  We developed a charming Rudolph character to deliver various Christmas Gift ‘riddles’ via email to the customer base.

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