"Soft Corinthian leather": What's in a name?

In the past week, I've been working on the new name for a product we're about to relaunch.  A lot of names have been kicked around -- many descriptive of the product, and others that are more vague.  It's made me think a lot about why some product names are successful and others aren't.

On one hand, a descriptive name attempts to give the buyer an immediate idea of what you're selling.  (Think Coca-Cola versus Pepsi.  Upon hearing the names, you immediately know that Coca-Cola is a cola, but Pepsi could be a laundry detergent to someone hearing the name for the first time.)  Descriptive names can be good, but they can often be dull -- especially in the B2B world where you're naming a product or service that doesn't evoke an emotional response.  The name "Oracle Content Database Suite" tells you exactly what it is, but it sounds like it was created by a bunch of dull engineers.

Then you have the products/brands that use an existing word and attach the trendy prefix or suffix du jour.  Adding "e" to the front of a product was the rage in the 1990s (E*Trade, eToys), as was the infamous ".com" on the end of any name.  Today the letter "i" is the most fashionable, thanks to the iPod.  Half the products sold at Brookstone match this description...iMedic, iNeed, iGallop, iHome, iDesign, iConvert, etc.  If only I could predict what the next trendy prefix/suffix would be...

Next is completely made-up words, or combinations of Latin/Greek words.  These have been popular for the past decade or two as company names -- probably due mostly to the rise of the Internet and the necessity of securing a domain name, but also to avoid existing trademarks.  Verizon and Acura are a few consumer brand examples.  But often these types of names can be tough to remember -- unless you're doing a lot of branding and trying to establish that name in your potential customers' minds.  Most often I'd probably stay away from these types of names when I'm naming a new web product -- because it's not worth the effort to achieve flow-off-the-tongue status through advertising and promotion.

Another option is taking an existing English word or phrase that has another meaning, and bringing it into a whole new context that has no current meaning.  Chrysler is famous for doing this with "Corinthian leather" in the 1970s commercials featuring Ricardo Montalban.  It was called Corinthian leather simply for marketing sizzle -- "Corinthian" really meant nothing in the world of leather.  Similarly, the terms "leaderboard", "skyscraper", and "boombox" have become common sizes of online ads.  Each of those words all have their own meanings outside the online ad business, but they had no meaning to the advertising world until they were coined as names for ads.

So when it comes time to choose a new product name, consider all these options.  Think about your goals and the pros/cons of each type of name.  Then start brainstorming.  And if all else fails, hire a Mexican actor of Spanish descent to claim your product features soft Corinthian leather.

Photo by Giant Ginkgo

New Un-Roll video ad format: Is it the holy grail of short-form video advertising?

It seems like every week someone comes out with a new format or a new ad unit for video ads.  Recently Blinkx announced a placement called the Un-Roll, which is meant to allow advertisers to engage with video viewers in a less disruptive way.  The Un-Roll isn't anything dramatically new, but rather a compilation of a few different tactics that have been seen in online advertising many times before.  Basically it's a 2-second splash screen, followed by a 20-second overlay at the bottom of the video window as the clip is playing, with a clickable call to action placed below the video for the entire clip.  Here's a demo of the Un-Roll on Blinkx's site.

The Un-Roll -- just like overlay ads in YouTube and several different formats developed by VideoEgg (and a number of others) -- are the industry's attempt to monetize shorter web videos.  But no matter whether you're using an overlay, a branded video player, a pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, etc., it's still all about relevance.

When you watch the Un-Roll demo, this new ad format seems to make sense because the advertiser is Shell and the video is contextually relevant to the sponsor.  But I'm sure the moment the Shell ad appears on a video about something that isn't related to driving or fuel, the response rate will plummet.  Nearly any type of video ad format can get good results when the ad is matched up with a relevant video content!

Right now you have brand advertisers like Shell that want to spend money on video advertising, but they struggle to find the right audience.  Shell's ads perform best in contextually-relevant context, like the Un-Roll example about finding better fuel economy, so it's a no-brainer for Shell to place ads against those types of videos.  But Shell's problem is that it needs to reach a mass market, and only a tiny fraction of its target audience will be watching videos about fuel economy.

How does Shell reach the viewers who are only watching a 23-second clip of a kid falling off his skateboard?  You might say Shell can try advertising against user-generated videos on YouTube, but the click-through performance is going to be poor and the audience annoyance factor will be high.

I don't see an easy answer to this big challenge the online video industry faces.  It doesn't matter what kind of brilliant ad format you develop.  When the ad isn't relevant to the viewer, it's still interruption marketing, and the response rate decreases.  (Does that mean the ad is completely ineffective?  Of course not.  You still have branding benefits, but that's a separate topic for a different day.)  But a slick new ad format won't magically make ads placed within "kid-falling-off-skateboard" clips more effective.

Photo by I Love Trees

Break up a long page into multiple pages, or make users scroll?

Lately I've been thinking about different usability issues on websites, and how to balance the users' preferences with your business model.  Specifically today I'm thinking about situations where you have a large amount of content that belongs together.  Should you put it on one page and make users scroll down to read it, or is it better to break that content into multiple pages?

This usability tip I received the other day in an email is what triggered my thoughts:

Usability studies have shown that internet users far prefer to click to another page than scroll to see content. As long as we provide content that gives users a reason to click, they’ll be happy to do so.

I've seen research that goes both ways on this topic.  Here usability guru Jakob Nielsen says only 42% of users will scroll on a content page.  And there's been plenty of research done on this behavior, including ClickTale's study and Razorfish's examination.  And of course the closely related question of "is there such a thing as a 'fold' on a web page, and if so, how can you get users to scroll below the fold?"

But I think the question is more complicated.  How should you balance usability with your site's main priorities?  This is a big question for publishers especially, or anyone whose site depends on advertising.  For example, CNNMoney.com does a lot of slideshow-type content, especially with feature such as 9 top tech flops and 6 terrific towns on the water.  It calls these "galleries", and you'll see the presentation of this content is consistent.  They have a short write-up about each one, usually accompanied by pictures, and prominent navigation along the edges (with red Next and Back buttons, and a "1 of 6" indication to let you know where you are in the list).  At the bottom of the content, you'll also see a thumbnail navigation element, where you can quickly jump to the one you want to read.

It's in CNNMoney.com's best interests to display its content this way, rather than putting all 9 tech flops in a long list on a single page, simply because it benefits their advertising business.  When you click the Next button to go from #1 in the list to #2, that generates a second page view -- and more ad impressions.  Since most sites sell display advertising on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, more impressions can equal more money.  But sites need to adopt this strategy in moderation, because forcing users to click too much can be annoying.  Plus this strategy can often decrease click-through rates on the ads that appear on each page, which has long-term financial ramifications for the site owner.

Some sites like to put all their content on a single page, because they feel it's easier for the user to interact with the article when it's on a single page.  Many publishing sites like The Wall Street Journal keep most of their larger articles on one page, while others such as BusinessWeek break their longer articles into multiple pages. 

Sometimes the motivation for keeping articles on a single page is a fear of metrics, especially among small and mid-sized companies.  This doesn't just apply to publishers -- it can apply to any company selling a product or service.  By breaking up content into multiple pages, it's a lot easier to measure exactly how engaged the audience is with a content asset.  If an article is broken up into two pages and 1,000 people come to page 1, but only 50 click through to page 2, it can evoke an emotional response in the writer of the article (why are only 5% of readers interested enough in my writing to click through to the second half of the article?) or in the webmaster/marketing manager (we're not getting a lot of people to view the later parts of articles, so we must be pretty bad at this web thing).  When the article is displayed on a single page, it's a lot easier to lie to yourself and convince yourself that everyone is reading every last word you wrote!

My philosophy?  There are some pieces of content that lend themselves perfectly to the multi-page approach, like the CNNMoney.com galleries I mentioned above.  Generating multiple page views on these types of pages is also a huge plus, especially for sites that sell CPM advertising.  But as a user, if I have to do too much clicking (like if that CNNMoney.com gallery was any more than 10 pages), I'd get sick of it pretty quickly.  Personally I like the approach MarketingProfs takes on its longer articles.  It defaults to breaking long articles into multiple pieces, but it offers the user an easy and prominent option to override that format, thanks to a "view article on one page" link.  I think it's the best of both worlds -- giving users the choice to read an article in a way they're most comfortable, while still defaulting to the multi-page method that generates the greatest number of ad impressions.

9 things you'll learn by viewing my presentation on webinar marketing

Based on my experience producing online events for IndustryWeek, I was invited to give a webinar presentation about webinar marketing.  The live event took place Dec. 17, and the title of the presentation was "Webinars as Part of a Digital Marketing Strategy."  I gave an approximately 30-minute presentation as part of this 60-minute webinar, which was produced by Adobe.

Here's a link to the archive of this webinar, which you can view for free on Adobe.com.

These are just a few of the things I covered:

1. Aligning your marketing with the type of webinar you're producing
   
   
2. A list of metrics for tracking your success
   
   
3. The cornerstone of your webinar marketing
   
   
4. Why you don't want to buy website or enewsletter ads that say "come to my webinar" (and what you should do instead)
   
   
5. The most powerful social media tool for marketing your webinars.  It's not Facebook, LinkedIn, or Delicious.  It's something you've probably been doing for a long time...
   
   
6. Why pay-per-click ads aren't a magic bullet for webinar marketing
   
   
7. Tricks for optimizing your webinars for search engines
   
   
8. Using an industry guru as a webinar speaker (often for free!) and putting their content to work for you
   
   
9. How to tie your webinar into in-person events, and vice versa
   
   ...and much more!  View the archive now