It's All Geek To Me - June 1st 2005

CPC Inventory Correctly Predicts American Idol by Ross Lasley I have a confession to make – not especially relevant to this article, but it will reduce my embarrassment a bit – I was a big time choir boy when I was a kid. I sang both Tenor and Bass, was in gospel choir, madrigals, and several competition choirs. I had the opportunity to go to Europe with American Musicians Abroad and we toured – even had the opportunity to perform at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

I tell you this only so you won't laugh out loud when I tell you – I love American Idol. I suppose you could say I have an obsession with the show. While I acknowledge that it is incredibly dumb television, I can't turn it off. In case you have been under a rock recently, American Idol is a singing contest.

American Idol is a veritable orgy of marketing and advertising profit – from the special commercial Ford makes with the contestants each week, to the sponsored-by-Cingular phone numbers you call to vote – these folks never miss an opportunity for branding or product placement.

The Idol website is very active – serious community boards and lots of content. The viewers of the show are frequently told about the website and why they should go there - video casting call, the store, tickets for the summer concert tour - the list just goes on and on.

As serious students of all forms of marketing Kung Fu, we started to wonder about this show.

We wanted to take a peek at how the contest connected with CPC advertising. Cost per click advertising is all those 'sponsor results' folks you see all over Yahoo, Google, and the like – here is a 2002 article we did on the topic.

In order to sell CPC, the search engines want to make sure that you – the advertising buyer – choose terms that are sufficiently popular. In order to do this, they provide what they usually call “Keyword Selector Tools” - inventory. Type a word into one of these tools and it will tell you how many people are searching for the word.

We looked at the last six weeks of the show – for fans, that'd be Anwar, Nadia, Constantine, Anthony, Bo, and Carrie – and checked out how many CPC searches were conducted for the name of each contestant.

When Amy first mentioned this to me I was pretty doubtful – but it was a completely correct prediction. As we watched the show each week, we saw the person with the lowest number of CPC searches get “voted off” and go home.

In 2003 we did an Article on Why Cheaper Clicks are Better; in 2004 we published How to Figure out if Your Website Makes Money; and, this year we are observing that CPC correctly predicts American Idol – it's just more and more fun all the time.

That "Internet Thing" You Do by Michael McGrath Think this Internet “thing” is just a fad, the electronic version of the hula hoop and the pet rock? Probably not, if you're reading these words. Let's firm up that opinion just a little today, though. The U.S. Department of Commerce released its first quarter figures 10 days ago, and the numbers are not only solid, but growing at an enormous rate. First-quarter retail Internet sales rose 23.8 percent to $19.8 billion in the United States from $16 billion a year ago. It's clear consumers are moving more toward e-commerce avenues as the collective comfort level with the Internet grows.

Internet sales have grown between 20 percent and 25 percent each quarter over the last year, and that stability is a good sign for long-term growth. If you're not heavily invested in that notion, you are falling farther behind every day.

Passing thing? I don't think so, and neither should you. Are you positioned correctly to participate in that growth? Most people touch their sticks and bricks store regularly - - new displays, new products, new advertisements, a new coat of paint. But do you touch your online store regularly - - new displays, new products, new advertisements?

The growth in online sales has been both steady and spectacular, as these most recent figures indicates. Make sure you plug into it that growth with your own online sales efforts.