Sooner or later it had to happen... This week YouTube began testing an advertising format that overlays 10 to 15 seconds of video across any video that a viewer selects. YouTube's Flash-based mini commercials appear at the bottom of a video are semi-transparent and clear after the ad has run its course. Clicking on the ad takes the user to a player within the player where they can interact with the advertiser's content. One they click out of the ad, the video picks up where it left off playing.
The format has quite a few advantages for YouTube. Firstly, it is unavoidable - if you want to see the video, then it's going to run. Secondly, it's obviously richer than your average Adwords placement, so it offers a real branding advantage to advertisers. Thirdly it offers a cost effective and measurable new route for advertisers to get their message out to a targeted audience.
As a user of YouTube, I'm not sure whether I'm going to like this level of intrusion, but from the marketeer's point of view, I can't wait to try out the new format to see if it is effective in reaching my target audiences. If YouTube get this right, then they could be setting a course for the future of TV-style advertising. If the targeting's poor, however, there is a risk that they will lose both users and potential advertisers. At the end of the day though, they aren't a charity - their media partnerships, litigation andrunning costs meant that they had to start raising revenue at some stage - this could turn out to be a neat way of addressing that challenge...
Showing posts with label SEO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SEO. Show all posts
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Perfect integrated marketing from Eurocamp. Well, almost...
Yesterday I saw a classic example of integrated marketing that is almost great, but falls down as the customer experience online isn't quite thought through. We received a piece of direct mail from Eurocamp, the travel operator that offers family camping holiday packages in France. It offered us a discount to book our 2008 holiday before the end of the month. This was perfect timing for us, so we visited the Eurocamp website (www.eurocamp.co.uk) to decide which holiday to book. Everything went fine whilst we were choosing our main destination and we were offered a large discount to complete the booking online. But then the problems began.
Travelling down from the North West of England meant that we couldn't complete the journey to our chosen site within a day, so we needed an overnight stop. Relatively straightforward, you would think, as a large percentage of Eurocamp customers would need this option. Unfortunately though, you couldn't book this online. Nor could you book a ferry or Eurostar crossing. You could complete the booking (and an agent would call you back to sort out all of the logistics), but Eurocamp were asking you to take a leap of faith - to book the holiday without knowing the total cost. So we tried to call and complete the booking, but all of the agents were busy so they had to call us back - clearly we weren't the only people struggling with their website!
This got me looking at a few other things around the Eurocamp site. The 3D views of accomodation didn't work on my Mac. They don't seem to do any Adwords, and the site isn't SEO-optimized for anything other than Eurocamp-specific terms - you can't find them on Google by searching for 'French camping holidays', for example. Fine if you know the Eurocamp brand. Not so good if you are researching this kind of holiday for the first time. You also can't comment on past visit to sites either, which I would think would be a great option for regular customers (of which there are many).
This got me thinking:
- How many additional agents do Eurocamp employ to cover enquiries from frustrated website customers?
- How many customers abandon their bookings due to the holes in Eurocamp's CRM process?
- How much new business do they lose through their lack of Search Engine Optimization?
Eurocamp are a great British brand in their sector. With a little more work, they could be a great brand online as well - and probably save themselves a fortune in unnecessary call centre resources...
Travelling down from the North West of England meant that we couldn't complete the journey to our chosen site within a day, so we needed an overnight stop. Relatively straightforward, you would think, as a large percentage of Eurocamp customers would need this option. Unfortunately though, you couldn't book this online. Nor could you book a ferry or Eurostar crossing. You could complete the booking (and an agent would call you back to sort out all of the logistics), but Eurocamp were asking you to take a leap of faith - to book the holiday without knowing the total cost. So we tried to call and complete the booking, but all of the agents were busy so they had to call us back - clearly we weren't the only people struggling with their website!
This got me looking at a few other things around the Eurocamp site. The 3D views of accomodation didn't work on my Mac. They don't seem to do any Adwords, and the site isn't SEO-optimized for anything other than Eurocamp-specific terms - you can't find them on Google by searching for 'French camping holidays', for example. Fine if you know the Eurocamp brand. Not so good if you are researching this kind of holiday for the first time. You also can't comment on past visit to sites either, which I would think would be a great option for regular customers (of which there are many).
This got me thinking:
- How many additional agents do Eurocamp employ to cover enquiries from frustrated website customers?
- How many customers abandon their bookings due to the holes in Eurocamp's CRM process?
- How much new business do they lose through their lack of Search Engine Optimization?
Eurocamp are a great British brand in their sector. With a little more work, they could be a great brand online as well - and probably save themselves a fortune in unnecessary call centre resources...
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