Had an article in Marketing this month looking at GoogelAds, and how they present marketeers with similar challenges to Haiku's. Read the full article below.
GoogleAdwords – The Haikus of Marketing?
We're all used to the mantra that “less is more”, and never ending pleas to “keep it simple”. But rarely is brevity as compulsory as when it is used in a Google AdWords advert.
Google AdWords are the small adverts that appear down the right hand side of Google's results screen. Limited to 3 lines, 95 characters (about 15 words) and one URL AdWords can be a sublime example of the art of good copy-writing, and good marketing. They even recall the Haiku, the Japanese poetry form of 17 syllables and 3 lines covering setting, subject and action. The best Google AdWords cover context, offer and call to action!
Originally dismissed as an also ran in the search engine marketing stakes, Google AdWords are becoming a powerful, and cost-effective, source of leads. Search engine placement has become a more and more arcane activity, with search engines in a constant battle with search marketeers. The results list can be such a jumble of poor page headings, and cut-off page copy that only dedicated buyers will use them to find what they want. In contrast AdWords stand alone, each hand crafted to make maximum use of every one of those 95 characters.
One of the reasons for the prevalence of these ads has been their use by Affiliate organisations, as well as brand owners and retailers. Affiliates can spend a lot of time choosing their words and campaigns, and even more time studying results and picking the successful ads, and ditching the unsuccessful ones. The leads they get they can pass straight off to the retailer's web site, in the hope of earning enough affiliate sales commission to cover their AdWords costs. One sales campaign I ran on Google as an experiment made ten times its investment in AdWords – but another hardly broke even.
So, what are the implications of all this? First affiliate schemes can offer marketeers an easy way to recruit large numbers of outsourced amateur (and not so amateur) marketeers to market their products to consumers at large, and in to hard to reach niche markets. However you may need to take care over brand and reputation protection as you will have no control over the content of the ads.
More importantly, though, I believe that marketeers should look to Google AdWords as a personal challenge. Can you really distil your marketing experience into 95 characters to promote a product, and produce a profitable revenue stream? Perhaps in the interest of honing all our skills there ought to be an annual Marketing Haiku competition to see who can deliver the most effective 15 word campaign.
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