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Brent Hill is Vice President, Advertising Services, at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider, where he cultivates relationships with both traditional and interactive marketing agencies and corporate marketers. Prior to FeedBurner, Brent was President of Classic Kids, a national children's portrait studio and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at OCA Ventures. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of feed advertising and his insights have been published in a variety of publications including Advertising Age, Adotas and DMNews

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The Future of Feeding: Why the RSS Frenzy Isn’t Just for Media Anymore

Written on
September 27th 2006
Author
by Brent Hill  |
Feed
   XML Feed

Over the last two years, RSS feeds have been adopted by content publishers of all shapes and sizes — from individual bloggers to established media giants. RSS is being used by the online properties for media publishers in every segment — all of the top ten daily newspapers, many popular consumer and B2B magazines, and most broadcasters make feeds available to subscribers. The result is a rich media landscape that provides us with syndicated content that is informative and entertaining.

As consumer adoption of syndicated content continues to increase, marketers in a variety of industries are making feeds part of their standard marketing communication mix. Many of these companies take widely different approaches to the amount of content included in their feeds, the update frequency, and the navigation strategy behind incorporating subscription pages into their homepages. While it is typically unclear — and maybe irrelevant — whether the content is aimed at acquisition or retention, each of the ten companies listed below are engaging consumers via a new marketing communication channel — syndicated feeds.

Ford “Bold Moves”

Ford’s “Bold Moves” initiative is a brand documentary, tracing the history of the company, the evolution of makes and models, and its struggle to survive in a new world of global competition. The documentary includes audio and video segments. Episode 12 focused on Ford’s involvement in racing, while Episode 5 covered the first road test of the new Shelby GT 500.

Industry - Automotive
URL - http://www.foldboldmoves.com
Number of feeds - 1


Expedia

Expedia offers a level of personalization to their feed offering, by allowing the user to select from five types of feeds (flight + hotel; flight; hotel; cruise; deals) for 20 popular originating and 27 destination city pairs. The different combinations of selection criteria yield over 2,700 possible feeds. I subscribed to the “Chicago to Las Vegas” flight deals feed, which contained one recent post offering a discounted fare. A click on that headline linked me to a calendar page, conveniently showing me the days in the current month when the discounted fare was available. Expedia does an impressive job of tying its feed promotion to a familiar and highly useful page on the site.

Industry - Travel & Hospitality
URL - http://www.expedia.com
Number of feeds - 2,700+

Target

Target takes the red-and-white bullseye to syndication with the “Weekly Ad” RSS feed, offering subscribers an early preview of upcoming deals and a chance to “get a jump on Sunday’s paper.” Posts in the Target feed are SKU-level promotions, and a click on the headline takes the subscriber to a product listing page that includes “Add to Cart” buttons. If this product listing page is only accessible from feed subscriptions, Target will be able to attribute sales back to the feed, and build an LTV model for subscribers — similar to what most retailers do for their email recipients.

Industry - Retail
URL - http://www.target.com
Number of feeds- 1



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