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Jen Sangbush is a Senior Affiliate Strategist at Clickbooth. She has been with Clickbooth for over two years, and plays a significant role in the Publisher department by consistently managing crucial affiliate accounts. She has an extensive background in all aspects of Affiliate Marketing, including Advertiser Optimization, Paid Search, and Email Marketing. She is at the forefront of Clickbooth's advancement, currently overseeing the expansion of Clickbooth's Co-Registration division.

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In The Time Of Recession, Is Branding Really Enough?

Written on
August 11th 2008
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by Jen Sangbush  |
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knife_recession_small.jpgADOTAS — In a downward market, does a positive correlation between brand awareness and customer acquisition still exist? This is a realistic concern addressed by advertisers who choose to allocate their budget towards a Branded or CPM-based model. Recession worries only continue to rise for understandingly anxious and apprehensive Americans, while consumption drastically decreases. Consumers no longer act in such a way that awareness of a product will directly result in increased sales of that product. We see this change occurring in our economy on a daily basis. Brands we’ve come to know and love are closing their doors at an alarming pace. What is a company to do when branding just isn’t enough?

What if I told you that you could place your product in front of millions of potential customers, and only spend your advertising dollars when a customer has been acquired? Sounds too good to be true, right? Think again!

If you’re working on a CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition, basis, your dreams have come to fruition. Performance-based marketing provides a no-risk alternative to reaching a premium audience, providing the simple solution to the rise of the recession and smaller budgets. A set action is determined by you, the advertiser, prior to the launch of your campaign into the marketplace. Required actions may range from a simple email address to the purchase of a product, in which payouts to affiliates will be applied accordingly.  Therefore, advertising dollars are only spent when the set objective has taken place, resulting in an immediate return on investment. 

Performance-based marketing also allows advertisers to fully take advantage of the technology that online advertising provides - the ability to track sales and gather data on existing customers. In last week’s article titled What to Look for in a List Management Company, author Bryant Valentine stated that list management is “one of the largest and quickest ways to add another source of revenue to your business model with not a lot of work involved.” Performance marketing and effective list management open up the opportunity to target existing consumers directly, a customer base that is much more likely to respond during a recession.

The preference of working on a CPA basis has been evident as large brands are shifting away from branding and more towards a CPA model.  Smaller budgets require increased accountability on each advertising dollar that goes out. With performance-based marketing, dollars spent towards wasted views and impressions are a part of the past. Advertisers now have the ability to see detailed, measurable results immediately following their marketing efforts, and are able to allocate their budget accordingly.



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Cost per action deals tend to be too one sided. It’s as if the advertiser wants the publisher/web site to do their work for them by closing the sale. And often the goals are unrealistic (i.e. buy this $100 purchase during the user’s web session linking from your e-mail; btw if they are in our system, you get no credit for the sale) and they don’t want to pay for branding or recognition. It turns out every marketer deep down does value name recognition and aspires to become a household name, right now they just don’t want to pay for it. What has worked for us have been blended CPM, Cost Per Lead and some cost per action deals. This way there is accountability, it’s a middle ground solution and the value a of a magazine’s or Web site’s audience isn’t reduced to nothing.

Posted by Chris Roberts | 2:54 pm on August 11, 2008.

There are models like attention-for-content that guarantee interaction and direct response. Wi-Fi, The Economist and Virgin Mobile Sugar Mama use it. Branding is guaranteed.

The Critical Advertiser

Posted by The Critical Advertiser | 11:04 pm on August 11, 2008.

I suggest you go back and read Ogilvy if you have any questions about the relationship of branding and direct response.

David Ogilvy, the most renowned of all the classics pays total homage to the direct response advertisers of his day. If you’re an advertiser, a media is only worth what it’s worth… not what the publisher thinks it’s worth. If it doesn’t sell in the placement at the cost of the venue, place your bets elsewhere. Measure it and don’t just make it pretty and guess.

Posted by Hunter Gatherer | 12:51 pm on October 2, 2008.

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