I’ve seen a few of these movie promotion ads on Facebook now, and I’m pretty much astounded at how big of a waste of money they are. The problem with an ad like this is the fact that there are only two ways I can interact with it: I can either become a fan of “From Paris with Love” or I can blacklist the ad for any number of reasons. I don’t want to blacklist it, because I actually prefer seeing movie ads about 100x more than seeing ads for “Scholarships for Dads” or “Christian Singles” or GroupOn…

The problem is–they’re not even asking the right question. Am I going to go see it in theaters? Sure. I loved Taken, and while I’m skeptical of Travolta’s ability to play a fast-and-loose action hero, I have tremendous faith in Luc Besson as a writer/producer of fun action movies. Solidly on board, solidly planning to go see the movie they’re promoting, there’s still no way I’m ever going to become a fan of From Paris with Love on Facebook. Or–likely–any other movie on Facebook. For one thing–whether I become a fan or not has nothing to do with whether my friends go see the movie. If they haven’t decided one way or another on it by this point, my becoming a fan is going to amount to a drop in the ocean. Secondly, I have no interest in helping some viral marketing firm (”We get u lots ov fans!!!11!”) get a higher bonus because they hit some fan threshold. The obvious disconnect between the people who actually make the movies and the people who promote them just astounds me. What kind of ads do I want to see? Here are 7 ads I would’ve clicked on:

1. Ask me if I’m planning on seeing the movie in theaters. If I click “no,” you can tailor future ads towards your stronger “change someone’s mind” content instead of showing me the same thing over and over and over again. If I click “yes,” you can start showing more interesting ads that might eventually get me to become a fan. (To be fair, I’ve seen polls on movies–but they’re usually some asinine unrelated question written by a marketing intern).
2. Don’t promote the movie itself–promote the people within the movie. Had this ad said something like “Become a fan of Luc Besson,” I probably would’ve clicked it in a heartbeat. I don’t even know if he has a fan page, but (assuming he does) that gets any of his future marketing material right into my stream. Becoming a fan of an actual person says something to my friends, while becoming a fan of some movie that just came out says I’m gullible and pay too much attention to ads.
3. Build a Flash game for the film (and hire an indie flash developer to do it–there are lots of us) and promote the From Paris with Love game.
4. Link to an interesting article on the Film (Digg does a great job of this)–a behind the scenes article or an interview with John Travolta. Something more engaging than “please please pay attention to me.”
5. Instead of a canned one-sentence synopsis, just put in a bite-sized piece of trivia with a “like” button. We call them “nuggets” on ShowtimeFu, though we’re a little behind in entering them. A “like” is much less of an investment than fanning something, and I’m much more likely to use them.
6. Give me a link to add a similar movie to my queue on Netflix. “Get ready for From Paris with Love by watching Taken”
7. Now that I’m 5 or 6 steps down the funnel and I’ve had plenty of positive interactions with your campaign… now is the time to ask me to become a fan of the movie. Don’t just give me marketing drivel, though–remind me of how into the movie I am: “You’re going to see it in theaters, you’ve played the game, you’ve read the trivia, and you’re already a fan of the cast. Isn’t it time to become a fan of the film?”

Okay, I still may not click on #7, but my chances of responding are probably up around 50% instead of 0%, which is a bajillion-times increase. Funnels are used for all kinds of things on websites, so I don’t see why people don’t set up ad funnels to guide people towards the desired result.

When I originally tossed the Stockmoose up a couple of months ago, it was mostly a prototype–one that had taken a single evening to produce, and one that was based on a single request to my artist girlfriend: “Can you draw me a moose with a tie?” Well, now it’s finally back with a new coat of paint, some basic anti-gaming measures, and a few other things to spice it up. The “borrowed” Yahoo stock charts have been replaced with our own proprietary charts, and each stock now has a sort of miniature info card so the choice isn’t based solely on name-recognition. We also created a list of 25 Silicon Valley stocks that most people around here have probably heard of–just to make it a little more engaging. Some of the early results are actually a little surprising. In our SV25, TiVo is actually pretty close to the bottom while Netflix is near the top. Based on what I know of the two, I would’ve actually assumed this to be the opposite of what would happen.

The most interesting result, though, has been the clickthroughs. As an experiment, I tossed $50 into Project Wonderful to point some traffic at the moose. PW grew up around web-comics, and you pay for time instead of clicks. The resultant CPC is incredibly low ($0.04-$0.05), but it’s extremely low quality traffic–totally untargeted, and often times people just click on the ads because they think it supports the comics they like. Roughly 1 in 8 unique visitors visiting the Stockmoose have been clicking through to Piqqem, meaning the $0.05 CPC for the StockMoose turns into a $0.40 CPC for Piqqem itself. Because our niche is in the financial sector, most CPC ads on Google cost anywhere from $.60 to $1.20 for even moderately relevant keywords.

It gets better. The bounce rate for traffic coming off of the Adwords was in the neighborhood of 70%, while those coming in off of Stockmoose are closer to 40%. I don’t know if we have enough data to be statistically significant or not, but the concept seems sound. Instead of trusting Google to target our ads to relevant “customers” (they’re good at what they do, but there’s thousands of people out there who make a living scamming AdSense), we instead cast a much wider net and do the targeting ourselves. Those that are interested in the stock market, interested perhaps in the wisdom of the crowd, click through to the main site. Those that don’t either bounce or hang out and pick a few stocks in the Stockmoose game. Either way–our “crowd” results get better and we have an opportunity to pitch the main site.  Win win.

Okay okay, so traffic share is nothing new. But it’s pretty sweet. I’ve never done any paid search before, so I thought I ought to experiment with it a little (hey, I can always write it off as an expense against my game profits). I was going to use AdSense, but as my website’s been hosted on Yahoo for years now I knew they had one of those “$100 in paid search” deals going. I forked over $30 to get an account going, and they matched my $30 with $100 of their own (although, as the service provider, it’s not like they actually have to pay anything). I set up some pretty simple text links to go in search/contextual spots, set the CPC as low as it could go ($0.10/click), set a limit of $10/day, and launched the sucker.

Not quite through the end of day one, they’ve shown my add to around 45k people, of which 158 have clicked through at a cost of $12.42. I have nothing against Yahoo’s advertising–they’ve so far given me exactly what I paid for: eyeballs at around 10 cents a pair. If I actually had a product that I was selling, I could see this sort of marketing working out quite well (or if I was trying to establish a brand). That being said, what I’ve mostly realized is how sweet of a deal the Mochi guys are giving their publishers.

I don’t have any hard numbers, but I’d figure that around 20-25% of the ads shown on the MochiAds network come from the traffic share program (EDIT: Mochi’s Bob Ippolito says it’s much lower, so my empirical data may not match what’s going on behind the scenes). This benefits the players and the paying advertisers (a much wider variety of ads), but it’s we developers who get to reap the rewards. My traffic for Filler has started to tail off a bit over the last few weeks (down to about 50,000 a day, of which around 15,000 are MochiAds-enabled), but even so the Mochi team has served my ad up to around 26,000 people in the last week. That’s sent 814 clicks my way, or just over 3%. Going with a $0.10 CPC, thats around $80 in free advertising in the last week alone.

Since I launched the game, the Mochi-enabled version has been played around 2,000,000 times (a little under 40% of its total take–the lion’s share coming from Kongregate and Addicting Games). Using the 25% estimate, that means they’ve kindly showed my own ad around 500,000 times, and the 3% CTR translates into 15,000 visitors over the last two months. At $0.10/click, that’s $1500 in free advertising. The actual number is a lot lower than that–I only just switched to the 3% CTR ad from one that was only garnering about a 1.5% CTR–but the potential of it is pretty impressive. It’s certainly a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-your-back arrangement, as the only way to get a high number of traffic share views is to put out a game that’s going to make them (and you) a lot of money–but I can’t imagine Google or Yahoo doing anything similar (25% less ad views is 25% less profits…).

It could all be an artifact of the fact that Mochi is still relatively new and might not have the ad sales lined up for the next three years, but I’m hoping the program persists as the company grows. It sure beats the heck out of paying for traffic!

It’s no secret the the movie business spends millions of dollars on advertising–and most of it is just as bad as the rest. I see a pretty good share of annoying ones, as my browser home page has been IMDB for as long as I can remember. A lot of times the ad campaigns are too heavy handed, and you actually have to spend a few brain cycles to figure out how to get them to go away (which I’d consider the cardinal sin of advertising, although I know some consider a negative reaction to be better than no reaction at all).

When I loaded up Firefox just now, though, this is what I saw at the top of the page (and below the normal top banner ad):

After a couple of seconds, each individual symbol faded out to reveal the normal logo:

At first, I assumed it was an ad for the Golden Compass–which got pretty bad reviews and didn’t do so hot at the box office. I was actually intrigued enough by the ad to click on it and see what it was. It was actually ad for the new National Treasure movie, which makes a lot of sense in hindsight. It’s possible that my positive reaction has something to do with the fact that I’m really looking forward to the film (the first is one of my favorites from the last few years), but I’m going to stick to my guns and say that it’s because this is one of the most effective ads I’ve seen in recent memory.