Online Advertising 101
-- Publishers Weekly, 5/12/2008
Publishers have been moving advertising campaigns from print publications to the Web for years now and, according to one exec at an outside agency, it's become much more common to take a book campaign online... and only online. Tom McCartin, president and CEO of Walter Kremer Paino, which works with various book publishers, indulged PW with a hypothetical: we gave him a client, and he gave us a budget and approach that, these days, could serve as your basic online ad blitz.
The client: A major house.
The product: A strong book by a midlist author with a modest fan base: “no John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell.”
The budget: $35,000–$40,000.
The ground rules: Most major houses have separate PR budgets for their authors, so McCartin focused solely on the ad side.
The approach: Given the money, McCartin said he would do a two-pronged outreach, one a “social media campaign” and the other an “online advertising” attack.
The Social Media Campaign
McCartin would work with the author to spread the word virally about the book using the author's Web site. (Given that the author is a midlist success, McCartin is assuming s/he has a decent site... and a mailing list.)
Outreach to bloggers would be made, and ARCs would be sent to 25–30 of them for reviews. McCartin said he would expect a few bad reviews, and even those might be an advantage. “If you have a couple of pans, that actually lends viability and credence to the discussion,” he noted.
The author would be made available for interviews with bloggers and would also appear at live reading group discussions.
Online Advertising
McCartin would focus on two things here: banner ads and rich media content. He said he would plan a two-month campaign.
For banner ads, McCartin would do two or three different spots. Given the budget and the low cost of online ads, he said it would be unwise to do only one spot. Although McCartin acknowledged that many people feel banner ads don't work—he referred to a syndrome called “banner blindness,” in which consumers ignore the spots on the screen where banner ads usually run—he believes the cost of placement and production still make the effort worthwhile. “Banner ads are still the most visible online ad. The key is to find a way to make banner advertising more interesting.”
For the rich media outreach, McCartin would create a couple of book videos and run them on various sites.
