Nice find surfvenice; here's the full text:
Edited: Boston Globe story is getting picked up now by other newspapers...good stuff)
Online, Advertisers Rewriting the Rules
By Chris Reidy
As consumers grow comfortable with new technologies, marketers are scrambling to adapt. Institutions from corporations to colleges are seeking new ways to grab attention and build loyalty, and online marketing, until recently an afterthought, is fast becoming a leading element in ad campaigns.
Honda Web ads for its Element sport utility vehicle have migrated to television. IBM is marketing through video podcasts. And Babson College is redesigning its website to look more like MySpace.com, the online social network popular with students.
"People are living more digitally," said Larry Weber, chief executive of a Waltham marketing firm, W2 Group. "They're spending less time watching TV and more online."
To build a bigger audience for Technology Review, a magazine affiliated with MIT, the W2 subsidiary Digital Influence Group trolls the blogosphere to identify bloggers and online communities that focus on the health sciences and other fields covered by the magazine. Then its employees work to build content-sharing relationships.
Digital Influence recently persuaded Instapundit.com, a popular blog that sometimes deals with terrorism, to post a link to a Technology Review story about mind-control bioweapons. Nearly 4,800 visitors came to Technologyreview.com directly from Instapundit.com, and that meant more of the kinds of visitors most likely to use the collaborative engineering tools advertised on Technologyreview.com by the likes of Microsoft Corp.
Sharing content with relevant blogs represents a new way of thinking about marketing, said Digital Influence vice president Rachelle Spero. Gone is the hard sell when it comes to blogs.
"You cannot sell," she said. "You have to engage and have a conversation. We're talking about building trust and relationships."
Today, Digital Influence is helping Technology Review launch a video series focusing on innovations at MIT and complementing magazine stories on such topics as stem cell research, said editor and publisher Jason Pontin. The streaming videos can be accessed at technologyreview.com.
A campaign designed by the California agency RPA for American Honda Motor Co. and the Honda Element effectively reversed the old relationship between traditional advertising and online media: Ads that first appeared in clever Web spots last fall moved onto billboards and TV this spring.
The initial search-word campaign had an interesting wrinkle. Instead of buying pricey search terms such as "SUV" that could call up an ad whenever a computer user typed it in a Google or a Yahoo search, Honda and RPA chose seemingly unrelated search words like "platypus" to trigger ads that invited users to link to elementandfriends.com, where they were treated to video ads and a game.
Why a platypus? Both the platypus and the vehicle are hodgepodges, according to one ad. Just as the platypus has the bill of a duck and the tail of a beaver, the Element is part SUV, part van, and part "surf wagon."
The online platypus ad later appeared on billboards and now airs on TV.
Another Digital Influence client, Babson College, thinks a new twist on a relatively new tool - the website - can improve relationships with applicants, students, and alumni as well as burnish the school's reputation as a center of entrepreneurial education.
One planned feature would allow applicants to post profiles of themselves on a portion of the school's website. Applicants could then communicate with one other, sending e-mails to other applicants from the same state or with similar interests. Many students apply to a dozen colleges; the hope is that the sense of community encouraged by the redesigned website would make applicants more inclined to choose Babson.
Features envisioned for alumni would let them establish networks of contacts, interact with faculty, or post such questions as "Recommend a patent attorney in this field" or "Any advice for someone launching a biotech company?"
Give alumni an opportunity to have lifelong access to such a valuable site, and they're more likely to contribute generously.
"People will be more motivated to give back in time, treasure, and talent," said Scott Timmins, the college's vice president of marketing.
On another front, Digitas Inc. of Boston has started producing video podcasts for IBM in addition to newsletters it sends key customers.
This target audience spends many hours on airplanes; for them, podcasts are an efficient way to get information.
"Would you rather watch a video or read a white paper?" asked Digitas spokeswoman Wendi Smith.
In a recent IBM video podcast, IBM master inventor Andy Stanford-Clark discusses how wireless tracking devices he employed to help his wife's llama trekking business led to innovative solutions for a British insurance company, which liked the idea of tracking vehicles and basing premiums largely on when and where motorists drive.
The Lexington firm Mobot Inc. is involved in a test for a British convenience-store chain that offers a new variation on clipping coupons. Customers with camera cellphones would take pictures of store products and wirelessly send photos to an agency licensing Mobot's technology; the agency would send back bar-code images. With a bar-code image on the cellphone's screen, the cellphone could be swiped over a cash register's scanner for product discounts.
Mobot and executives at other marketing firms believe the same young consumers who might use TiVo to skip TV commercials might also be willing to use new technology to access marketing messages from companies that ask permission.
"Consumers always complain about advertising, but if a marketing message uses a new technology, like camera phones or iPods, young people gobble it up," said vice president Stefanie Geddis of Boston ad agency Hill Holliday.
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