If I had a dollar for every time somebody offered to "take one of my inactive domains of my hands", I’d have a big, fat, rapper-size brick of cash.
People just don’t understand that a parked domain that looks entirely inactive can quietly be making it’s owner hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each month! The user experience is so passive and benign, the ad so inert, "there is just no way you’re making more off ads than I’m going to offer you" .. At least that’s what I’m told in in a flurry of daily unsolicited sales inquiries. It’s not the case of course. Usually unsolicited sales offers have us falling out of our chair they are so laughably out of wack with the revenues (existing or potential) of generic names.
But why is it that people seem to be drawn to ads which so obviously look like ads?.. How are they able to draw clicks and convert into sales so amazingly well?
On the flight home from California today, I read this story in Businessweek. Apparently TIVO has uncovered a parallel phenomenon to domain name PPC ads on TV. Who knew that providing relevant info to the subject matter of the domain name people choose to type, could act as a catalyst to close a sale? Well okay.. it looks obvious now that I write it but in the ad business it is anything but obvious.
Quote: "IF THERE’S ONE LESSON from TiVo Stop||Watch, it’s that relevancy outweighs creativity in TV commercials–by a lot. The ads on the "least-fast-forwarded" list aren’t funny, they aren’t touching, and they aren’t clever. And they don’t have big budgets."
People pay agencies billions each year to make cool and funny commercials to sell us stuff. Only those commercials don’t usually work. The stuff people want, the stuff that sells is much more simple. Give us information so we can make an informed decision.. People want reality in television and reality in advertising… Apparently that’s what sells.
Thank-you TIVO.
Welcome back Frank,
I’m touring Germany, Luxemburg, and the UK at the moment. It has been a few years since I looked around Europe. It’s like taking a vacation in that the world around you is fundamentally different than what you experience every day.
Sitting in a cafe having a German beer and talking about domains with players heavily entrenched in the European landscape is a unique experience. On one hand it makes you question the superiority and durability of the .COM dominance we see today. On the other hand you look at the opportunities and ask yourself is there any real way to scale this so that for a big company like ours it would move the needle?
Time will tell, but I do see that we probably need to have some interests in Europe. Opening your mind and ensuring that you aren’t just drinking your own cool-aide is a good thing. What is the next new thing that will change the internet or the domain space? It may already exist in a much smaller market than the USA.
Cheers,
Dan
Welcome back Frank. I hope you feel reinvigorated from your break. I’m looking forward to reading your posts again.
Glad to have you back on the blog Frank. I enjoy reading it everyday.
Some excellent points on this post. Especially the fact that simplicity and reality work great in advertising.
I’ve used that approach lots in my 900 pay-per-call TV ads over the past 20 years. I can’t tell you how many times TV network execs laughed at us when we sent our TV commercials in for review prior to airing and heard idiot statements like “Who made this stupid silly spot for you?”, “You’re going to get no response from this.”, “No one is going to call that stupid 900 number.” and on and on. They were always wrong obviously and clueless about innovative marketing techniques.
From decades of experience in advertising and marketing, I always felt and validated successfully with my off the wall marketing techniques that if you do ads that are interestingly different yet easy for the average joe “to get” and ads that are “real” without the usual sales hype and BS, people will respond and in droves, because your ads will stand out from all the canned Madison Ave million dollar production spots.
I’ve done this with print ads as well. Putting a simple black and white ad in the middle of a page filled with other fancy color ads. And they’ve always work fantastically.
You have to be one of a kind and different with all the immense competition for people’s attention. I never listen when someone says that will never work, because the opposite always happens and it does work. Off the wall and zany is what grabs eyeballs. Violating the traditional rules of uniform composition, color, spacing, fonts, etc. is what zings an ad above others.
You gotta keep it simple. You gotta keep it real. You got keep it unique. That’s what always works best.
Welcome back, Frank; wow, is it Sept already?
How many shopping days ’till Christmas?
…I had a purchase inquire on one of my domains last week that was–at least for me–”creative” (and that knocked me over laughing as well)…
…a well-written, early morning, proper English (telling me it came from Europe, Australia, etc) Yahoo e-mail missive from someone claiming to be a school girl looking for this particular .com she just had to have for a school project…
…and of course, when I referred her to my domain site with the additional advice to just register some other “income and business success doesn’t matter” extension since it was ONLY for a school project…I never heard back from “her”…and what a big surprise that was.