Brainstorming Research: Making Money Advertising

Even in times of severe budgetary crisis, WMATA still has to advertise itself. And what better way to reverse the public's negative opinion about random bag searches, constant maintenance, annoying talking buses, broken escalators, confusing fare structures and so forth than with some state of the art "guerrilla" marketing! Kytja Weir reports that the agency is going to try and get your attention the same way your local emo band does.

The transit system brought on Williams Whittle, based in Alexandria, earlier this month to help market the agency using traditional advertising but also possibly "guerrilla marketing" and "street teams," said Metro spokesman Reggie Woodruff.

"Williams Whittle will assist us as we continue to explore ways to increase revenue and off-peak ridership and to more effectively promote Metro and the improvements that we are making," he wrote in an e-mail.

That could mean "unconventional marketing" that directly engages potential riders, he explained. He could not provide any examples of what such direct marketing might look like, though.

What, was Evan Hensleigh not available? WMATA will be using about two-thirds of its $1.8 million advertising budget on Williams Whittle's services. For the sake of public transportation, I sure hope that Williams Whittle has some better "unconventional" ideas than those Second Life animations which Metro rolls out every now and then -- based on the company's website, it looks like they've got a ton of experience creating slightly annoying, yet oft-imitated television ads.

As noted earlier by The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb, Twitter has just launched an updated guide for businesses for organizations interested in exploring how to make the most of the micro-sharing service.

Coincidentally, the @TwitterBusiness account hasn’t made followers aware of the changes yet – in fact, it’s been about a week since there’s been a tweet from the account.

Update: from the Twitter blog: It’s Business Time (and @TwitterBusiness is awake again!)

The expanded business guide includes a section that helps companies start advertising on Twitter, inviting advertisers on a “journey with the most engaging innovative ads on the web”.

I’m not so convinced about the innovativeness of the whole thing, but Twitter does an excellent job at explaining how they plan to make money through advertising (Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts).

Interestingly, Twitter also touts a seemingly new product called Analytics, which lets all advertisers gain insight into both paid and unpaid activity on Twitter by offering two layers of analytics (advertising product dashboards and timeline activity).

The Start Advertising page also comes with a hard-to-miss form, inviting organizations to indicate in which advertising products they’d be interested, what kind of budget and launch date they had in mind, in which regions they operate and whether they’re for-profit or not.

It’s anything but self-serve, like Google AdWords, but it’s a start.

With the soft-launch of this form, Twitter is effectively saying that it’s now open for business, and (hopefully for them) has a sales force in place to handle all incoming requests.

Will 2011 be the year in which Twitter not only figures out how to properly make money, but also manages to scale its money-making operations in a way that can lead the company to sustainable profitability?

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Thursday, December 23, 2010

Making Money Advertising

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