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You would be surprised how often basic online international marketing blunders occurs. My favorite I have heard about so far comes from China SEO Blog:

One of the tings mostly overlooked by advertisers, especially those not based in China and trying to promote their websites in China through pay per click (Google Adwords) is the fact that the Chinese visitors actually might just not be able to visit their websites!

One example should help. Everyone knows about Homestead.com , the popular all-in-one DIY sitebuilder + hosting platform that was quite hot in the early 2000, maybe not that much now as people become more knowledgeable in web design or for selecting a web hosting solution that better suits their needs. Homestead advertise heavily through Adwords and China is one of the markets where their ads are shown. They appear mostly for their own name and many search terms related to web hosting, wed design etc. However, Homestead.com has been blocked in China for the last two or three years at least! This means that they have been spending tens of dollars (or even more, considering that their industry has rather high CPC values) every day for years now, while those who click on the ad could not access their sites and would shut down the browser in a second. Talking about wasting resources.

International marketing requires more than just a copy-and-paste strategy from the domestic environment to the international environment. I am often surprised at how often people believe that even in the online world it is a simple process to take all the same tactics and strategies and apply them abroad without thinking about how local situations can affect your marketing campaign.

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Bump and Update I (07/02/2008):

Found the Youtube video:

Here I was eating my dinner and watching TV when an ad came on TV that beautifully meshed in The Mummy 3 with the Beijing Olympics for a TV commercial trailer. Now, regardless of what you may think of The Mummy (1 or 2), from an advertising perspective, that was an amazing mesh of two ads into one TV commercial.

The minute I can find the the commercial up on Youtube or the main site, I’ll link to it here.

Well done.

Update II (07/02/2008):

The main site still does not have it and from an SEO perspective–not very friendly.

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Got forwarded a link that had the following hilarious image:

“Will Work For Dilithium Crystals” — well done. Although, personally I would have used some kind of background such as this one:

To make it more desperate/funny, but that’s just me.

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Saw an article via Wired about PMOG, or passively multiplayer online gaming which by installing a Firefox plugin and by just browsing the web, you essentially are now playing a game ‘passively.’

PMOG is an infinite game built on individual network histories, transforming our web surfing into ongoing social play. With a game head-up display in Firefox, players can bomb each other, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions. Ordinary web sites become caches for items and currency. PMOG fuses an MMO into our WWW.

I must say that the idea sounds enticing, but at the same time realize from an advertiser’s/marketer’s perspective how easily this could be abused by giving or selling the data gleamed from the plugin to other people by noting the sites they visit.

That said, I’d be interested in this a little more if it had a bit of a sci-fi edge to it rather than a more kiddish/Harry Potter feel.

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Correction (2/18/2008):

Jay Minkoff from First Flavor corrects the impression that the ad is actually something you straight up lick, but rather includes a tamper-proof pouch (similar to the breath strips) that one can take out and try. Though very specific, I do believe that creates a huge difference in how the product is perceived and in my opinion is far more likely to do better when people are already familiar with breath strips. Thus, these should be considered “edible ads” rather than “lickable ads.”

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Mmm… I am not quite sure how effective this is going to be (beyond the novelty factor) for a lickable ad to appear in magazines:

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This is essentially in response to Aaron Wall’s post about the next US President being bad marketers (Note that this is about US Presidential Candidates and their direct staff, not about those indirectly affiliated like in Ron Paul’s case).

1. Presidential Candidates and DC elites are technophobes or just plain technologically ignorant (series of tubes anyone?)
2. Those running for President have to study a lot about politics and really have no time to learn about new ways to market themselves.
3. Candidates being even closely aligned with marketing or advertising agencies could receive a lot of bad press (-5 million sinks).
4. Marketers and advertisers want to make money now, not give money back as tax cuts if their candidate wins.
5. Young people talk about voting, but in comparison to older age groups, never do (Sorry Ron Paul / Dean supporters, love to be proved wrong in the next election though).

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Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club seems to be entering into the SEM field (both SEO and PPC) for many of its clients:

That’s right… America’s “favorite” retail chain is offering online advertising packages starting at the low, low rate of $100 per month.

Aaron Wall at SEO Book couldn’t help but make a snarky comment:

I think I am going to fight back by selling Chinese made US flags for 3 cents each.

Please take a look as the hilarity ensues on their awful SEO practice (let’s see if they rank for this, below mine probably *cries*). Gosh, where to begin for SEO?

• Title Tag: Bad.
• Meta Tags: Bad.
• H1 Tag: Bad.
• URL Tag: Bad.
• Ability to scam customers: Priceless (oh wait–at a new low cost of a few cents below priceless, w00t!)

My co-worker is already curious to see what work they’ve done and I’m sure at some point people will begin to do some competitive intelligence on that (not to mention if they start to show some testimonials as well the hilarity that could ensue).

So, why would Wal-Mart branch out beyond their niche? Karl Ribas gives a potential reason:

If you’re like me, and you’re sitting there, reading this, and thinking to yourself WTF?… my only logical guess as to why the Wal-Mart / Sam’s Club organization has decided to step into Internet marketing is because they’ve either A) lost their damn minds or they’re B) getting tired of running the mom-and-pop stores of the country out of business and are now looking to bring their fight elsewhere.

Snarky reasoning once again as a lot of people consider the field strategic enough that it cannot be done at a discount. I think what Wal-Mart saw was an opening with product companies that so far have resisted online shopping/marketing and saw a potential opening that it could “help push” them towards that direction and make some easy money from “pushing” them towards online marketing.

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Here’s a great real-life story by Paul Middler at The China Game to show how people try to get away with not doing their job in China:

In the case of Google AdWords in China, I have a story. One supplier I worked with was advertising its products to “the world”, but the ad reseller wanted to show that the advertisement was getting exposure, so what the reseller did was “turn on” the advertising so that it showed up on searches conducted inside China. In other words, when the factory went online to check its name in Google, because the advertising was targeted to China, it showed up. But the ad was not set to show up in the US or Europe, where they had prospective customers.

Now, I’m not on the PPC side of things, but I’m fairly certain with the average American (how many times have I had to explain what SEO is?) this could be done as well to show up in the US, but not in Europe or China, but claim it was being shown there as well.

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Over at Americablog, John Aravois noted that Facebook is taking things from external sites and putting them into your Facebook notification network:

From what we’ve been able to glean, Facebook automatically opts its users in to this privacy-violating pyramid scheme and the only way you can get out of it is by visiting every single one of Facebook’s corporate partners (whoever they are, we only know about Fandango at this point), and telling each and every one (if you can figure out where to tell them this) to stop publishing your private information on Facebook.

At first I wanted to laugh as usually this entailed the user of Facebook specifically having to add applications, widgets, etc. to opt in on their own accord (Anybody who’s big on privacy and the Internet, those of us who love Slashdot for example usually have an idea of what we’re opting in on). (more…)

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