Earlier tonight I was watching Hulu.com (which is really great place to burn a few hours and watch some TV online). I noticed an interesting video advertising concept. TRESemme was running a series of ads throughout the videos. Before the video began there was a screen asking you to “Choose the style you prefer:”

I think this is really cool. Here they are actually involving you interactively in the advertisement. When you choose one style over another it gives you tips specific to that hair style. Now that’s an interesting concept delivered over time. If you did this with more fine-grained segmentations you might actually be able to create ads for direct response advertising. I give TRESemme kudos for coming up with a cool concept.

BUT they did miss the market big-time. Why in the world would you show a hair care ads deliberately created for women to a man watching “Weird Science”? It’s about as far off the mark as you can get, but the concept still stands.

What questions would you like to ask your audience?

Branding is a tough game to play. In traditional advertising building a brand can cost millions of dollars. The big boys on the block (think Wal-mart, Sears, Coke, Miller) literally spend billions of dollars annually building the brand. I’m sure that you would be happy to to have that kind of money to throw around, but chances are that your budgets are significantly smaller. Let’s take some learnings from the big guys and show you how to apply them to your business.

Measuring the value of a brand is pretty tough work. Owning the trademark for Coca-Cola has got to be worth something right? In practice it is hard to nail down a price because a brand is not a tangible thing. In truth, it’s more of an art than a science. In the financial world when they put a dollar value on a brand they call it “goodwill.” This is the figure that traditionally gets tossed around.

In the online world there are a few fantastic ways to measure the penetration of your brand. The two best metrics you should follow are:

1. Direct Navigation Traffic
2. Number of monthly searches on the brand term and it’s derivatives.

Take Bidz.com for an example. I went to Google Trends and typed in “bidz.”

As you can see, over the last few years, they have enjoyed about a 20% increase in their brand term searches. Now, that’s cool. The data above is Google’s view of the world. When you are assessing the demand for your brand you’ll want the hard facts from your web analytics package.

Go back six months. Measure all the traffic that you received from search engines that included a brand term. Do the same for last month. What is the change in the traffic from these two periods?
Do the same process for your direct navigation traffic. Is your brand getting more prevalent or less?

Start now. Go measure the pulse of your brand.

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