“Go Big or Go Home” — you’ve probably heard this slogan, maybe many times. Do you believe it works? Here are three examples when it failed utterly.
The first was during the “Dot Com” explosion in about 1998. One Silicon Valley Internet company spent $1 million dollars on a Super Bowl television ad and then went under about six months later. It had no products, and apparently no business plan. At the time it ran the ad it did have a website which received a massive spike in traffic but it didn’t capture any contact information for the visitors so all the money was wasted. No leads were generated and there couldn’t have been any sales because there were no products.
In those days, you heard a lot about Web “traffic” but not how it would translate into sales or profits. They were strange days with a fair amount of hysteria and far less practical sense.
The other instance occurred at one of my former employers many years after that at a state government agency. Some public health educators ran a campaign to try to raise awareness about the H1N1 virus and why it was important to get vaccinated. They contacted an outdoor advertising company which offered ad packages on billboards and buses. For $1 million dollars they bought a statewide campaign with billboards across California, and they had their own graphic designers create the promotional materials, including a website with a unique domain. They were excited when their campaign launched and the senior manager made a presentation in a big internal meeting declaring it a success.
I was on the team that put the project together and handled setting up the Google Analytics for the campaign website. By looking at the Web analytics, I knew that there were only about 550 visitors to the site during the six-week campaign that cost $1 million dollars! The cost per Web visitor was $1,818.18. That’s not cost per lead, it’s cost per visitor. There weren’t any leads.
The data showed the project was almost an utter failure in terms of driving visitors to the site and a waste of all that money. The senior manager who said in front of dozens of internal employees that it was a success lied to everyone there. She knew what the results truly were but did not mention them in the meeting. In a private, smaller meeting, she told us all not to mention the real results to others.
The public health educators were well-intentioned people who didn’t understand marketing or advertising. They didn’t know their target audience or how that audience accessed health information. In fact, we all know that no one looks for health information by driving on freeways and scanning billboards at the same time. Distracted driving acutally kills thousands every year in the U.S.
We all conduct online searches when we want health information. The health educators could have figured that out if they had done their research properly, but they didn’t. They resorted to an assumption that conventional media advertising would be effective. Of course, it wasn’t.
If they had run a Google Adwords campaign, they would have driven a huge amount of visitors to their H1N1 website, not 550. They might have actually had over one million visitors. They trusted an outdoor advertising company, and they didn’t have what you might call ‘street smarts’ about what an advertising company might claim versus what the real-world results would most likely be.
They could have easily set up some quick tests with tiny budgets on Google Adwords to see what kind of response there might be. That way, they would have had some data to predict what the cost per visitor might be and how many people they might target and ultimately impact. They didn’t think that way. They were not data-driven, and did not think strategically or creatively.
The worst part of the situation is that they also did not seem to learn anything from their mistakes, and were likely to repeat them again. Their attitude was, “We got the federal grant money and we spent it.” To them, that was success. Measurable results didn’t particularly matter.
The last scenario I heard about on the podcast of a marketing instructor who teaches musicians how to effectively market their independent music online. He was interviewing a guy who helps musicians with their websites and other creative promotionals materials. He mentioned a scenario where a single musician spent $1 million dollars on TV ads for his music, but had no sales.
So, in these these examples the total amount of money wasted was $3 million dollars.
The “Go Big or Go Home” approach to promotion might result in a huge failure.
The great thing about using controlled, measureable online campaigns is that you can run tests using tiny amounts of money and get nearly instant feedback to use to make better decisions. You also get precise analytics.
You don’t rely on ineffective tactics or delusional assumptions and waste huge amounts of money.