Half Full or Half Empty? Fill It Up All The Way!
by Aaron Strecker ~ December 29th, 2009 |
If I had to pick between the two, I could easily say that I am more of a glass half full kind of guy than half empty. I would rather look on the bright side of life, than looking around every corner for what is going to go wrong. But you know what, my glass is under constant siege from the world around me. The world is what makes me slip over into the dark side, the half empty side, sometimes. It is what makes me a skeptic in some situations. I’ll give you an example of this strange (or maybe not so strange) Jekyll and Hyde dual personality. When I get that call about the great vacation deal for $99, I get excited thinking “This is awesome, a great vacation spot for only $99!” Then the skeptic decides to interject, “Yeah, but what do they want? Is this someone calling from their basement trying to rip me off? Will I ever really see this so called vacation spot?” I’d say that this is probably the norm for most people. We want to believe, but there are too many news stories about people being bilked out of their money. For goodness sakes, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme had enough zeroes in it to make me more than a little bit cynical. Money is the obvious example, but there are other things that contribute to the emptying of our glass – unfulfilled promises, unrequited love, even bad timing and bad luck. Is that what we have become in life, skeptical optimistics?
‘Twas the week before Christmas, no time left to waste
Do a search for almost any product or service and you’ll most likely see a variety of paid ads on the results page. Search marketers often talk about the importance of “being there” when a potential customer is looking for you. But some advertisers don’t want to be there just when their own customers are searching; they’d like to be present when their competition’s customers search as well!
One of the unique opportunities of my role is that I spend a fair amount of time reflecting on how we have gotten to where we are at this point in time — and even more important, attempting to answer the question “What’s next?”
While looking at the Sunday paper one morning, I began to daydream about how much money I would save if I would just commit to coupon clipping. I then saw a coupon for a client that I work for and noticed that they had a call to action to find recipes and tips online. I thought it would be nice to see how many people would actually use the coupon or take it a step further and use search to get recipes to use the product. I felt it was great that they were using print advertising to bring awareness of their recipe site but wondered why they didn’t utilize paid search to promote their free standing inserts. So for their next Free Standing Insert (FSI), we decided to test the geo- targeting feature (that I discussed in my last 
