What’s Old is New – Part 1

There is a phenomenon in the product marketing world where a particular trademark becomes synonymous with every product of that type despite who makes it. This is when a brand name becomes generic. It’s hard to think of anything better for a brand when everyone just associates the category with their name. Of course, it’s horrible for everyone else. In the performance marketing space, we have our own little version of this phenomenon with incentive promotions. What is that you ask? Exactly. But, if we say Free iPod advertising, email submit, zip submit, or cell submit you’d most likely know.

From 2004 through 2007, the business of Free iPod ads was such a big business that for some companies it wasn’t just an offer. It was their entire business. Stop us if you’ve heard this theme before, but after years of unfettered growth, an FTC investigation comes in, settlements are paid, the language on the ads change, and what was easily half a billion dollars a year in revenue tanks. Like mobile and acai who followed after, the Free iPod ad economy was hit hard. Those who stayed around became quite compliant and/or had thick skins.

The Free iPod ad market faced another whammy, and again, stop us if you’ve heard this. Many of the big sources of inventory started to ban the ads or at least make it very tough to have them run. Add to that an increasingly sophisticated user base, more difficult email delivery, harder reg path monetization, and you have even more reasons why companies without complete dedication (and even some with) would leave the space.

You might think the market would have dried up completely. That would have been my guess, but a few factors have kept it ticking. We could call it the rules of incentive promotion. Wherever there is hard to monetize traffic, ad units that no other advertiser would want to join (like content locking on copyright material), there will be an incentive promotion ad. Second, whenever there is super shady behavior generating traffic, there will be an incentive promotion ad there. Examples abound, such as comment spam on social media after someone’s account is hacked.

The traffic doesn’t have to be super shady to have an incentive promotion ad. Said the other way, if you see an incentive promotion ad, it doesn’t mean the site / traffic is shady. It could simply fall into the first category of harder to monetize / less well developed portion of a marketplace. We came across one just the other day that fell into this category.  

Click on the banner and you go here.

Then, here.

It’s a smart flow in that it optimized for mobile. We don’t know if the generic landing page is what allows it run, helps conversions, etc. What we do know is that the actual offer page being a cell submit is pretty clever. What makes this different though, is that it isn’t actually a typical incentive promotion. That ad sounds like one, but the monetization is decidedly not your typical one. It’s an SMS subscription. Scrolling below, you will see this (among other language):

“Summary terms: You must be the account holder of this device or have permission from the account holder. This is an auto renewing subscription service that will continue until cancelled anytime by texting STOP to short code 47777. Available to users over 18 for $9.99 per month charged on your wireless account or deducted from your prepaid balance for 2 clues & 1 quiz per week on T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Centennial Wireless and Unicel.”

The use of mobile subscription billing makes sense – it’s self-contained. Enter cell, get code on phone, go back to browser, and bang. Money. The downside of course is our usual gripe. Asking the consumer to bend over while they get it without the reach around. What we’ve always liked with mobile and incent though is the fact that the user could actually get that iPad if they were to stay on long enough. We always thought the acai folks should have given away something after month three, even if the duration was in a disclaimer. The other thing they could do? Get more creative with how they use the cell number.