A friend of mine got the following email from MSN today:
From:Microsoft
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 3:22 PM
To:
Subject: Share the benefits of adCenter with your friends today
Dear ,
We’re excited to recognize your participation and feedback that have helped us shape the pilot of MSN® adCenter. To thank you for using adCenter to promote your business, we’d like to offer you an exclusive opportunity to refer friends and colleagues to apply for the pilot.
In addition to an invitation into the pilot, your nominees will receive a special offer to join our complimentary campaign set-up service called QuickLaunch. This service offers the assistance of a Media Specialist, making it easier to set up campaigns, migrate and optimize current P4P campaigns, and learn how to best manage campaign performance in adCenter.
So, share the benefits of adCenter today and access your exclusive invitations.
We look forward to welcoming your friends and colleagues to MSN adCenter.
Sincerely,
The MSN adCenter team
Does this remind you of anything? Say, oh I don’t know, Gmail? Recall that Gmail generated a lot of buzz when it launched by making the beta an invitation-only affair. The hype got so out of control that people were actually putting invitations up for auction on eBay (and what’s worse, people were actually bidding for them!).
So I guess you could say kudos to MSN for trying to market AdCenter via word-of-mouth or “buzz” marketing. The problem, however, is that MSN AdCenter and Gmail are different for two primary reasons – reasons that will likely make the buzz around MSN much less significant than the Gmail phenomenon.
First of all, Gmail is a free email account. Other than being cooler than Yahoo at the moment, it isn’t something that isn’t readily available elsewhere online. MSN AdCenter, however, is a limited beta of high quality online clicks. The more people that sign up for AdCenter, the more competition for clicks, the higher advertisers must pay, and the lower the ROI for existing advertisers.
Existing advertisers no doubt comprehend this fact (especially since the margins right now are astronomically higher than those on Google or Overture). So there’s actually a strong disincentive to ‘share’ MSN with other advertisers. I suppose you could give an invitation to someone you know in a totally different vertical, but for the most part, the other folks you know that are actively engaged in online marketing are probably your competitors. Just as you wouldn’t tell a competitor about a secret keyword you’ve discovered that’s driving thousands of dollars of business to your company, you’re unlikely to send a friendly email inviting your rivals to participate on a successful network.
Of course, the flipside of this could also occur. If you’re having bad luck on MSN – and you’re a malicious person – perhaps you’d actually want to invite some of your less-likeable competitors onto MSN, just to see them burn through a lot of cash. Either way, if you assume that advertisers of a feather flock together, it seems unlikely that there would be a lot of benevolent sharing of invitations.
The second difference between MSN AdCenter and Gmail is that MSN AdCenter costs money and Gmail is free. It was nice (albeit a little spammy) to get an invitation in the early Gmail days inviting me to try out Google’s latest cool product. But getting an invitation from someone inviting me to sign up to buy advertising online? That’s a little strange. I can just imagine the boilerplate email MSN has composed: “Hi [Insert Name Here], I just spent $5000 on MSN AdCenter. You should too! Click here to provide your credit card information and get started today!”
Viral marketing works, no question. And again, I give MSN credit for thinking outside the box on this one. To be fair, they have generated a bit of buzz about AdCenter in the SEM community – everyone I meet (every SEMer, that is) always asks me if I’m in the MSN beta and whether it’s working. That being said, I’d be surprised if the ‘invite a friend’ campaign has the desired effect. Of course, if I’m wrong, I may just have to start an Amazon affiliate site and ‘invite’ my friends to purchase books from me!
Tags: MSN AdCenter, viral marketing, buzz marketing, gmail, sem, ppc, cpc
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