WebTrends

The capstone class of the advertising sequence at the University of Oregon is Ad Campaigns. The class works like this: You submit a resume and cover letter, get assigned to an “agency” and solve a company’s advertising or marketing problem. At the end of the term, each team presents their plan to the client, who picks the winning campaign.

I was chosen as Account Director and along with an Account Planner, Media Planner, Art Director and Copywriter formed the agency Ice Cream 4 Everyone. Days later, representatives from WebTrends, a Web analytics service, briefed us on their business, the state of the industry and the specific problems they needed us to solve. These problems were market saturation and weak branding. Although WebTrends is one of the original Web analytic companies and one that provides exceptional service, a flood of competitors has led to a loss of market share. A week branding strategy meant that they did not stand out from their competitors, even though their service was as good or better.

We began by researching the competitors’ branding strategies and comparing the different services offered by each company. We also talked to Web Administrators and marketing professionals to discover how and why they use Web analytics. What we learned is that the key value that leads people to need Web analytics is efficiency. People value their time highly and inefficiency within the workplace cuts into the company’s bottom line. In Web terms, a Website will be most efficient (and profitable) when it provides exactly what customers want without excessive content that they do not. The best way to discover what customers want from your Website is to monitor which pages they are viewing and which pages lead to sales.

When we stepped back and though about it, what WebTrends does is analyze what your customers have done in the past to help you predict what they may want in the future. So in a weird way, WebTrends helps you predict the future.

Our concept:
Meet Future Guy. Future Guy is a superhero that watches over Web City (your Website) and battles a group of villains known as The Inefficients. Future Guy, like WebTrends is something that understands what it takes to run an efficient, profitable business and is something to stand behind and rely on. The goal is to personify WebTrends as a “hero” that is dedicated to helping your business.

Our media mix was a combination of traditional and non-traditional media carefully selected to most efficiently reach our two target groups: Business decision makers and IT Professionals. We utilized a mix of print and online media and set up a Future Guy Website that funneled visitors to the WebTrends Website. Our calculations showed that our media plan allowed us to achieve an average reach of 62% and an average frequency of 1.52.

Campaign evaluation worked out well because we were able to use WebTrends’ own service to generate metrics to measure ROI. All print and online ads directed people to the Future Guy Website so monitoring traffic allowed us to quantify interest and believability. The number of visitors who continued to WebTrends site after the Future Guy site allowed us to measure how compelled people were by the campaign.

The WebTrends staff was impressed by both our strategy and creative execution. They praised us on comic book/superhero differentiation strategy, out hand-illustrated ads and our evaluation and ROI tactics. Our plan was chosen as the winning plan out of all the other groups of graduating ad students that term.


Some example pages from our campaign planbook: