Yes, this is what I do sometimes when I’m bored: I geek out with advertising. I buy ads to promote my own awesomeness.

I mean, c’mon, that ad was pretty freakin’ spectacular:

This ad does not lie. One. Bit.

Let’s look at some of the “Emma is Awesome” campaign facts:

• I ran this campaign from March 24-31 and spent a total of $17.46.
• I got a CTR of 0.066%. If you compare this to the recent Webtrends whitepaper, “Facebook Advertising Performance Benchmarks & Insights“ - the paper indicates that in 2010, Webtrends saw an average campaign performance CTR of 0.051%. Yay! My ad was compelling! [I mean, cough, of course it was.]
• I spent an average CPC of $0.58 – higher than Webtrends overall 2010 campaign performance CPC of $0.49. #EmmaFail

My thoughts on these results:

• For $17 essentially, I got 45,000 impressions. Now, as we all know, impressions don’t really mean much these days. Impressions mean, essentially, there’s a chance that maybe someone saw your ad. And we all know ad blindness is increasing. But still, I’d pay $17 to promote my blog for a fraction of 45,000 users’ attention! In my personal opinion, this is a good deal for my blog.
• AND! I got 30 clicks. That means 30 Facebook users (assuming 100% unique clickers) visited my blog. So how did this impact my traffic? Well, I pulled a graph of my traffic for the week before, the week during and the week after the campaign ran.

Uhhhh. Pretty much no effect on my traffic. So what does this tell me?

Options:

1. Facebook has sucky users!

2. The ad was misleading.

3. My blog wasn’t very interesting.

It’s my expert opinion that the only true answer is clearly Option #1. Because Option #2 and #3 just simply aren’t valid arguments. My ad was amazing and my blog is pure awesomesauce. That said, there may be some bias in those last two statements.

Even with an attempt to filter for the following interests:

• Live in Toronto
• Between 18-40
• Likes advertising, digital media or Publicis Groupe
• College graduate
• Speaks English

Facebook didn’t drive what I would consider quality traffic. Though if I’m to be honest, the ad didn’t set up user expectations well. Anyone who clicks on an ad like the one above probably isn’t looking for the advertising musings of some 25 year old redhead living in Toronto. You know who is? You! (Congrats on having excellent taste, by the way.)

Anyway, it was a fun little experiment to see if I could drive further traffic to my blog. I can tell you I won’t be using Facebook again to create interest in this here blog. But perhaps in the future I’ll play around and see how I can continue to bring additional interest to my sometimes-updated blog.

So, what about you? How do y’all feel about Facebook Ads? Ever tried them,  for professional or personal reasons? Success or failure stories to share? Would love to hear in the comments! Cheers.

So I want to warn you.

What you are about to see? May change the way you look at the world. It may shake you to your little advertising core. It may cause simultaneous weeping, laughing and jaw-dropping.

I am warning you because I care. About you. About this industry. About being upfront and honest. About being the best I can be. About only showcasing what matters, what really matters, to this world.

I can’t be any more – or any less – than that.

So, please, sit back and be prepared to change your life. Because of me. Because of how awesome and super-cool I am. Because I… am Emma Brooks: Digital Media Enthusiast.

Okay, so maybe I just haven’t updated in a while and I’m exhausted. And when I’m exhausted I think I’m funny. But really, you gotta admire the mad Paint skillz I possess. No, sir, as I told you before: I am not for hire. $10,000/hour? No sir, the world is not ready for my skillz. Not yet. Call me in 2 years. We’ll talk.

So I was looking up lyrics today and came across some great Scientology ads on a song lyrics website, Sing365. Just thought I’d capture these for my lovely readers and share them with you! Really not sure why a song lyrics website is the best place to capture potential Scientologists: anyone have any ideas? What’s the demographic of these sites?

In order to answer my own question, I turned to the internets to find out. And according to Google Ad Planner, 60% of the visitors are female, 41% don’t have a high school diploma, 37% are 0-17 years in age and 67% make between $25,000 – $75,000 a year. So basically they’re targeting young, rich kids? Sounds about right. Way to go Scientology!

And here are the great ads for you!

Square Banner Ads

Vertical Banner Ads

How great are these? “Love! Hate! What is the answer?”

Hmm. Tough one. I’ll let you guys decide! Feel free to comment with your ideas on what the answer should be? Love? Or hate?

I watched this video, laughed and marveled at how true it rang and then re-tweeted it on my account.

Since then I’ve seen it pop up at least 4 times on other accounts I follow on Twitter and on advertising blogs, such as AdJoke.

As of 5.47pm, this video has been viewed over 2,500 times and my guess is the majority of them were today. Already it’s received well over 63 comments – a much higher view/comment ratio than one would normally find on a YouTube video. It’s also been favourited 524 times, so clearly the video is clearly hitting a nerve in the ad industry.

Comments include things such as, “This made my stomach hurt. I have had this same type conversation three times this week alone” (shawngoesgreen) and “Five stars isn’t enough” (jforrest55).

This video was added to YouTube 5 days ago on an account that was made 6 days ago. Sounds like someone’s trying – and succeeding – in making this thing viral. Should be interesting to see what the numbers are like in a few days. I’m also curious to see whether “Mr Bennett” really did see this thing on Facebook or whether it was actually created by Leo Burnett itself.

Recently I was on the MTV.ca site enjoying some free TV programming thanks to The Hills Aftershow Show (I never claimed to have good taste in TV!) when I noticed this banner ad above me. And not for the right reasons:

Something is wrong!

Can you see it? Just me? It says: Missed an episode? Click Here to Watch NOW.

If you’re going to go for leading caps, why isn’t episode capitalized?! And just for the record, I hate leading caps. They look ugly and unnatural. If you’re going to talk to a consumer, talk to them with regular punctuation, as if you’re talking at the same level. Leading caps makes me feel like this advertiser is talking down to me. Let’s have a regular conversation, with regular punctuation, shall we?

It’s small, yes, but I disliked it enough to blog about it! Take that, CTV.