

$150 Later Using MyLikes.com Social Ad Platform. - jasonwilk
http://tinycomb.com/2011/03/08/150-later-using-mylikes-com-social-ad-platform-fail/

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johnrob
WhiteyBoard is a physical product. Get it on the shelves of Walmart, then use
social media to build brand awareness. Otherwise, stick to intent based
advertising like search ads.

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acangiano
This is particularly true for non-geographically targeted traffic. I'm the
ideal customer for this product, but given that I live in Canada, any cent
spent to reach me is wasted. I won't pay $40 in shipping for an $18 product or
even a $35 one.

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arvinds
This is Arvind - one of the co-founders of MyLikes. We do offer location
targeting (all the way upto a metro level). In this case, his campaign was
paying only for US clicks - (our system guides and publishers self-select
since they are only paid for clicks from the location that the advertiser is
interested in).

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acangiano
That's a great feature, Arvind. I'll keep MyLikes in mind.

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dreamux
No offense, but if you're reaching out to that many people and getting zero
engagement it's probably just not an interesting campaign. Young people
(twitter user demographics) are awesome at filtering out ads, they don't
process things unless they're unique/funny/interesting. I'm not a marketer (in
fact, I'm pretty terrible at such things; so take my critical view with a
grain of salt), but the reason people remember old spice isn't for the
deodorant.

Perhaps try a new direction with your messaging, before you give up on the
medium/channel. I'd love to see more A/B testing here to know what really
works.

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jasonwilk
We tried creating an Old Spice type commercial.
<http://www.youtube.com/user/whiteyboard#p/a/u/0/JUi2bLcryfc>

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shadowpwner
Personally, I wouldn't buy your product based on your ad because it looks like
your product is a flimsy plastic sheet someone can make by unwrapping a
plastic bag.

I remember reading about this on Reddit, how were sales there? Also, have you
considered targetting your product to people like college students, or
designers, etc?

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jasonwilk
It's not like a flimsy plastic sheet. I know the kind of product you're
talking about, WhiteyBoard is not that. We just did a bad job of showing the
product off in the video (correction; our director and set designers did a
poor job)

We've thought about advertising to college students. We did a couple of free
promotions at UCLA where we handed out our sticky notes for free, but those
are tough sales to track. Students are also a tough demo to reach with
marketing. Probably one of the main reasons 99% of our sales still just come
from word of mouth. We have a good product and it's cheap.

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bindupreddy
I am the CEO of MyLikes. Just wanted to chime in and say that the system
typically takes 24 - 48 hrs to match your campaign to relevant publishers /
disapprove irrelevant ones etc. Please check your campaign again. Only $50 of
your campaign is currently spent. My sense is you will also get a lot more
tweets from relevant publishers in the next 24 hrs.

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jarin
If you're paying that much for non-targeted advertising, you might as well
just get junk traffic (it's cheaper).

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jasonwilk
If you're comparing $0 revenue, then yes, junk traffic would work the same.
We've proved with other avenues, however, that non-targeted advertising works
for our brand in some cases.

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arvinds
Jason, how are you measuring conversions on your end? I didn't see any
tracking codes in your campaign urls. We do have a advertisers who measure
conversions as well as a lot of them who are just interested in building brand
awareness.

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elvirs
You're paying for people to astro-turf your app to people that are interested
in what that person has to say, not necessarily looking for whatever your site
does.

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minalecs
what ad service did you use for the reality star ?

for those talking about the campaign or the non targeting, I think the example
he mentions about using another service is relevant.

I'm not familiar with MyLikes, but are the influencers that are used for
advertising, are they able to be chosen by the companies, like ad.ly ? How
transparent is the process of what influencers are running the ads ?

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jasonwilk
The reality star was just a friend of my co-founder.

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minalecs
I'd be more interested in who are the people MyLikes chose to advertise your
campaign based on the categories you chose. From the categories you chose..
Moms, Youth/teens, Finance,Education, Art, Small business. This seems like its
the right target for your product.

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jasonwilk
Right, we certainly picked the correct target demos based on all the research
we have on who has purchased products in the past. MyLike lets people
categorize themselves, which is a problem.

