Student Loan Blog : advertising

Wilkes University Puts Freshman Recruits Front and Center and Billboard-Size

Student Loan Girl — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:56:00 GMT

Wilkes University, a small, private school in northeastern Pennsylvania, is using a quirky new in-your-face $120,000 ad campaign to get the attention of today’s media- and marketing-savvy students.

The university is plastering personalized messages on billboards, pizza boxes, gas pumps, and even on MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to students it wants to make a part of its freshman class, reports Michael Rubinkam in a story by The Associated Press (“Pennsylvania College Woos Students by Putting Them in Ads,” April 30, 2008).

The “trendsetting and forward-thinking” marketing campaign appeals to the “look-at-me generation,” teens comfortable sharing all-things-personal on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, says Nancy Costopulos, chief marketing officer of the American Marketing Association.

The Message: Personalized and Not for the Shy

Wilkes features applicants in its ads who have a “mix of talents and determination” and who live in markets where the university wants to promote itself, says Jack Chielli, the school’s director of marketing. Students must also consent to having their names used.

The ads, writes Rubinkam, are meant “to convey the message that the school gets to know its students personally and pays close attention to their needs.”

To get messages with the right personal touch, 160over90, the Philadelphia marketing firm contracted by Wilkes, interviews participating students and their friends and families, uncovering likes, dislikes, hobbies, nicknames.

The agency uses the information it gleans from these in-depth interviews to design the highly personalized ads that have turned some college-bound seniors into quasi-celebrities in their high schools and communities:

“Lake Lehman senior Greg Heindel: You give your time at the soup kitchen, the firehouse, and your church summer camp. Wilkes University would like to give you something — a top-quality education.”
“Hey Kristen Pecka. Only your closest friends at Central Catholic call you Pecka-lecka-lecka. Choose Wilkes University and add 2,362 more people to that list.”
“Scranton High senior Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)”

Each ad includes an invitation to “call a Colonel” (the school’s mascot) and provides a phone number that plays a recorded message from a current Wilkes student.

It’s the Thought That Counts

Even if targeted recruits end up choosing another school, says Chielli, he considers the ads successful as long as they continue to grab attention and get other students to think about Wilkes.

But besides drawing more students to apply, the school wants to help make it possible for them to actually attend: Nearly all students receive some form of financial aid apart from student loans to help cover the $25,000 price tag. Wilkes awards $22 million in financial aid each year.

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Not Just Your Virtual Diary Anymore, Blogging Is Big Business

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:23:00 GMT

A decade ago, blogging was a way for anyone with a computer to get a high from posting their personal ramblings to the Web and sharing their now-published thoughts with the online world.

Narcissistic? Maybe. Therapeutic? Definitely. Profitable? Questionable.

But not anymore.

Thanks to our obsession with the Internet and our undying need for ever-more information at our fingertips, blogging has evolved into a powerful and profitable business venture that almost anyone can do.

Big-Buck Bloggers

Take Zach Brooks, for example. This Manhattanite has turned his love affair with greasy food into Midtownlunch.com, a blog devoted to spotlighting cheap eateries in New York for nearly 2,000 daily readers.

The website, which focuses on restaurants where you can get lunch for under $10, can sometimes net Brooks $1,000 a month, writes Associated Press reporter Candace Choi (“Casual Blogging Not Just Lunch Money Now,” Dec. 26, 2007).

Then there’s Samuel Chi, who started BCSGuru.com “as a way to demystify the convoluted universe of college football rankings for fellow fans,” Choi writes. This season, Chi, a former sports journalist with a background in statistics, earned about $8,000 from his blog.

With the help of PayPerPost, BlogAds, Google’s AdSense, and similar programs that help advertisers place ads on large and small sites, bloggers, who write on everything from the latest tech gadgets to politics to the celebrity train wreck of the day, can earn money based on their site’s popularity — the more people who click on the ads on their site, the more money they make.

Turn Your Blog into a Cash Cow

Write about your obsessions, make the most of your advertisers, and you may never again have to hawk your clothes or sell your plasma to get that extra cash.

Last year, total online ad revenue was nearly $20 billion, so there’s plenty of money to go around.

The Washington Post suggests a few different ways to get your share as a blogger:

Let online ad programs work for you. Sell ad space on your blog, and you can get paid each time someone clicks on your ads.

Take control of your ad sales. Not a fan of pay-per-click ads? Use BlogAds. Join its database of advertisers — free of charge — and set your own ad prices. Companies then find you and purchase ad space for a set period of time. You keep 70 percent of your add fees and turn over 30 percent to BlogAds.

Be the middleman. Join a company’s affiliate program: Post an ad on your blog that links to their site, and every time one of your readers clicks on the ad, goes to the company’s site, and the visit results in a purchase, you’ll receive a small commission. You can earn as much as 10 percent per referral sale from businesses like Amazon, eBay, and Match.com. Use affiliate marketing networks like LinkShare or Commission Junction to browse hundreds of companies with affiliate programs.

Get your fans involved. Give your loyal and dedicated readers an opportunity to show their support. Post a donation button from online payment services like PayPal or the Amazon Honor System, and set yourself up to receive monetary donations.

Sell blog-branded gear. If asking for a handout isn’t your thing, slap your company logo on T-shirts, coffee mugs or caps and create your own online store. CafePress offers you more than 50 products to choose from.

What Are You Waiting For? Express Yourself.

Know the best places to find a bargain? The best sports bars to watch a game? How to make the most out of your college loans?

Launch a blog. It’s so easy you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it before.

Just go to any popular blog platform site, like WordPress, Blogger, MySpace or Weebly, and create your blog for free. And let your love of all things you make the extra cash for you.

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Amazon and SpiralFrog Looking to Cut Into iTunes' Market Share

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 02:03:00 GMT

Spurred by the monolithic popularity of iTunes and the decline of CD sales, veteran online retailers like Amazon.com, start-ups like SpiralFrog and other companies are clamoring to get into the fray of digital music on demand.

With so much competition, consumers can get great deals and music options, depending on what they’re looking for.

Amazon Betting on Flexibility to Lure Consumers

Amazon’s venture into MP3 sales launched last week with an inventory of nearly 2.3 million songs from the catalogs of major music labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music, as well as thousands of independent labels—and none of these songs are copy-protected with digital rights management technology.

DRM technologies, which have been implemented by the music industry both on CDs and digital files, aim to restrict how consumers can use or distribute their music purchases. In the world of downloadable music, these DRM controls will typically restrict, for example, what kind of hardware (iPod, Zune, etc.) a music file will play on, or how many times a digital file can be burned to a CD.

While the Universal and EMI songs available from Amazon aren’t subject to DRM, they represent only a portion of the labels’ vast music libraries. Nevertheless, Amazon is setting the stage to compete directly with Apple’s iTunes, which has so far dominated the digital music market.

Amazon MP3, as Amazon’s digital-music virtual aisle is called, offers songs for 89 to 99 cents a pop and albums for $5.99 to $9.99 each, a slightly lower price point than iTunes, which sells individual copy-protected songs at a flat rate of 99 cents each and DRM-free songs from EMI for $1.29 apiece. Full album downloads from iTunes typically sell for $9.99.

iTunes uses AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format with proprietary DRM to encode its downloads, which means, unless you spring for the slightly pricier DRM-free songs or if you want something not on the EMI label (which is the only label currently offering DRM-free songs through Apple), your iTunes downloads will only play on an iTunes platform.

So if you have any portable digital player other than an iPod or an operating system that doesn’t support iTunes (Linux, for example), you won’t be able to listen or watch your iTunes downloads. And your iPod won’t play any DRM-enabled files that you purchased outside of iTunes.

Amazon MP3, on the other hand, by providing all DRM-free content, gives you the freedom to play your purchases on most types of portable devices (including the iPod) and through various desktop media players like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Realizing that flexibility is the convenience factor most music lovers are looking for in their online purchases, Wal-Mart is following in Amazon’s footsteps. The low-cost retailer offers its DRM-free tunes from EMI and Universal Music for 94 cents each and albums for $9.22, which is roughly 27 percent cheaper than iTunes.

Free Songs: Too Good to Be True?

SpiralFrog is taking a different approach, offering its non-DRM downloads free instead of engaging in a price war with online retailers. But the free music comes with a catch: Visitors can download songs at no charge but “have to wait 90 seconds for each track to download, and they must answer questions each month about their buying habits,” explains Joseph Menn in the Los Angeles Times (“SpiralFrog Offers Free Songs—With a Catch,” Sept. 17, 2007).

Songs can be stored on your computer but can’t be burned onto a CD. And if you don’t visit the SpiralFrog website at least once a month to watch more ads, your SpiralFrog music library gets digitally locked, and you won’t be able to access your music. You do have the ability to transfer your music files onto two Windows-compatible portable players or mobile phones at a time—but of course, this excludes the Apple iPod, the most popular digital music player out there.

The SpiralFrog website opened with a selection of 770,000 songs and 3,500 music videos from numerous independent labels and Universal Music. According to eFluxMedia, SpiralFrog has also recently signed a deal with digital label/publisher INgrooves to make INgrooves’ full catalog of audio and video files available, which adds close to 100,000 songs and 2,000 videos to SpiralFrog’s library, including 4,000 Brazilian albums from INgrooves’ iMúsica division (“SpiralFrog Opens for Business,” Sept. 17, 2007).

SpiralFrog makes its money from displaying online advertising. The ad revenue, Menn explains, will be split between SpiralFrog and the labels and music publishers, with the music industry getting more than half.

By offering free media downloads, SpiralFrog wants to appeal to customers tired of paying for their entertainment at iTunes or other pay sites.

“This is a very viable alternative to selling music because clearly that mode is broken,” says Scott Stagg, a SpiralFrog investor, in a quote in Menn’s article. “This is very similar to TV: You get it for free and the advertisers pay the money.”

The record labels, for their part, hope that free sites like SpiralFrog will help keep users away from illegal downloading and unauthorized peer-to-peer share services like LimeWire.

Whether you decide to get your music free, by dealing with a few restrictions, or at the best deal you can find by shopping around, SpiralFrog, Amazon and Wal-Mart are just a handful of the companies competing for you. Rumor has it Google may also get into the melee of online music sales.

Let the games begin.

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Advertisers Cashing in on Common Scents

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 05:45:00 GMT

So you think you’ve outsmarted advertisers with your TiVo^®-driven, ad-free television-watching world. A realm devoid of TV commercials aimed at the hard of hearing—the kind that sound like someone let the bellowing OxyClean^® spokesman loose in your living room. Armed with a DVR and an iPod, you thought you’d never have to listen to another unsolicited TV or radio ad.

Think again.

You may have blocked advertisers from peddling their wares in front of your eyes and in your ears, but now they’ve gone up your nose.

Advertisers are triggering your sense of smell to get you to buy everything from cell phones to candy bars. Realtors have long used the smell of chocolate chip cookies to land a sale during an open house. And now department stores and Vegas casinos are joining in, using scents that trigger spending everywhere, from the lingerie section to the slot machines.

Scent marketing is so popular, it’s become one of Advertising Age magazine’s Top 10 “Trends to Watch,” and you might be surprised to discover the ways in which you (and your nose) may have already been targeted, according to an article by Karen Ravn that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (“Sniff … and Spend,” Aug. 20, 2007).

Scents aren’t just for masking unwanted odors anymore, they’re big business.

Anyone who’s ever walked through Costco, Sam’s or a Trader Joe’s knows that the nose has buying power. The aroma of free food samples can secure a purchase or two of the sampled items.

And then there’s Disneyland, which for years has used its “Smellitzer” machines to pump the sweet smells of candy into the air outside its Main Street confectionery store and prompt you to stop in and buy candy you didn’t know you wanted.

Besides driving up food sales, scents also work to push sales of non-edible items at retail giants like Bloomingdale’s, which has tapped into the impulsive shopping that appealing aromas can inspire.

The smell of baby powder wafts throughout the Bloomingdale’s baby department, and the classic Spring Break smell of coconut hits you as soon as you get to the swimsuits. The nostalgia and images inspired by instantly recognizable scents will often lead to purchases.

Younger shoppers more likely to be led by their noses.

Where stores and product designers used to only fuss about “the color and shape of a package or the precise arrangement of items in the aisles of a store,” they’re now sniffing out the profitability of the olfactory senses.

“Already it is a $100-million business,” and Harald Vogt, founder and chief marketer of the Scent Marketing Institute in Scarsdale, N.Y., “predicts it will reach $500 million or even $1 billion within the next seven to eight years,” Ravn writes.

And research shows younger shoppers seem to be the key to success. In one soon-to-be-published study, a Montreal researcher found “shoppers younger than 35 spent more in a suburban mall when it had a pleasant ambient scent than when it didn’t. But this was not true for older shoppers—possibly because the sense of smell declines with age.”

So next time you go to the mall, take a whiff and make a note of what you smell. It may be fresh coffee from a Starbucks kiosk, vanilla at an ice cream parlor, or the cacophony of aromas that tell you you’re passing Bath & Body Works or Yankee Candle.

But don’t be fooled. One sniff of an enjoyable scent might lead you straight to the cash register. And you might not even realize it’s marketing at its best, advertising even your TiVo and your iPod can’t deny.

Talk to the education finance advisors at NextStudent. They have all the information and advice you need on student loans. Check out www.nextstudent.com.

Student Loan Girl

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