Sunil Garg's Weblog » advertising

In the Netherlands, I Fight Stains

Sunil Garg — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:58:06 +0000

While I was in Amsterdam last year, I came across Sunil brand laundry detergent at the grocery store, which was pretty cool.

I just found some of their ads on YouTube, which I feel compelled to post here, if for no other reason than that they contain my name.

Here’s an old black and white ad:

In this one, I fight stains with martial arts:

I have no idea what they’re saying. Maybe one of you out there on the internets will translate the videos for all of us?

Deceptive Packaging

Sunil Garg — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:02:23 +0000

For the record, I disagree with Minute Maid’s decision to devote less than 0.3% of this carton’s area towards indicating that its contents are from concentrate.

A Weeklong Experiment with Facebook Flyers Pro

Sunil Garg — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 07:47:44 +0000

Last Monday, in an attempt to promote our Facebook application while experimenting with Facebook’s advertising platform, I signed up for Flyers Pro, a low-cost CPC-based service that allows users to purchase targeted advertisements on Facebook.

Over the course of one week, my flyer received 2,108 impressions and zero clicks. Starting with almost 1000 on the first day, daily impressions steadily declined as the week progressed, probably because Facebook’s algorithm saw that they weren’t making any money on this flyer.

Even though I don’t expect people to click on ads within Facebook, since I rarely do myself, I find it somewhat surprising that I didn’t receive a single click from any of the high schoolers to whom this flyer was shown. If I were to receive a single click at this point, that would give me an overall click-through rate of less than 0.05%, which is abysmal by any standard.

While I fully recognize Facebook’s value in reaching and engaging the younger online population, this experiment has made me skeptical of the viability of CPA or CPI-based advertising with Facebook and its competitors. Given that this realm of advertising is very much in its infancy, this picture might change very soon.