Month: June 2009

A Tale of Two Ads

This is a tale of two ads that started running on my company’s FinalCutters website from its launch in April:

The ad on the left (Killer Secrets) produced far more clicks than the ad on the right (Loader). Here are the stats for a couple of weeks:

27th April to 3rd May
Killer Secrets: 21 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 2 clicks per 1000 visits

4th May to 10th May
Killer Secrets: 16 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 1 click per 1000 visits

Very bad news for the Loader ad, so I decided to try an experiment. I reckoned that there were two things working in the favour of the Killer Secrets ad:

  1. There’s no company name so it isn’t obviously an ad (for an eBook) and could easily be seen as a link to a tutorial or some other content.
  2. It is static rather than animated. Do users really have the time or inclination to sit and wait for an ad to run round the loop?

So I remade the Loader ad to look like this:

The results were quite dramatic:

11th May to 17th May
Killer Secrets: 25 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 7 clicks per 1000 visits

18th May to 24th May
Killer Secrets: 19 clicks per 1000 visits
Loader: 7 clicks per 1000 visits

Yes the Killer Secrets ad is still the more striking one but even so that’s a 466% increase for clicks on the new Loader ad compared to the previous 2 week period! Job done.

Looking for Eric

This film goes on general release in the UK today and I was lucky enough to see a preview last Friday at BFI Southbank.

Now what I know about football could be written on the back of a stamp but luckily this film isn’t just for footie fans. It tells the story of Eric Bishop (played fantastically by Steve Evets), a depressed postman in Manchester living with his two teenage sons. As his work mates rally round to lift his spirits, he starts talking to the poster of Eric Cantona in his bedroom. Before we know it, ‘Big Eric’ is sitting in the same room and playing life coach – pushing ‘Little Eric’ to move forward in his life and take control of himself.

Through babysitting duties for his grown up daughter, he begins to heal old wounds and misunderstandings with ex-wife Lily. Then the plot takes a dramatic turn when he discovers one of his sons hiding a gun for a shady local gangster. Trapped in a seemingly impossible situation, ‘Big Eric’ encourages ‘Little Eric’ to turn to his mates for help and the resolution is unexpected, hilarious and uplifting.

‘Looking for Eric’ is a triumph. The acting is superb and the film is completely engrossing and never descends into sentimentality. Highly recommended.

After the film’s preview there was a fascinating and very entertaining Q&A session with Ken Loach, Steve Evets (outrageously funny guy) and yes the man himself…Eric Cantona. It was being videoed and is well worth seeing if it becomes available on the BFI or Guardian websites.