A Million Hits? New PEER 1 Branding Campaign

Today, my marketing team officially unveils PEER 1’s new branding campaign where we ask the question, “Is your business ready for a million hits?” and introduce PEER 1’s new tagline “Fully scalable hosting solutions” that will appear below the PEER 1 logo. The tagline speaks to PEER 1’s position in the marketplace as a full solution IT hosting provider offering businesses the choice or combination of Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting (through our ServerBeach division), Co-location services, and in the near future, Cloud Computing. It also captures my company’s core value proposition of delivering “scalability”, or our ability to grow with our customer’s online hosting demands; conversely, our ability to scale down when less hosting horsepower is required.

The campaign also speaks to PEER 1’s extensive geographical footprint – 15 data centers and 21 network PoPs across North America and Europe – and our reputable high performance SuperNetwork™. At PEER 1, we’re confident that we deliver the most scalable IT hosting environment for startups and SMBs ready to explode online, as well as enterprises looking to scale their current needs. Clients like Club Penguin, YouTube, and PlentyofFish all began as relative unknowns that quickly turned into mega Internet sensations with PEER 1 and ServerBeach there all the way. Through this campaign, we want to let every IT professional and business operator know that we can do the same for them.

The campaign is largely comprised of online banner advertisements and three 30-second commercials shown above that take a cheeky approach towards individuals who experience a sudden increase in online traffic or “hits”. Let me know what you think. If you like them, please help me spread the message – link, embed, tweet, blog, and share anywhere and everywhere on the net. Cheers!

Poll on Marketing Spend

Second Microsoft Ad With Gates and Seinfeld

Here is the follow up ad (long version) to the first Gates Seinfeld Microsoft ad. Techcrunch isn’t impressed, and based on the comments I’ve received regarding the first ad, not many of you will be either. I found this one very much like a Seinfeld episode, so I enjoy the humor, but I do have to say that it isn’t getting to the point fast enough. This holds true with the shorter tv ad versions that I’ve seen.

Microsoft Motivational Video… Cringe!

Microsoft takes the cringe factor to a whole new level. Check out this motivational video for their sales department to pump them up to sell Vista. Maybe there is some truth to those Apple MAC commercials after all

Getting IT with New Web Campaign

We’ve officially announced our new “we get IT” campaign at PEER 1 through this press release today. My team and I designed this campaign as way of telling our customers’ business story, and how hosting has played a critical role in doing what they do. So far, we’ve launched three video stories: Plentyoffish.com (no.1 free online dating site), Vonage (leading broadband telephone provider) and Blast Radius (interactive design agency for fortune 500’s). This blends with my strong belief in making the customer the star, and allows us to keep the campaign as fresh as the individuals we profile. People are doing some very unique and innovative things online, so there is no shortage of content and intrigue. We’ve adopted a casual interview style with the segments hosted by former MTV VJ Brian Adler, who helps by injecting some humor and taking some of the mystery out of technology so that anyone can understand it. The other part of this campaign was a trial piece we launched on social media sites called “Growing Pains” which tells the story of a guy named Todd who brings home a server to start his own online business. “This is going to grow into something beautiful,” he exclaims. He’s right. Well, sort of. Things do grow… but just a little out of control. A fun (yet experimental) piece that we launched on October 19th and has since received over 34,000 views and over 500 entries into our free managed hosting contest. The next segment is in the works.

MySpace Hypertargeting vs Facebook Beacon

Dave Rosenberg compares new features for advertisers on MySpace and Facebook in reaching targeted members through behavioral patterns and interests. For an advertiser, this is very attractive, giving them the greatest chance to ensure their ad resonates and is relevant. To the user, it can feel very intrusive. Concerns of privacy will no doubt creep up. However, this is what members knowingly or unknowingly give up when they sign up for many of the free services they enjoy online like MySpace and Facebook. At Adtech New York, this topic came up a lot with many vendors reassuring the audience that no personal contact information is ever passed on to advertisers, and only behavioral patterns and interests (ie. jazz music) are used to help advertisers reach their audience. The profile info is completely anonymous and treated as some innocuous serial number that no one could ever decipher. Comforting? Maybe for some, but this will continually grow into a hot topic as more sites find creative ways to satisfy the demands of advertisers who provide the revenue streams to make these sites available.

Marketing Metrics: Measuring Events over Page Views

Insightful post from Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion who questions the value of popular online marketing metrics “page views”, “unique visitors” and “time spent” – all metrics I currently use to measure our sites. The questions he raise are the same questions I continually ask myself when reviewing these stats – particularly how valuable a page view metric really is? We’ve done campaigns which have spiked our traffic but had little impact on quote requests coming through our sites, which is a metric I use to measure how effective our traffic is. Sites that use Ajax and Flash and that are highly interactive and could be delivering a better and more engaging user experience, don’t even show up as a page view. Steve mentions how Google Analytics (available for free btw, like you don’t already know) delivers a metric around events which measure the amount of interaction a user has within a page. As a marketer, this is more meaningful. High, meaningless traffic is useless for a business selling products and services to a targeted audience. Gaining a better understanding on how interested visitors engage with my sites, is much more meaningful. You can read more at Steve’s site.

PEER 1 Launches New Brand Building Campaign

We’re launching a new brand building campaign this week at PEER 1. The campaign is called “we get IT”, and features a broad range of customers doing cool and innovative things online, while leveraging PEER 1’s IT infrastructure. The first video in the series profiles Vancouver-based interactive marketing and design agency Blast Radius, who co-locates their servers in our Vancouver data center. The shoot took a full day and about three weeks in post-production. Next up is free dating site Plenty of Fish which is currently in post-production, followed by leading VoIP provider, Vonage who we just wrapped up shooting on Friday in Toronto.