The J. Peterman Co. dipped its toe into the online advertising waters this spring with a test campaign for the Heart of the Ocean necklace from its “Titanic” collection. Not only was the campaign a huge success, the company says, but Peterman learned some valuable lessons to boot.
“We wanted to see how to do online advertising,” says vice president Joshua Grode. “We learned how to spend our money. We learned where to spend our money.”
The jewelry, selling for $198, is a replica of the heart-shaped pendant necklace worn in the movie by Rose De Witt Bukater, played by Kate Winslet. Grode says it had been selling very well online but the company decided to try promoting it with ad banners. It ran the test from late April to the middle of May.
“It was absolutely selling like hotcakes online but they contacted us to figure out if by doing online advertising it could sell even more,” says Will Akerlof, marketing director at Interactive Agency in Los Angeles. “We created some banners and got spectacular click-throughs.”
They placed the ads pretty widely around the Web through San Francisco-based Flycast Communication Corp.’s ad network, but found that Flycast’s movie and fan sites such as Box Office Exchange (www.boxex. com), Movies at Home (www.ecreations.com) and Digital Hit Entertainment (www.digitalhit.com) were most successful. Lovestories.com obvious reasons-also did well.
“We did better by a factor of four to five on movie and fan-related sites than on the Web as a whole,” Akerlof says. “Click-through rates were in the double digits at some point.”
Grode declines to disclose more specific sales numbers. He does say that the catalog, with its wider distribution, sold more of the necklaces than the online channel but that-because of the low expense of the Web-the return on investment there is greater.
He adds that one lesson learned was that advertising ad-ons such as placing cookies didn’t offer much in the way of ROI. “At the end of the day what we wanted to know is, Is this going to increase our sales? Are we going to get more people who didn’t know we were selling this online?”
Akerlof says that when Interactive Agency changed the creative from a more general tag line (“Own Part of Movie History!”) to the product name with the price, the click-through suffered by about half but the much higher conversion rate more than made up for it.
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