Category: Digital Marketing

For those unaware of it, it appears that Pat the Baker has decided to market itself on Bebo, of all places. Not sure how Bebo was chosen as a place to market since this is where the average age is below 18 and a space where the ones that make the bread buying decisions would not be hanging around on that space. Perhaps it was to influence the people that pester the mammy to buy the bread? Someone knows.

Irish companies that are running campaigns on Bebo are apparently dropping €30k to €50k on their projects. Figures for these campaigns and the breakdown of them are not public and don’t seem to be available but I would guess that for your money you’d get promotion to the front page for your profile, a specially designed skin (a template that the kids can install), promotion of the skin on the skins section and banners ads to be displayed around the site. This is pretty much what Pat the Baker has had.

So the profile was created in September and what are the results?

• 2878 friends on Bebo.
• 19811 views.
• 334 love hearts.
• 3638 skin installs.
• 45 pages of comments. 20 comments per page. 900 comments.

So what about mentions in other places?

• 14 mentions on Google Blogsearch since September.
• No mentions on Facebook Lexicon
• On YouTube 29 videos are returned for Pat the Baker, including some old ads and this very odd one.
• Google Trends says no blip in amount of searches for Pat the Baker. No data for Irish searches.

So if this campaign cost €30k, what were the costs per “engagement unit”?
It all depends on how things were measured. Are comments the measure of success or page views or Luv Hearts or skin installs? Taking only one of these factors as a measure of success:

• 2878 friends on Bebo. So that’s €10.4 to acquire each friend. But getting friends on Bebo is dead easy.
• Look at how many “shared the luv” which is more of an engagement. You can “share the luv” 3 times a day now. Yet they only got 334 love hearts. 90 quid for an engagement of that sort.
• 3638 skin installs. €9 per skin install?
• 45 pages of comments. 20 comments per page. 900 comments. €33 euros per comment.
• 19811 views since September. €1.51 a view. Perspective: Mulley.net did 146k pageviews in the same time period.

Adding up all “engagements”
If we add the number of comments, to the number of friend adds to the number of Luv hearts to the number of skin installs we get 7750 engagement “units”. That works out at €3.87 if we use the magical €30k number.

The level of engagement if you consider the “Sharing the Luv” action is low. If you consider this blog post that asked people to comment about their favourite sandwich it only got 15 comments. Out of 2800+ friends?

Summary
Marketing bread on Bebo is probably not the best place for it. There was nothing innovative in this whole campaign either. Take yor picture with a sliced pan? Jesus. Singing to the theme song on YouTube is ok but is a very very expensive method of brand reinforcement.

Also, some advanced SEO work would have been good. The first result in Google is full of grammatical errors. Capital letters and apostrophes please.

So what would I do? Not go on Bebo to sell bread. Hit mommy bloggers up and those who buy the bread and use the bread. Or if you wanted to get to the kids then actually sell them something more appealing but which makes them buy your product. You know like chocolate spread, peanut butter and jelly spreads etc. etc.