Author Archives: Nick Ewertz
The Football Nerds
(In the style of The Autumn Wind – The Oakland Raiders Anthem)
The football nerds are gathering
With laptops and cheat sheets in tow
Constructing rosters, avoiding imposters
Drafting men with names like Bowe
Anxiety is on the rise
Your hair turns a feeble gray
A sense of gloom inside this room
And a smell that could linger for days
Fantasy Football sounds a rallied cry
Uniting fans in song
Opponents wage war over points galore
Until the season’s final game hast won
Red Square is for Football
Echoing with boisterous cheers
We’re quite cavalier until it appears
Our star Running Back is out for the year
Summer reading.
Remember the glory days of summer growing up, when you were free from the bondage of schoolwork? Of course, there was always one teacher who would try to give you a reading assignment. How dare she! As a nod to the teachers everywhere who encouraged reading during summer vacation we’ve put together our Long, Hot Summer Reading List. These are all the books we’re currently enjoying. Yes, there will be a quiz this fall. If you have any suggestions for our list, let us know.
- NOVELS -
House Rules by Jodi Picoult
I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
Light Boxes by Shane Jones
Paint it Black by Janet Fitch
The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille
This is Where I Leave You by Jonothan Tropper
- MEMOIRS -
Bossypants by Tina Fey
How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill
Just Kids by Patti Smith
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
- MARKETING MATTERS -
Buyology by Martin Lindstrom
Designers Don’t Read by Austin Howe
- ORAL HISTORIES -
Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
- ZOMBIES, WITCHES AND WIZARDS -
Anything remotely related to Harry Potter
World War Z by Max Brooks
- THOUGHT PROVOKERS -
Anything by Malcolm Gladwell
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Pop Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klostermann
Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
- BLOOD BOILERS -
Griftopia by Matt Taibbi
The Big Short by Michael Lewis
Commenting on our Facebook ads.
Let’s start with a question as old as social media advertising itself. How do you make an effective Facebook ad if the majority of them get ignored? We stumbled upon an answer while making our own Facebook ads for Red Square Agency.
Space limitations are a big reason why many Facebook ads are considered about as exciting as watching paint dry. With only 25 characters for the title/headline and 135 characters for the body copy, brevity is at a premium. But shorter is sometimes the enemy of storytelling.
Our solution was to create fun, entertaining ads targeting the personal Facebook pages of CMOs and other marketing decision-makers. The ads married with the ever-changing hero banners on our website, giving our messaging some consistency.
But a funny thing happened on our way to making this campaign. An idea emerged to create an ad that pokes fun at social media advertising in general with the simple goal to entertain. And with that, the legend of Cous Cous was born.
Cous Cous is a real cat. He belongs to a friend of Red Square’s own Ryan Lundy. We decided to use Cous Cous as a “control” and turn these four Facebook ads into an experiment of effectiveness. In one corner stood a consistent, well-crafted campaign of three ads, and in the other corner purred a ridiculously irreverent cat ad. In the five weeks that we’ve been collecting data, Cous Cous has destroyed the competition.
Nerd Section: We base our ad performance on Click Through Rate (CTR) and Cost Per Action (CPA). After five weeks, Cous Cous had a CTR of 0.026% compared to 0.016, 0.014 and 0.014%. Cous Cous also had a huge leg up in CPA with $1.46 compared to $1.83, $1.92 and $1.92. And Cous Cous led the way with 919 visits compared to an average of 630. So the data told us that a ridiculous cat ad outperformed all other ads by 39%. That’s right. 39%.
So what did our little experiment teach us? Well, being different and entertaining stands out in the Facebook ad world and elicits positive responses. (Seriously, we have emails to prove it.) And while the ultimate measure of success will be if ads like Cous Cous can lead to new clients, the data thus far speaks for itself. Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to make some more ridiculous Facebook ads.
Our #1 Oprah Moment.
Over the past 10 days, we’ve been counting down our Top 10 Favorite Oprah moments on Twitter. Why? Because we love Oprah, that’s why. In fact, we love Oprah so much that we created a @YoOprah twitter account with the goal of getting a Follow Friday (#ff) from @Oprah. And we even put it on our homepage. So it should come as no surprise that our top moment needed more than 140 characters.
1. Oprah vs. Dave. Dave vs. Oprah.
“The Feud” allegedly began when Letterman hosted the Oscars and kept filling time by introducing Oprah to Uma Thurman. Of course, Dave had a different theory. But the alleged feud gave us many terrific moments over the years, including our #1 within our #1, “The Super Bowl of Love” TV spot.
Hey, the only thing we love more than Oprah is advertising.
