HETIC 2008 official Online Marketing Challenge Blog

L’ÂNE GOURMET is a French e-commerce website launched in march 2008 that sells local gastronomic products and is hiring two people.

ÂNE GOURMET (literally GOURMET DONKEY) aims not only to food lovers who want to buy authentic products but also to everyone looking for an original gift idea. On the French on-line market, the competition is led by BIEN MANGER (bienmanger.com), a website launched in 2001.

Web site’s ergonomics and usability are the main strengths to arouse the enthusiasm on the donkey mascot. The French map, as an interactive product finder, already appears to be its « killer feature ». Upstream of site launch, a viral marketing campaign relayed by various influential bloggers and social media, was led using a video and a blog recounting all about ÂNE GOURMET’s genesis. On the fringes of the challenge, an e-mailing campaign towards 15,000 targets will be sent while PR operations should start.

ADWORDS campaign will drive highly targeted and converting audience in order to increase turnover.

Created in 2007 in LYON (2^nd biggest city in France), PNEXT is a French company that sells Nintendo’s goodies via its website (www.p-nintendo.com) and is managed by the two owners and only employees.

Nintendo’s goodies market started in the mid 80’s when the Japanese brand invaded the video games’ market. However, French Nintendo’s lovers have always met difficulties to find products on their local market. Typical Nintendo’s enthusiast profile is a 16 to 25 years-old French-speaking European male inhabitant. PNEXT has no Nintendo-oriented competitors but it has to face not only various goodies e-tailers but also many EBAY stores.

Due to its youth, PNSTORE only starts to be indexed by search engines and since no kind of campaign has been performed so far, traffic mainly comes from referring websites such as P-Nintendo.com.

ADWORDS campaign will drive highly targeted and converting audience in order to increase turnover.

Until now, display URL in an ADWORDS Ad didn’t have to be necessarily the same than landing page URL. Since april, GOOGLE has modified its guidelines and requirements about this.

« Starting in April, all the display URL for the new ads will be the URL of the page for related : no exception will be accepted. Please update your URL accordingly when creating new ads. »

To avoid click fraud and enhance Ads relevancy, GOOGLE has decided that display URL must now match landing page URL. This means they must use the same domain with no exception.

For example:

The following will still be correct:

Display URL : www.lanegourmet.com/Confitures
Landing URL : www.lanegourmet.com/PRODUITS/MIELS-ET-CONFITURES-28.html

The following will not be acceptable anymore:

Display URL : www.lanegourmet.com/Confitures
Landing URL : www.confiture&miel.com

If there’s something for sure about the GOOGLE ONLINE MARKETING CHALLENGE (GOMC), it’s that the competition will be tough! Indeed, more than 20,000 students, from 61 countries have taken part in the GOMC.

The main particularity of this challenge is that it’s open to all students. No need to be a marketing guru!!!

As testimony of the huge range of universities or colleges:
College of Aviation And Management Studies (Nigeria)
University of Otago (New-Zeland)
National Hotel and Tourism Institute (Yemen)
Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (Peru) …

It’s pretty hard to find information about other competing teams. It seems that they’re not much talkative about their participation. While searching the Web (obviously via Google) I discovered GOMCHA, the unofficial social network for international teams competing in GOMC. In this website, I found out that most of the teams have already started their campaign.

I got in touch with a member of the social network (and also member of the Global Academic Judging Panel, but I wasn’t aware of it at first!), I learnt that about half of the teams have already accomplished their campaign.

I don’t really know how they managed to finish so fast because, while writting this post, we’re still working on our pre-campaign report!

Anyway, as the proverb says: “To win a race, the swiftness of a dart availeth not without a timely start“!

GOOGLE’s german business office has launched a new advertising campaign in order to promote its video service. You can see that Google use offline to talk about online service.

This Guerrilla marketing campaign is very unusual.

But that is not Google’s first try onto their services‘ promotion. Russia did the same when launching GMAIL and GOOGLE Maps.

Gmail Russia :

Google Maps :

We can say that it’s the offline advertising year to promote Web services and also the year of interactive billboards.