Marketing Tactics - part 1: 'Silverware' continued

Silverware development
Developing a silverware product can be an expensive proposition by many ISPs' standards. What some companies do to reduce the expense is to private brand an existing silverware product with your company's advertising. According to Dan Ferguson, CEO at NVision Design, a company specializing in silverware development, such private labeling can usually be done for between $20,000 and $40,000. Development of your own unique program can run between $40,000 to $75,000 or more depending upon time and complexity of the project. My experience, coming from a software publishing background, has been that many of these programs can be developed for under $10,000 with the right team and hungry talent.

Before you run away screaming at the cost figures, consider the success of a recent release by NVision entitled "Elf Bowling." [Holiday Surprise! To download Elf Bowling, click this link]. According to Ferguson, Elf Bowling spawned more than a million copies within 3 weeks of its release. Enough to overload their file servers for a few days. Elf Bowling has built-in online tracking which allows NVision to monitor the number of games in progress. During the game's initial release, NVision was racking up more than 900 games in progress every second—and those were only the game sessions that were connected to the net. NVision estimates that as many as four to five times that many are actually in play during the same period.

How much would you pay for 1 million ad impressions a day for the next month? Even at $100,000 in development costs, over a single month, your CPM would run about $3 and continue to drop as time rolls on. That's very cost effective as far as net eyeballs are concerned.

Deployment
Most ISP's send out monthly e-mail newsletters to their customers. (If you aren't doing this, you should be.) Placing a link to your newest silverware offering within such newsletters is the simplest way to distribute your silverware creation without spamming. Let your users pass on the program as links or mail attachments to their friends.

Pro's and cons
Pros:
    This form of advertising can be extremely productive and cost effective.
Cons:
   Most people don't like getting huge attachment e-mails on a 56K connection. To offset this, keep your file sizes as small as possible.
   No one can be sure if the silverware program is legit or a cleverly disguised virus out to wipe their hard drive. (Even Elf Bowling has been falsely rumored to contain a virus.)

Neutralizing the virus factor
Even with new and deadly viruses like MiniZip and ExploreZip spreading through the Net via e-mail attachments, many users are still willing to go out on a limb and execute file attachments sent to them by friends and coworkers. Virus attachment woes can be totally alleviated by posting links in lieu of the actual program. As long as users can see where the file came from, they are more apt to execute your silverware program and play it.

Obviously there's no guarantee that your silverware will catch on and end up being distributed to people outside of your own customer base. But with the way Netizens forward jokes and other entertainment e-mail these days, silverware could turn out to be one of the most cost-effective ways of communicating your company's message and generating whopping returns on a relatively small investment.

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Look for new Marketing Tactics articles in coming weeks.