Live chat advertising

Back in April of this year Intel launched an advertising campaign to support it’s new Nehalem Xeon processor. Advertising for a specific computer processor does present some challenges.

Firstly, you simply have to be in front of the right audience. Your typical consumer isn’t the type to care about a specific processor; the new processor is interesting to computer enthusiasts and IT professionals – and I presume shareholders. To address that hurdle, it’s all about ad placement. Intel placed their ads on CIO Today, CNET, ComputerWorld.com, InfoWorld and Internet.com. The ad was also reportedly on LinkedIn.com, where it was likely targetted to a specific type of LinkedIn member.

Intel's Live Chat Ad

The second hurdle is where Intel started to throw creativity into the mix. An IT professional will be interested in different things than the PC enthusiast will be. Both groups are valuable to Intel, but how do you create an ad that speaks to each group? Quite simple – you create an ad that, literally, speaks! Intel’s banner ads supported live chat. If you have a question, you could simply type that question into a chat box and an Intel representative would answer you, in real time, and hopefully, in a timely manner. This image is what the ad looked like.

So you might think to yourself, “that’s great, but I don’t have the resources to answer hundreds of questions, 24/7″. How can a small business benefit from this approach? It doesn’t have to be a continual effort. Retailers can cash in on holiday hype – maybe it’s a Valentines Day ad with chat representatives selling custom chocolate packages based on the answers to a series of questions? If you can’t answer chat questions 24/7, it is possible to have a standard ad run during the night that clicks through to your website, and in the day it kicks over to the chat ad.

There are always possibilities and ways to make new things work. Remember, the ad technology providers want small business involved, they represent a big piece of pie. There’s a number of businesses and people out there, myself included, that are ready to bring the latest in advertising technology to any business that can benefit from it. Just because a business is new to Internet advertising doesn’t mean it should be content with dated ad techniques (not that those techniques aren’t useful, of course).