The Laughing Parrot’s Nate Baumgart interviewed me for the People You Should Know section of the site. Check it out here!

Spent 6 days with keywords related to comedy:

boston comedy festival, British comedy, Chicago, comedy center, comedy central, comedy club, comedy connection, comedy Facebook, comedy movies, comedy shows, comedycom, nyc, onion news network, online, sketch comedy, stand up, stand up cancer, stand up comedy, stand up records or youtube

Before doing specialized searches, I used comedy related tags. It seemed like a good idea, but the results always sucked. Let’s peep the results this time:

campaign cost: $60
- 73 ad clicks
- 1 new vimeo connection
- 37 vimeo views
- 25 views of the trailer
- 0 new Facebook group subscribers
- 0 new mailing list subscribers

Pretty poor.

Let’s see how I do with ‘Inventions’ keywords. I know that I’ve never marketed to this type of crowd before, and I’m interested to see how I do in a non-media related target search.

I’ll be starting that campaign soon. On we go!

And we have a winner:

THE WINNER: TWO

Now it’s time for the keywords.

With Facebook ads, you can target the search with keywords to try and narrow down your demographic. Before I would plug in a long list of stuff I like and though was relevant to my film, but mostly it was stuff I wish my fans would also like. The end result was a list of TV shows, movies, film makers, etc. that was all over the map, probably sending my ad all across several demographics I had no business advertising in.

Time for a more effective keyword search. I’ve settled on 4 different categories of keywords:

- Comedy
- Inventions
- Infomercials
- Indie Film

I could waste an incredible amount of time making a list of words and phrases for each category, but luckily Google has that covered. Ladies and gentlemen: Google’s Free Keyword Generator

This tool will generate 100 keywords for each category I can slip into the ad. I will run each category separately for 1 week a piece, to see which demographic jumps at the ad the most.

For the time being I will have the ad send them to this video:

But we’ll explore the link possibilities a little later…

One of the reasons this movie is about inventions is because I plan to make an online ad campaign that resembles ads for the fake products in the film. My hope is when someone sees an ad for a ridiculous product like the Waterproof Blow Dryer, they’d click on it with curiosity and be introduced to the film.

First time out I took a blind stab and created the ad below, which lead the the trailer underneath it on vimeo, which had a link to the MOI page on my site:

The user path would hopefully go:
1) see funny Facebook ad and click on it
2) see the trailer and get introduced to the film
3) click the link to learn more
4) become a Facebook fan / mailing list subscriber / watch videos on vimeo / a combination of these

I’m looking to use these ads to gain more fans and draw more attention to the movie. Success will be measured in the increase of:
- Facebook fans
- Vimeo subscribers
- Video view count
- Email list subscribers

There are so many variables one must consider when using an ad campaign on Facebook or Google. I decided to jump right it. Here were my stats before starting:

Vimeo – 53 contacts
Facebook – 278 fans
Mail Chimp – 143 subscribers
(I didn’t pay attention to views on the videos. I will in the future.)

I put $50 into a 5 day campaign ($10 a day). There’s more details to the campaign, but since it had terrible results I won’t bore you with them. Halfway through the campaign I changed the link to go straight to the MOI splash page, skipping the trailer. The campaigned stopped on the 3rd day for some unknown reason. I’m guessing it’s because I changed it.

After $16.94 I gained 1 new fan on Facebook.

Variables to play with / explore:

The visual make up of the ad:
- Title
- Picture
- Link
- Subhead

The workings of the ad:
- Where the link takes you
- How much you spend per day
- How long is the campaign
- What’s your CPC (cost per click) bid
- What is your target audience
- How many steps until you give your potential fans a chance to act (subscribe, become a fan, etc)

There’s a bunch of things here to figure out, so I’m going to start at the start of the user experience: the ad itself.

I think something as weird as a Waterproof Blow Dryer ad would get people’s attention. My first step is to play with visual combinations of the ad, as well as some other ad visuals, to see which grabs people the most. I’m also going to make ones with pictures of Jeff (the films star) that read ‘Master of inventions’ or ‘Meet the world’s worst inventor’.

MOI fan Rishi has recently used/blogged about a site called PickFu.com. The site puts any question with 2 answers to a 50 person survey for only $5. I will pose the question: Which ad are you more likely to click on? and create 8 ads and pit them against each other to determine the best one.

OK college football fans: how many matches will that be???????

7. At $5 a piece, this experiment will only cost me $35. Ads coming soon!

Joe