Yesterday one of my clients was paying an average of 40¢ per click on a maximum bid of 45¢. After I switched the account to GBP the bid was automatically converted  to 27p (about right at today’s exchange rate). But when I checked the account just now I discovered that impressions and clicks had plumeted to a fraction of their previous level and the recommended bid was now in the range 46p to 56p – that’s a whopping 75¢ to 90¢.

Hopefully this is just a short-term blip and they’re working on the solution. Facebook Ads are great for raising brand awareness amongst a really tightly defined audience but the company is not noted for being very responsive to customer support tickets. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how this works out.

graze.com operates a similar model to wine clubs – you sign up for a regular delivery (which you can cancel or push back anytime) but instead of receiving a box every few months, Graze boxes arrive on as many days of the week as you like and instead of wine, they supply fresh fruit, dried fruit, nuts and seeds in a beautifully presented, letterbox sized box. The quality of the goods is exceptional and the range of ingredients is really unusual; I’ve never tasted dried blackcurrants or dried morello cherries before. (They are both delicious, by the way.) At £2.99 a box, including delivery, it’s almost hard to see how they’re making any money.

9NTR77N

Their use of social media – Twitter and Facebook in particular – to grow awareness of the brand is brilliant. Most people get their first box free and their second half-price, via a promo code posted online by one of their friends (mine is 9NTR77N if you want to try it out). As soon as you sign-up, you get your own promo code to pass on to your friends, with one-click buttons to post a link to Twitter and Facebook. Every time your code gets used, you get £1 off another box. Like pyramid selling for pineapples. I don’t have all that many followers on Twitter but already four of them have signed up from my code. If each of them get another four people to sign up, and each of them get another four people to sign up – well, you get the idea. A quick search of Twitter reveals how often these codes are being passed on.

Their site is as gorgeous as the product. It’s all very web 2.0, in its design and functionality. Personalisation is a big trend right now – think of Moo cards for the ultimate bespoke business cards – and graze.com’s rating system (bin, try, like or love) keeps you engaged with the brand by allowing you to tailor the product to your tastes.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

The company do use a lot of recycled material in their packaging and encourage consumers to recycle again, but it’s difficult to ignore the environmental impact of this product. Recycling is good but reducing packaging is better. And there’s still the fuel used in transporting the box to your home / office. But I’ve been well and truly seduced and despite the tuts of disapproval from some of my coworkers am going to continue to enjoy my guilty grazing.

What about you? Have you tried graze.com yet? What’s your view on the product and its green credentials?

comparethemeerkat.com is a playful, witty and clever promotion for comparethemarket.com with TV adverts that feature its ‘founder’ Aleksandr Orlov whose Russian accent explains the mispronunciation.

They have taken the concept right through to creating an entire site where visitors can compare meerkats – oh, and this website just so happens to use the same functionality as the similar site where you can compare car insurance, of course.

Aleksandr’s Facebook Page (35,657 fans) features photos from his family album and notes about his forthcoming rip to see Céline Dion (priceless) and he also maintains a Twitter profile (1,149 followers) where he tweets about eating jellied centipedes.

Why I like this campaign so much:

• It’s hard to not feel warm about the brand just from watching the TV advert, but even harder when you see the depth to which they’ve developed the idea.
• It’s personal. They are taking their marketing right down to individuals. It looks like they do a public reply to every message they receive on Twitter.
• It gets people talking and sharing their enjoyment of the campaign.

Compare this to the clunky efforts of some other companies who think they can just publish their same old marketing schpeal in social media sites and expect it to ‘go viral’…