This is a different take on “cause marketing” – similar to nonprofit marketing but more frequently employed by corporations that are for-profit, using a cause as a method of communicating. This marketing blogger decided to illustrate the importance of split testing a campaign (A/B testing). To begin with, the results were impressive: thes experiment improved the homless man’s earnings by over 100% over several days.

The blogger began his analysis of the homeless man’s campaign by noticing that his signage was in need of an overhaul. It was brown cardboard and largely featured “Hi, I’m Keith” with a number of other details too small to read in passing. In addition, the sign had no major call to action.

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Looking to create more buzz about your product, or deploy ads that drive traffic to your site?

Behavioral targeted ads outperformed run of network ads in a study done by the Network Advertising Initiative.  In fact, behavioral targeted ads nearly doubled the performance, 6.8% to 2.8%.

From the study:

“Over the past several months, policy discussion around behaviorally targeted advertising has lacked a critical foundation, because there had never been an empirical assessment of the value of such advertising to ad networks, consumers, and publishers,” said Howard Beales, author of the report, in a statement.

“This study found that behaviorally targeted advertising is a critical component of ad network, publisher, and advertiser success,” he said. “Behaviorally targeted ads sell for twice the price and offer twice the effectiveness of normal run-of-network ads, significantly enhancing the advertising revenue engine driving the growth of the Internet.”

eMarketer: Behavioral Targeting Doubles Ad Effectiveness