Advertising Hold The Line

I’m not one for making many of my own ideas (and this isn’t one of my own really anyway) but during the first mad flush of the RetakeME3 campaign the idea came up to advertise Hold The Line using facebook and other social media sites. The idea failed to gain any traction then due to outside issues but now considering Retake is over I think it’s time we start recruiting again. @Noelemahc

The message and content (Beyond the templates below have not been decided, so any input on that would be lovely)

Just looking at Facebook (this really applies to all social media really), it would seem that there are ways of advertising the site using it.

Advantages
● First of all is that we can set a limit on how much money we spend on the advertising. This means that we can set exactly how much money we want to spend.
● We can do it per click, or per view. Allowing us to stretch our money even further and reach more people.
● It allows us to reach people who may not use gaming news sites or the ilk in anyway at all.There are people out there who will not know of HTL and these are the people we have to try to reach.
● It’s impersonal, you don’t have to do more work than donating every so often to the fund and let the advertisement do the work for you.

Dis-advantages
● It would be costly, much too costly to sustain it for long, so specific days and amount would have to be raised for the advertising.
● It’s not perfect, we’d probably miss people who would be interested in something like this because of various different reasons.
● Ad blockers may mean that the message may not get through to the people we want it too, considering they are likely to tech savvy and to have an ad blocker.
● The message would have to be well crafted, and the image eye catching in order to attract people to the site. It should not, however, look like we’re just another gaming site.
● We’d need a custom thread or wiki entry to help explain the site and its purpose, the lack of personal touch can sometimes put people off. Part of the hope lies in the article section, but while it’s still in development, the forums and wiki should take up the load.


A different avenue would be to do it word-of-mouth. This is cheap as dirt, but requires viewer participation. That’s right, YOUR participation. Mainly consisting of physically going somewhere and telling people about HTL, what it does and why they should consider signing up.

Pros:
● Cheap
● Reaches places you can’t place ads on
● Reaches people with vicious adblockers
● Actually touches the appropriate target audience (f.e. posting on a game’s forums instead of reaching out to that game’s FB group... or maybe both!)
● You can tailor your ad to the audience you’re reaching out to (as with the Aliens Colonial Marines example of #LV426NeedsWomen)
Cons:
● You get what you pay for
● Requires manpower
● Hard to predict reaction (f.e. posting on the BSN as it is now will only score us an influx of trolls and people wishing to burn down BioWare’s offices and not a lot in-between)
● You probably HAVE to tailor your ad to the audience you’re reaching out to so as not to be dismissed as an automated bot. Bonus points if you’re actually already been part of that community for some time, despicable as it may be to rely on nepotism to work for you.
● Our current site design and infrastructure are a liiiittle bit Mass-Effect-heavy. Yes, even with the recent redesign of the forums. All fics by default are ME or DA-related, all RP is ME or DA-related, all Rule 34-- oh, wait, Rule 34 is actually appropriately sorted and sometimes even spoiler-tagged. Good job, pornomancers!

Word-of-mouth can also be engineered. Tweet (Facebook post, etc etc) at your followers. Tweet at famous and relatively famous people you think can spread the word. It will probably have to be done on a per-project basis, though, as it probably will be harder to get, say, I dunno, Felicia Day, to endorse us in GENERAL. But getting her to at least RT a tweet about Women In Gaming is conceivable. Think who you can reach out with your messages, and aim to match our goals with their goals. I’m sure you can find at least one media personality with a twitter, tumblr, reddit, Facebook, Vkontakte or (Andraste forbid) MySpace account that you can get interested in a project you support and get them to pass the word along. In the long run, the idea is to get cracking on that Web 2.0 thing, because, seriously, it’s very elegant when you get the gears spinning. Once more people come in, more projects can and will pop up as people will bring their issues to us. The point is to get them to come and convince them it’s worth staying (which considering the site shouldn’t be a issue ).

Both choices have their plus and minus points, however if we ever wish to make the dream of gaming advocacy possible then we need to make us known at large for it. We need to change our image from “That ME3-ending” site to “That Gaming Advocacy” site.

Example one of advertising.
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?campaign_id=402047449186&placement=pflo&extra_1=0


As you can see, it allows for massive customisation, allowing for us to select the country, age and most importantly the precise interests of the person. One of the good things about such targeted advertising it that it gives us more value to our money, because the people who we target are most likely to be interested in something like HTL.

Of key note is the age area, allowing us to target the age of people we are most likely to be interested, your average 15 year old for instance is unlikely to be interested, but a 22 year old would. Another key point is that we can take advantage of our diversity, the co-author of this post is russian and I know people from sweden to america. This a good point to take advantage of.


And the most important part, the pricing. Here we can arrange the currency we use (If I end up doing it, it will either be in pounds or dollars). as well as the time zone and where it is being hosted.

The most important feature here it the daily budget, this is where we can set to spend as much money as we want per day, the default is set to 10 dollars per day, which would allow us roughly 10 clicks per day. We can also extend our money by doing cost per thousand impressions, which means how many people would see the advert, this would let us stretch our money much more (at 10,000 views for the same price).

So that’s everything to a Facebook advertisement, we’d have to find a logo to use and a text extract but beyond that, there’s nothing more to say.

Resources, for the social option:

To make the social option as easy as can be, me and noel have created these templates to make things easier.

Twitter Template

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Hey,do you feel that game companies are taking you for a ride,that they make sell games that aren't done? Then join HTL bit.ly/HXWjPe

Facebook Template

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Do you feel that games companies take you for a ride? That they take your money for bad games and then insult you when you complain? Do you often feel that the way they operate is unfair or unjust? Then join HTL at www.holdtheline.com . Where we can make a difference together.

Update 1: @Noelemahc has made some wonderful sigs for the fourmites here they are.
Grabbing instructions:-

1. Right click the sig you want
2. Copy the image location
3. Paste that into your browser
4. Save it on your hard drive
5. Congrats the image is now free for you to use for as long as you wish

Signatures (Negatives).

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More updates to the Op later on.

One of the reasons we offered the other option, we know that money may be hard to come by now, so there's the option to use our own contacts to get people interested.

Update, please see the OP for some sigs you can use for other forums.

I like these ideas. It'd require a massive infusion of capital though, but I think we can get that, gives us something to focus on, and also gets our name out there, proves we're not going away, and increases our membership.

I really like these ideas.

Yeah, when I've gotten some sleep, I see I messed up with the text visibility, but still, these are just idea pictures =)

But in the meantime, we should also be prepared to handle the influx of people who may not have even played Mass Effect, so... Be friendly to them when it happens, OK? =)

Yeah, positives are important too. I just made these spur-of-the-moment at 1AM, not the best of time to be making design decisions, y'know? So anything you make will be welcomed with open arms =)

Be my guest, I haven't got the artistic gene (expect possibly with words, but probably not) so any sigs would be welcome. Thanks kim

And bumperstickers, something along the lines of: "HoldtheLine.com, gamer advocacy" or something. Driving around a big city, people will probably at least come to the site to take a look at it.

I feel that this is the time to say HTL STORE! (Not only advertising but it could be a source of money to help the site keep running).

Idea forwarded by my lovely assistant @meatsammich

But for that, we need to provide variations of the site logo that is thematic to various games. I was thinking of doing that anyway, as bouncing ideas for the top banner redesign. Any suggestions, beyond the four games we already have forums for?

Just listing my suggestions, they may already be included, they may not, but here they are: Batman, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted

Loving these ideas that I am seeing so far on this thread. I would agree that word of mouth is probably the best way to go for advertizing. Things like bumper stickers etc. So I would say some type of store front would be a great thing to do. In regards to HTL advertizing. I would also like to put this out there to those who do be it vidcast, podcasting etc that we try and get those be it on staff or from the community who are looking at gamer advocacy onto various podcasts or vidcasts to also help spread the word about HTL. Things like @Jenesee and possibly getting the people from Forbes Games to talk about it again once we have com up with an issue that we can all focus around. I really believe that the community will have to use every single resource that we have in order to do this. Like i said banners in forums, sigs adding holdtheline.com in all your online profiles etc. as well utilizing any audio or video resources we have as well.

I am willing to do whatever I can be it with the audio/ video side of things for what I can do. How many would be willing to do a some type of video about HTL that I could slice together into a 30 sec to 1 minute commercial type advertizement? Basically just describing HTL to the general public.

Reddit Template


The red area is where we set the duration of the advertising as well as the total bid (The amount of money per day is the total divided by amount of days) It also lets us set the target(whether or not we wish to target the whole site or just a specific portion of the reddit population).

The yellow area gives us the prices of the various days, it allows us to choose days where there’s less demand, this allows us to book ahead and get cheaper advertising.

The blue part gives us the link and the title we are going to use, it’s a example of what we could use (as a side note, is that ok? Anyone have suggestions for it?)



The red area lets us choose what banner we are going to use to advertise it. The green area is where we choose if we are to disable comments or not.

Do you think we should use our sig banners as the header image, or our symbol?

Whelp, another update, here I show how the reddit advertisement would work. What do you guys think? What should we use as our banner and title (If we go this route)?