kidmercury

Let's start with some stats:

Ad: Help Ingrid Fight Cancer Sing this song for Ingrid to help her make cancer patients be ok.
Impressions: 19,075
Clicks: 8
Clickthrough rate (CTR): 0.04%
Cost: $0.80

Ad: Legalize Weed for Mraz Support the effort to legalize weed for Jason Mraz. kidmercuryblog.com.
Impressions: 307,323
Clicks: 342
Clickthrough rate (CTR): 0.11%
Cost: $35.45

Ad: Defend Oasis From Jay-Z Jay hated on Oasis at Glasto. Stand up for Oasis by singing this song.
Impressions: 2,534
Clicks: 4
Clickthrough rate (CTR): 0.16%
Cost: $0.47

Ad: Save the Ocean 4 Tristan The ocean is under attack. Sing this song for the ocean and Tristan
Impressions: 1,714
Clicks: 6
Clickthrough rate (CTR): 0.35%
Cost: $0.60

Analysis

My maximum daily ad spend is set to $3; I'll plan on increasing it slightly (probably to something like $3.30) in the New Year. Right now, most of that money gets spent promoting my song for Jason Mraz and his fans. I didn't realize how popular Jason is -- there are a lot of people searching for him on YouTube! I wish YouTube allowed me to set a maximum spend per ad, as right now Jason takes up the vast majority of my daily ad spend. Presumably YouTube will add this feature in the future, as I believe Google has it on the ads for their search engine (though I am not 100% sure, as my experience with search engine marketing is primarily on the organic side -- i.e. ranking in the free listings for your specific search query). Though for now it is not so bad, as I have to counter all the phony propaganda that Jason spreads, as he preaches Obama (see our archive on Obama) as well as perpetuating the global warming/carbon emissions/"we must all sacrifice ourselves for the environment" hoax (see our archive on global warming for more info on all that stuff). Man, you should've seen the folks at the Mraz concert I went to a few weeks back, I'm still trying to get over it. It was like a Truther's worst nightmare: Obamamania everywhere, all sorts of phony environmentalism (but not real stuff like honeybees dying or Amazon deforestation, just the "sacrifice yourself" crap)....and most annoyingly, the girls sitting behind me talked all night about celebrity gossip and who was dating who and what their babies names were and all sorts of other irrelevant crap. Oh well, what can you do. Not much -- aside from sing a song and advertise it on YouTube!

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. While my ad for Tristan has the highest clickthrough rate, I just discontinued the campaign. I am increasingly concerned about being misunderstood and offending the subject of the song (i.e. Tristan). Tristan, if you read this, no offense is intended -- closer to the opposite, in fact. I try to imagine what it must be like for these people to have a conspiracist calling himself Kid Mercury write a song about them and then advertising it on YouTube. LOL. I would find it amusing if someone did that to me, though presumably if you are not a conspiracist the weirdness of it all could be a bit much. But, alas, no one is writing a song for me, so that it is not a concern of mine. Well actually, I wrote a song for myself -- check my theme song, Introducing Kid Mercury. LOL. One of my favorites, it will make Kid Mercury's Greatest Hits. Everyone should have their own theme song! Humorously, though, I forgot how to play it. Let that be a lesson: if you write yourself a theme song, make sure you jot down the chords as well!

Part of me thinks I shouldn't care at all about what the subject of the song thinks; after all, the Truth is more important than me or them, and anything I can do to promote this web site and all the truther information we have on it is justified (with the exception of crimes, but I'm not going to do that anyway, so that's not really what I'm talking about). And besides, I always intend my songs for people to be very positive; even my song for Jay-Z I think is obviously fairly lighthearted in a way (though Rockefeller is almost singlehandedly ruining the world and that is a very serious issue). But I understand the potential for misunderstanding, and that bothers me quite a bit. I don't mind people hating on me -- that's inevitable when you're a Truther in a world of lies -- but I hate to be misunderstood. Which I suppose is also inevitable when you're a Truther, but I'll try to avoid it as much as possible.

Observations

I noticed that when people find one of my songs naturally -- meaning without seeing and clicking on the ad -- I tend to get higher ratings. The people who click on the ad give it a lower rating. This is particularly true in our song for Jason and our song for Ingrid, both of which had high ratings until I started advertising them. This is one of the biggest reasons why I think many companies don't know how to deal with social media or advertising on YouTube; they are afraid of what customers will say, and how they will look if they get low ratings. Personally I'm not concerned about low ratings, and I don't think companies should be either. Instead, I think all advertisers should be focused on trying to create something that goes viral; that other bloggers link to and republish, and that folks email to their friends or share on MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/Friendfeed etc. That is the real value of the advertising campaign, in my opinion, and is what I hope for. (Obviously the likelihood of conspiratorial stuff going viral is diminished as people are afraid of that information and larger forces will censor it if it does go viral, but we must persist nonetheless). Accordingly I think companies that use social media advertising accordingly will be able to get some great viral marketing campaigns at low prices while most old school companies are still too afraid of interactive advertising.

Revisions

As I noted I'm discontinuing my campaign for Tristan, and will instead replace it with campaigns promoting our song for Eminem and our song for Dr. Dre. I've also narrowed my campaign for Jason Mraz so that it comes up for fewer Mraz-related queries, so that his popularity doesn't end up draining my ad budget -- especially when I want to leave more room for uber-popular musicians like Dr. Dre and Eminem.

Below is the copy I'm using for my ads for Dre and Eminem:

Ask Dre for Tyranny Detox
Our world is addicted to tyranny.
So let's ask Dr. Dre for a detox.

Ask Eminem for the Truth
We need a freedom relapse.
Use this song to ask Eminem for the Truth.

Dr. Dre's forthcoming album is called Detox; Eminem's forthcoming album is called Relapse. My song for Eminem is already on Napster/iTunes/etc, and is actually my most popular song; there are, understandably, quite a few people searching for Eminem's new album, and I'm the only search result that comes up. I'm not a huge fan of my "pure" rap songs like the ones I've created for Dre and Eminem, though I think they are somewhat decent. My Eminem song I put more effort into than pretty much any other song I wrote in 2008 (with the exception of We'll Always Be Connected, which I worked hard on as a past life therapy exercise of sorts); I listened to nothing but Eminem in the week prior to writing it, as I really wanted to create a message that would resonate with him. Even though Eminem is an Obama supporter, he has published a song with reference to 9/11 being an inside job, for which he is deeply and permanently adored by the Truther community (though how someone can know the Truth about 9/11 and still be an Obama supporter is a bit of a mystery). Ultimately, in the final analysis, Eminem takes great pride in being a good father to his daughter, and anyone with that mentality will always have the Truther spirit deep down, as the knowledge that the Truth is essential to creating the best possible world for their children will be nagging their conscience. Unfortunately in our world most people are completely pathetic, immature, irresponsible, selfish, cowardly, ungrateful for all that they have, and derelict in their duty as parents. That's one of the things that annoys me most: I don't even have kids and I'm doing all this crap???? But in the end I know that the Truth is its own reward, so I feel sorry for those who naively believe they are better off serving the Lie, and who shut themselves off from the strength, vision, creativity, and inspiration that only the Truth can provide. Of course, we're all going to get a chance to learn the importance of the Truth when the dollar's value is destroyed in the coming years (thanks in no small part to the insane economic policies proposed by Barack Obama).

Anyway, I hope Eminem gets to hear our song for him. I always hope the subjects of my songs get to hear them, though with Eminem I am really hoping so, as he has been a major influence for me; I learned how to write lyrics and rhyme largely by listening to his stuff. Eminem is by far the most brilliant lyricist I've ever heard, he's in a league of his own. Untouchable.

That's all for now. I'll continue to keep you posted on my experiments with YouTube video ads and marketing the Truth.