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The key to brand awareness is repetition. It’s an important part of any product launch or service awareness campaign, and the online component is certainly a part of it. Image ads don’t have to be clicked to be successful!

Brand Awareness Through High-Brow Brazenness

My favorite campaign at the moment is that of the Motorola Droid smartphone, which I wrote about not too long ago in my article “How the Motorola Droid Takes On a Giant.” What a launch: it started with “viral” commercials that were vague and flat out bizarre. If you’re a nerd, you already knew about the preliminary talks about the Droid, and were able to identify the product in those vague commercials within seconds. If you weren’t, then you were fed a URL called “DroidDoes.com” at the end of them. Hopefully your curiosity led you to fire up your Blackberry, iPhone or laptop and see what was there. Otherwise, those marketers weren’t done with you yet…

Flip on the football game or a rerun of the Simpsons, and you’d see the commercial again. Visit tech sites like Mashable, Engadget, Gizmodo or Boy Genius Report and the PPC ads for the Droid were assuredly there, somewhere on the page.

Perhaps you’ve come across press releases, tech articles, or have visited community-run article sites like Digg or Reddit to read about Droid’s brazen approach to not only take on the iPhone, but make fun of it for its lack of testosterone.

Open up the latest issue of Wired Magazine, and there’s a full page spread for the Droid right in the middle of the magazine.

Regardless if none of these things prompted you to buy the Droid, they made you aware of it. I read a statistic stating that it takes 9-12 repetitions of a product, brand name or anything else to become ingrained in someone’s mind. To me, that’s exactly what happened here: me, the male age 26-34 with a household income of — hey, I’m not giving that away ;) — was hit from all angles in all of the places I frequent with the ad for this phone, which happens to target people just like me.

Getting a Share Of Voice

The mistake many marketers make, especially in big corporations, and even more so for service-based businesses not in retail, is to ignore image ads in PPC and placed banner ad marketing. Most complain that the conversion rate is too low, or that they don’t get many clicks. What they’re not keeping in mind is that those image ads are an important part of their brand awareness campaign.

Yes, people see text links on SERPs, but an image and logo showing in front of their face will remain in their cognitive memory to a much higher degree. It also complements the print ad for that same product they saw in that trade journal that your company advertises in. Or, the booth you had at the last trade show. Multiple ad exposures ingrain a brand name, image, and emotion in the mind of a web visitor…there’s even a term defining the rate at which an ad is seen on a site: SOV (Share Of Voice).

I never clicked a Droid ad, but I’m interested in the product. I didn’t need to click the ad – but it did help remind me to think, “I really need to get around to replacing my LG Dare.” Since I already like the Droid and have heard nothing but positive things about it, that ad does help serve as a reminder for times when the other ten million things going on in my life have forced me to forget about that purchase.

Just imagine if an un-clicked ad led to a conversion…who would have known?

With that being said – close up your total brand awareness campaign with some captivating image ads, and make sure they have the same exact look & feel (logo, colors, tagline, image shots or stock images, etc.) as your print ads. Perhaps you’ll remind a customer to contact you before they decide on your competitor!