Simple Solutions for Online Branding

Videogg’s Troy Young writes about what’s next in display advertising. What a great post! You even get a bonus deck, agency-style.

I agree with most of what Troy says, I would add this:

• We’re very, very far from have reached anything significant in terms of efficiency, even after 10 years. It’s not a joke, in 2009 even geotargeting is still a big problem. I covered this in a previous post here.

• Nice, slick, beautiful formats with creative that tells stories does have great value. Check out the top placement on imeem.com. It’s amazing. Even as a consumer I love it, let alone when I put on my marketer’s dumb hat.

• Measurement needs to change, but the engagement metric means nothing anymore. You can blame it on “social media experts” (a.k.a. twitter follower collectors) or IAB and ARF’s lack of leadership, but whoever is selling engagement has no chance of catching my attention.

• I do believe that ads should become more like content, where curation is important and where interactions are more predictable. Clicks on ads are some of the most unpredictable interactions online. At Bloom we’re working on a pilot project that puts those ideas in action.

Bottom line: advertising exists and will continue to exist. Twitter accounts and blogs will not replace it. You can’t expect people to consult information or even care about all products they consume. And marketers will continue to sell their products. And brands will continue to exist. And so it is.

Troy - love the deck, man. Love the deck.

Bipolar

Online ad spend will drop

Online ad spend will not drop

Why the Click Is the Wrong Metric for Online Ads

"Publishers have a lot to gain," said Steve Kerho, VP-analytics, media and marketing optimization at Organic. Mr. Kerho has been doing lots of analysis on how online-display ads affect search and conversions and found that in some cases, a display ad can increase a search ad’s click-through rate 25% to 30%. If he had simply measured the clicks from search, he would have missed the display ads’ influence.

Why the Click Is the Wrong Metric for Online Ads - Advertising Age - Digital

Nice follow-up to my last post.

Making Online Ads Accountable

Jeffrey F. Rayport writes in Business Week about the impending doom and gloom of online display ads in the seminal piece “Making Online Ads Accountable.”

Unsurprisingly, his conclusion is the simplest one imaginable: reducing everything to DR

It’s what we might call accountable media: advertising you pay for only when it works. What a concept, especially in an economy where pressure on marketing to generate measurable return on investment is greater than ever. That’s how online advertising will come out of this recession in a different way than it came in—more robust and much improved.

There are many reasons why this is a gross oversimplification of the problem. If the industry as a whole moves towards this model, it will continue encouraging the “last click syndrome”, or the idea of attributing all of success of a media mix to the last point of interaction. That is still one of the biggest problems of accountability in search marketing. Success needs to be shared, so to speak, and accountability works both ways.

There are other sensible alternatives of making display advertising CPM model more fair and more representative of the actual yield. Here are some examples:

• Discard impressions served below the fold and never seen, or impressions that spend less than X seconds in the user’s viewport. This may also lead to a model where advertisers use the metric of time spent with ad on screen (even if the user has not interacted with the ad) more routinely.
• Elimininate “international” impressions. The lack of geo targeting is rampant especially within premium media brands. This dilutes actual results and wastes advertisers’ media dollars which are usually allocated for specific markets. Ironically, all the ads I see on BusinessWeek.com are most definitely from US advertisers, targeting the U.S. audience. Yet I’m in Canada.
• Enforce frequency caps, with publishers accepting the possibility of capping total impressions per user across all campaigns. Reduce the pollution before it becomes a waste management problem.

Let’s not forget that even though advertisers may be buying the inventory on a CPM basis, they have the liberty of calculating their ROI in whatever form they like. Calculations can be made for an effective cost per click, cost per interaction, cost per engagement — and any other derivative imaginable. Reducing the potential of display advertising to a knee-jerk DR medium would be equivalent to pricing TV ad inventory based on immediate sales generated offline after the 30 second spot runs.

Ultimately, it’s up to publishers to enforce the quality of their inventory, manage its abundance, and to consistently reinvent themselves to justify the premiums they charge.

This just in: people ignore irrelevant ads

So, in UK, Addvantage Media runs a study on ads for YouGov, a summary of which is available here.

Recap of results:

• Only 12% of visitors to “large” websites report that they often look at ads
• 56% of ABC1 adults (ABC1 = upper, middle, lower middle classes) are more likely to go to specialist niche sites dedicated to their interests than visit larger portal sites.
• 57%t of consumers rarely or never pay attention to the advertising on major portal sites.

Although I have my doubts about the validity of results where people say whether they look at ads or not (after all who would admit to being influenced?) the overall mix of results in the study is interesting.

Despite all this research coming out all the time, the big dilemma in front of many online media planners stays the same when planning a campaign: do you choose a site with an established media brand and likely very generalized, higher quality content, or do you go the network route where content and audience are more specialized? And where managing a campaign becomes much more complicated?

The same study says that 22% of users only go to niche, sector-specific destinations, while only 2% visit the mainstream sites. So maybe the problem will fix itself, after all.