Quote by MediaPost Publications 37 Sites Ready To Implement OPA’s Bigger, Badder Ad Formats 06/30/2009

The Online Publishers Association announced Tuesday that 37 of its members, whose sites reach 68% of the total U.S. Internet audience, have begun offering the three new larger new ad units the group unveiled in March. Several — including The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.com — are already running, or will soon launch, campaigns for brands such as Bank of America and Mercedes-Benz.

MediaPost Publications 37 Sites Ready To Implement OPA’s Bigger, Badder Ad Formats 06/30/2009

I know this is a recurring theme of mine, but this is a great development to see. No amount of data and targeting will help you if the ads aren’t even noticed in the first place. And there are two ways for them to get noticed: 1) Make them bigger; and 2) Make them indistinguishable from main content. 

Advertisers target Microsoft browser - BusinessWeek

Certain advertisers insist on targeting ads only to people using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer—and not to those using Google’s Chrome or Firefox. The reason? IE users click more on ads.

Advertisers target Microsoft browser - BusinessWeek

Fascinating, this. Let’s say you’re a CPG company selling soap. Let’s say that IE users click more on your soap ads. Given that Firefox users use just as much soap as IE users, is targeting IE the right thing to do? 

Either you determine that Firefox users do not react to advertising, in which case it’s not worth to waste ad spend on them, OR that click is not the right metric to measure success of display advertising. 

Guess which decision is easier to make? 

And what if Kentucky internet users click on ads more? Or internet users who surf from 4AM to 5AM? 

On Tacit Knowledge (again)

THE BEST-INFORMED PERSON I EVER KNEW was a friend of my grandfather’s back in the Bronx, where I grew up. Every morning of every day of his life, this elderly man — his name, as I recall, was Boris — would dress impeccably in a suit and waistcoat and shuffle to the public library, where more than a dozen of the day’s local and out-of-town newspapers were threaded through bamboo poles and hung from racks. One by one, Boris would read them all, front to back; at dusk, he would walk home alone. This daily pilgrimage was conducted with ecclesiastic solemnity, a quiet, dignified homage to the majesty of knowledge. Even as a little boy, in that intuitive if primitive way that children comprehend important things, I understood the fundamental truth that Boris was, in some clear but compelling way, a douche bag.

Shift Market

Reblogging myself here, but this is the single best excerpt from a newspaper article I’ve ever read, and I catch myself thinking about this once in a while. 

The number of people who are like Boris grows exponentially thanks to the internet. What’s worse, some of them actually have a lot of success and public recognition based solely on library knowledge of things — anything from "startup culture" to venture capital, to …anything, really.

As I grow older I realize that to really, really know something you need to do it. You don’t become an expert by reading about things, you become an expert by doing things. 

Reading Fred Wilson does not make you a startup or VC expert. Reading Seth Godin and thinking about marketing doesn’t make you a marketing expert. And so on. If all you do is read, you’re a Boris.

Everything is much, much more complicated than it may seem from blog posts. Sorry. It’s experiences that bring the kind of tacit knowledge that make you an expert.

From Digiday Target: Sometimes The Client Does Not Believe The Data Says Media Kitchen’s Herman

From Digiday Target: Sometimes The Client Does Not Believe The Data Says Media Kitchen’s Herman

We’ve seen this trend as well. As much as data can be valuable, clients — people — have trouble trusting algorithms. That is why media buyers are still media buyers and not audience buyers.

And a media buyer with experience probably has already been burned by ad networks claiming unsubstatiated behavioral something or other.

Quote by Thinking Beyond the Online Banner

Several other Web publishers, particularly in social media — including Facebook and Digg — are moving away from a reliance on typical display ads and pricing methods as the linchpins of their ad efforts. Instead, they’re rolling out unique units and pricing systems, betting advertisers will find custom campaigns worth the extra time and effort.

Thinking Beyond the Online Banner

This trend is accelerating - not only are smaller publishers and ad networks launching their own ad formats and pricing models, but they also take on the production work required to adapt agencies’ creative. 

P.S. Although the title of the article is "Thinking Beyond the Online Banner", I was still greeted by AdWeek.com with a nice bigbox interstitial.