This is the homepage of cnn.com right now. I’m sorry, social media douchebags, but a twitter account does not have the same advertising impact. But that’s besides the point. Cool ad unit.
This is a big deal.
A good recap is at AdExchanger. Anxiously awaiting comments by ad networks, but yeah, reach is a commodity, isn’t it.
Edit: just to be clear — it’s a big deal because it helps Google commoditize ad network services. Since Google needs to certify ad networks, and since participating ad networks will have very little leeway as far as data/behaviour are concerned, they will be reduced to creating very little value at much lower margins.
What is to be seen is whether large publishers will actually go for it in remnant inventory.
Most successful technology companies aren’t rocket ships.
How Long Does it Take to Build a Technology Empire?
Cool interactive chart, check it out.
Brian McAndrews on Holding Companies’ ‘People’ Problem - Advertising Age - Digital
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.
A: When they’re relevant and include freebies.
This is the result of IAB UK’s study conducted recently (PDF of the summary). The problem here is that only an alarmingly low percentage of users in any given age group claims not to notice ads. My theory has always been that people hate admitting to being influenced, but here 70% of people don’t have a problem with it at all. Which begs the question — are they really telling the truth, or is this completely theoretical?
If this was based on actual behavior data, I bet the first winning category would be “when ads are big enough to be noticed”, closely followed by the second — “when they’re relevant”.
(link via @jonathanmendez)
RWW publishes an interview with Highland Capital’s Richard De Silva.
Richard essentially makes the point that everytime there is an economic downturn, advertisers want better performance for their their ad spend. The first move was from CPM to CPC, the second, he claims, will be to CPA. Some
Then he goes on to say that to actually track acquisitions you need to put implants into humans, invalidating the first point. There are, of course, other ways. aQuantive, before getting gobbled up by Microsoft, did a lot of work correlating actual offline sales with online ad campaigns, compensating for the last click syndrome, and weighing in the value of various consumer interactions in the end result. At Cossette we’ve done that as well over the years, but many other opportunities exist.
One of the things that fascinates me is that in 2009, pick-up-in-store still hasn’t taken off. To me it seems like a killer app for all things retail, yet (especially in Canada) this is still almost non-existant. How often did it happen to you to stumble upon a brand/product online, check out the price on retailer’s site — and then go to store and buy it? Imagine if there was a coupon thrown in too, making it that much tempting. Coupons by themselves, of course, are another way of tracking offline sales. Granted, the overwhelming majority of conversions from brand advertising are more latent and my examples are borderline DR, but I’d still be interested to analyse pick-up-in-store transactions with respect to their users’ previous interactions with ads and the brand online.
This sort of initiative would help brand advertisers make forays into CPA-based advertising, but without it the economic incentive for publishers is simply not there. The new crop of behavioural and data exchanges (bk et al) will be of great help to facilitate the CPA model.
Let’s not forget that, if brand advertisers could measure their CPA themselves, they could already convert their CPM rates to their CPA metrics. And they could already negotiate down their CPM rates to match an acceptable cost per acquisition.
The problem is thus not with the compensation model, but strictly with the (im)possibility of measurement. And as long as that’s not resolved, publishers wouldn’t be able to readily accept CPA.
What we’ll see in this recession is not a move from CPC to CPA, but a drop in CPM rates and maybe a drop in CPC rates if things get really bad.
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:
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.
Just spent way too much time in this. Draw something, swap with someone, repeat. It has been fun since SomethingAwful discovered the app.