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. 

Qualitative Value of Display Advertising

One thing that often comes up in my discussions with fellow geek marketers is the qualitative value of display advertising. More precisely, the idea of valuing advertising on metrics other than the direct clicks, interactions, acquisitions, links, and so on. These other metrics may include things like lift in brand awareness or appreciation, for example, and complement quantitative metrics such as the hard clicks mentioned earlier.

Survey-based measurement, while it has its own flaws, is one of the staples of advertising measurement, and one that is little known or understood outside of the agency/advertiser circles.

Lucky you, dear readers, for Chen Wang writes a long overview of the techniques and methodologies over at MediaPost which is well worth a read. Keep in mind that the magic really happens when you combine multiple measurement sources and methodologies. The insight of mashing up site analytics, ad server analytics and survey-based measurement is often overlooked but always appreciated when properly executed.

Paint With Ben!

AKQA + Benjamin Moore = PaintWithBen.com

It’s a toy. Express your vision of color. Etc.

Hear that? That’s the sound of thousands of clicks by agency planners checking it out — to figure out how to keep on selling minisites.

Q: When are people most likely to pay attention to online ads?

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)

An Inconvenient Truth: Sales Jump 11% After Asics Gives TV a Try

The running-shoe brand dabbled in TV for the first time last year, spending about $5 million of its $27.6 million U.S. media budget on TV advertising, primarily on Olympics broadcasts. That spending came primarily at the expense of magazines, which have traditionally dominated Asics’ budget. Magazine spending fell $2 million, to $21.7 million, despite a $3 million spending increase overall, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

The tinkering paid off, as Asics’ sales rose 11% last year, according to SportsOneSource. 

Advertising Age: Sales Jump 11% After Asics Gives TV Advertising a Try

Is the ad market moving to a CPA model?

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.