"In addition, Vibrant has had to deal with some negative feedback from journalists, who have said that connecting words in news articles to ads puts news and advertising too close together."
This is the dumbest play in online advertising — contextual ad words — the same system that was tried and dinged by Forbes.
Over at Reel-Time we’ve long felt the pain of never having the scale or revenue to invest in the tools that big sites can afford. Most notably a decent traffic analysis package. Sure, there’s the usual freeware log-file analysis, but nothing approaching the sophistication of an Omniture Teamsite or Websidestory HitBox.
Last week Google introduced Google Analytics, granting access to AdSense publishers such as R-T. Our webmaster Mark Cahill performed the install by adding some footer code to the pages, and voila, a week later we have the first real stats for Reel-Time that we’ve had in ten years.
And it cost nothing. Omniture and Hitbox which charge $0.09-$0.22 per thousand pages, are way out of the range of the little niche players.
Needless to say, I am very happy, but in awe of Google’s ability to overnight put companies like Omniture and HitBox under the gun.
WSJ.com – Top Web Sites Build Up Ad Backlog, Raise Rates
"In 1999, there was no research and people were chasing fear and greed," says Greg Stuart, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. "Now there’s good data, plus marketers with their own real experience."
Always a risk trying to point behind the WSJ cost-wall. But here goes. Good piece on the sold-out situation in online, especially in the auto segment. Big takeaways — broadband is hot, hot, hot.
TechCrunch » Insert Ads into Podcasts with Fruitcast
Thanks to Janice Brand for the pointer to this service that inserts 15 second audio ads into podcasts.
We shall check it out.
BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Advertising 2.0: An agenda for the Web 2.0 workshop
Jarvis in on a Web 2.0 panel this morning and posts the discussion agenda
"Advertisers need distributed media to provide metrics. Distributed media also have an opportunity to measure (and monetize) new assets, such as trust, influence, timeliness, interaction, engagement, and also to measure (and monetize) new behaviors, such as swarming around people and tags. * We need to rally round cookie sets and data reporting on the publisher side. * We need other tools to serve cookies and report data (i.e., RSS readers). * We need audience demographics and behavior. * We need publisher data (subject matter, demographics, content safety…). * We need protections against spam. * We need to establish trusted networks. All this should allow advertisers to select the “best” media, however they wish to define that — audience, demographics, influence, etc. — or allow publishers to serve the best advertising; it should increase efficiency and value for all and will support the growth of new media."
When I first got sucked into the world of publishing metrics in the mid-90s I was amused by the concept of "pass-along," that completely speculative measure of how many people read a dead-tree publication.
"IN AN EFFORT TO PROVIDE better usage data for advertisers, the Newspaper Association of America Monday launched a new initiative to show advertisers that newspapers’ reach exceeds the number of papers they sell. The semi-annual study, called the Newspaper Audience Database (NADbase), counts the average number of people who read the 100 largest newspapers in the country on a given weekday. Rather than providing circulation data–the usual currency by which newspaper advertising is bought and sold–the NAA study also incorporates "pass-along" data, which refers to the number of people projected to read each copy"
I remember asking the circ director at Forbes if that meant a copy of a mag moldering in the waiting room of a dentist was the most valuable in the world, he laughed, and said most of those magazines were complimentary gifts by the publisher to the doctor for just that reason.
Which gets me back to my ongoing rant about the lunacy of metrics in the dead-tree world versus the over-weening specificity of online. Agencies and clients seeking left-handed Latvians at 3 am feel empowered to demand and get quantitative insights into a site’s traffic logs, while the print world continues to depend on specious syndicated research, porous audience research, and flaky circ numbers that would make Enron’s balance sheet more dependable than the Table of Elements.
Here we sit, in the most measurable medium in the history of media, and people wonder why newspapers are going to hell. It comes down to metrics.
Internet News Article | Reuters.co.uk Online ad spending in Britain surged 62 percent to more than 490 million pounds in the first half of 2005, the Internet Advertising Bureau said on Monday. According to a study carried out by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for the IAB, online advertising has surpassed outdoor ads by market share, 5.8 percent to 5.1 percent, as more marketers have moved their advertising budgets online. Online ads surpassed radio by market share last year.
Tip of the hat to paidcontent.org for the news.
TNS Unveils First-Half Numbers, Top 50 Advertisers for June
Revised downwards from 11.2 forecast. These figures do not include paid search.