Category: Advertising

Will The Ad Slowdown Reach The Web? « GigaOM

Will The Ad Slowdown Reach The Web? « GigaOM

The housing boom hasn’t turned into a bust quite yet, but it is losing steam fast. In the meantime, the impact of the credit crunch is being felt in other areas of the U.S. economy, including advertising. A new report released today by TNS Media Intelligence shows that overall spending on advertising declined for the second quarter in a row.

Um, we’re seeing CPM and CPC auction prices spike. Sure, gross ad spend may be down, but it’s also migrating to online where there are a lot of dollars chasing a finite amount of opportunity. Heck, Forbes.com is quoting a $100 plus CPM for display. Try buying rich media/online video impressions. Nothing is cheap, yet top management wants to believe if it’s web it is cheap, measurable, easy and fast.

Only measurable applies.

The Art of the Make-Good

My wife, the decorator, lives in a world of precise measurement, where fabric can cost literally $1,000 a yard and there is wallpaper that you don’t want to know about. Remember when Dennis Kozlowski, the Tyco CEO, went down in court and there were accusations that he spent $6,000 for a shower curtain? My wife says she’s made more expensive ones. Anyway, before I invoke the — “but-I-digress” line — let’s just assume that when you are designing window treatments (never call em curtains) you can’t screw up or you wind up eating the mistake. Measure twice, cut once. Etc..

My house is furnished with expensive mistakes. This is not a bad thing. I get nice furniture out of the deal, but someone had to pay for them and it wasn’t the client.

One of the subcontractors that my wife works with is a company called Terranova. They do stone work — installing kitchen counters, marble floors, etc.. They mess up and they earn the nickname “Do-It-Over”

In the advertising world, a “do-it-over” is known as a make-good. Let’s look at the circumstances that result in a make-good. First off, the advertising agency buys the media — this is their life’s blood — they get a 15% commission and they tend to monitor their buys very carefully. Let’s say they represent a vodka company and they buy a full-page ad in a magazine. The magazine’s ad trafficker books the insertion order, slots the ad in the appropriate place in the magazine (front of the book, back of the book, rear inside cover, etc.). The editorial team, which is zealously separated from the ad side, writes a story about Mothers Against Drunk Driving and as chance and Mr. Murphy would have it, that story runs across from the vodka ad. Oops. Do it over, client wants a make-good. Run an ad for an airline on the same page as a story about the tragic plunge that killed 300 people flying over Dubuque. Make-good.

Agencies live to detect make-good situations. They can pull the wings off of a publisher like you would not believe.

I need to back up and look at some make-good scenarios.

1. The ad was badly trafficked. In other words, it showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Client wants it day-parted, ie shown only during business hours in Europe, but instead the impressions happened in the middle of the night. This is why you see lots of ads for laxatives, adult diapers, and the AARP during the evening; fast food and dating hotlines at 2 am; pampers and cleaning products at 10 am. Show a Viagra ad at 10 am during the prime mother’s hour and you won’t be nearly as effective as you would showing the ad on Sunday afternoon during the ball game. So — mess up the insertion order, and make-goods happen.

2. Bad proximity. This is the bane of the news world. This is the scenario above. Book a Ticket on the Airplane ads don’t do well next to plane crash stories. Booze and stories about rehab and cirrhosis don’t mix.
What inspires this post? Can’t say, only to note that I had a fire in my inbox at 6 am involving an online ad appearing next to unclad women thanks to a screw up in an ad network which shall go unnamed. The make good was an additional 4 million impressions which is like offering another serving of mussels to the guy who just claimed the restaurant nearly killed him with food poisoning.

Jumbotron magic

While riding crosstown this morning on 43rd Street, in thick traffic, late for an appointment, I saw three examples of outdoor advertising/marketing worth a quick comment.

1. Between Sixth and Broadway, in the entrance to a parking garage, I spied a phalanx of shiny Vespa motorscooters. I like Vespas. My dad owned one when he was a graduate student in the early 60s, and I am an Italian design snob. There were at least a dozen lined up in a row, parked next to a sign that said something to the effect that the space was free for Vespas courtesy of Vespa USA. Brilliant. Owners get a free service for their loyalty, a service that is not cheap in a big city, nor practical. How does one park a motorscooter in a city? On the street? Chained to a parking meter? In a garage? Vespa gave them shelter this summer, but in a way where the row of Vespas is visible to the world, with a little sign saying, in effect: if you owned a Vespa you too could park here for free. I saw it. I saw a lot of scooters — like a storefront dealership … only better.

  • Chinatown — 174 Centre Street, between Hester and Canal Streets
  • Midtown — 412-422 W. 33rd Street, between 9th and 10th Avenues
  • Theater District — 1120 Avenue of the Americas, near 44th Street
  • Tribeca — 15-21 Worth Street, between Worth Street and West Broadway

2. On the next corner, on Times Square, the cab was stuck in traffic, and there before me, on the corner of the Reuters Building, was a big Jumbotron sign with a digital Japanese paper doll on it. This was Harajuku — the Japanese fashion movement most identified with Gwen Stefani — who is HP’s latest celebrity (Vera Wang, Jay Z, Mark Cuban, The Chopper Guy) spokesperson for HP printing. There was an 800 number on the jumbotron. I dialed it, and after connecting was told I had 60 seconds to “dress the doll” on the screen. There were numbers next to the 50 foot tall Harajuku doll. On next to the head, the torso, legs, feet, etc. I pressed that number on my phone and the number highlighted on the screen.

I pressed another number. The dress changed. I pressed the number next to the feet and the shoes changed. I looked at the bazillion people on the sidewalks and no one was aware that I was the man behind the curtain …. Freaky. I had total control over the image. Well, not total, but I was messing with it and in control and that was cool ….

Props to Eric Kintz …. great campaign, great stunt.

3. Finally. What is up with ass marketing? I got two major out-of-home ass impressions in the same cab this morning. One from some really bad but new toilet company– which apparently is selling a bidet device that washes your netherlands and makes you feel clean. Clean. Do you hear me? Clean? And which features pictures of six people’s naked rear ends with smiley faces on them. I cannot remember its name. Nor will I try. Please. This is right out of the birth of Public Relations handbook, when the way to sell soap was to convince people they smell so they’ll take more baths.

Then, on the next block, is a delivery truck for Georgi Vodka with a huge picture of another ass. This one with the brand logo across the rear-end bikini. Okay. I looked. I admit it. And while I am at it: what is the deal with words on the derriere of shorts? I delivered my daughter to college last week and while sitting in the car waiting for her to get her ID I saw three women walk by with words on their butts, ranging from the name of the college to “Juicy.”
“Juicy” is not a sentiment I would flash on my withers.

Does Search Get Too Much Credit?

Does Search Get Too Much Credit?
Thanks to Chris Kobran for sending this AdWeek story to me via del.icio.us:

“Search is getting more credit than it deserves—that’s because if you go upstream from those clicks, a lot of users have been to the advertiser Web site before because they’ve been exposed to other advertising,” said Young Bean-Song, vp, analytics at Atlas.

Search advertising has become a dominant force in the online ad industry, thanks largely to Google’s popularity and its ability to deliver quantifiable results. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, search accounted for 40 percent of all Web ad spending in 2006.”

I won’t disclose our method of giving credit in our revenue attribution tracking, but last-click is not the methodology we’re deploying. Search can get overweighted in an online media plan, but it is, by far, the most predictable and efficient from an expense-to-revenue point of view.

I also have to question the impartiality of a metrics guy at Atlas — the Aquantive ad server acquired by Microsoft in May. Sorry, but Atlas has more to gain by discrediting search.

Widget, Gadget, Gidget

I was asked to give an impromptu tutorial in “widget advertising” last week in Bangalore. What started off as a casual request turned into a cubicle with a few people looking over my shoulder at a web browser with four tabs loaded with:

  • My iGoogle page
  • The new Lenovo/Microsoft Live Portal
  • The plugin directory at WordPress.org
  • Fred Wilson’s Blog, A VC

I have heard it said the best way to learn something is to teach it, and having never commissioned nor served a so-called “gadget ad” I found myself in the same mode I was in three years ago at CXO Media, when I conducted a series of brown bag lunches on the silent revolution occurring in the post-bubble world of web media. This is the abridged version of what I told the gang in Bangalore last week.

Traditional web advertising is defined by a call-and-serve model where a publisher fences off some turf which is occupied by a string of code which calls for an advertisement housed on an ad server. Getting that ad onto that server is the act of trafficking, and can attach conditions to when and where the ad is shown. For example, an advertiser might buy a specific section of a web site for a certain period of time, and only want an ad to be shown during certain hours, or to users from a certain geographical area, and further insure a visitor would not see the same ad more than three times. All of this is enabled between the code on the web site and the ad server.

Changing the terms — the duration of the ad campaign, the creative (say lowering the price in a banner ad in response to a competitor lowering their price), and making any modifications is a gigantic pain in the ass that requires a change order and all sorts of ad ops pain which one’s agency has to deal with. Therefore, the old model of serving ads, Dart trafficking, purchase orders, etc. , in my opinion, sucks.
Now, look at what is possible if the ad were fixed in place, like a plug-in feature embedded in the right side gutter of this blog. See the Flickr gallery? The My Blog Log thingy? Those are widgets. Apple has em. Yahoo has em. Google has em. WordPress has em. They are supposed to be all the rage and bloggers more eloquent than I have waxed eloquent about them. Some rag apparently declared this to be the year of widget. Um, okay, but how do they work for advertisers?

Let’s start with my personal Google page (my default homepage, except fricking Lenovo.com takes it over like a jealous girlfriend every other day). You understand the principle, it’s like every other portal page ever developed. MyYahoo, MyWay … pick a content module — a clock, a calculator, quote of the day from The Big Lebowski (“the Dude abides”), and place it where you want it. When you start selecting stuff, search on HP (yes, I am showing my competition some love here) and up comes this gadget.

Now, note to Eric Kintz, this thing hasn’t been updated in months, but the spirit is there and the potential is immense. So, for some reason, let’s say I am a real fan of HP cameras, I decide I need to see what they are selling every time I go to the Google portal. HP could, if they refreshed it, modify the price, change the image, push promotions, in short — this is a “perma-ad” that me, the user, can decide to place or alter.

What’s the difference between this and an ad unit? First off, it isn’t served by an ad insertion engine like DoubleClick or Atlas. Second, to modify it I don’t need to replace the entire ad, only elements inside of it. Think of this as a site within in a site. A mini-site.

Similar to this is what we’re doing with Microsoft for our homepage default in Internet Explorer. Setting the default on the browser to Lenovo.com isn’t a good idea — we get lots of garbage traffic that immediately goes elsewhere because the user can’t or can’t be bothered to change their browser’s homepage default. No, instead you want to offer the user a homepage with some modicum of utility, something that — dare I invoke the term of the year of 1997? — is sticky and will be useful. This page, a cobranded version of Microsoft Live at MSN, is an attempt to do that, and we are building a widget/gadget thingy to keep our customers informed, tell them about features and functions they may not be aware of, and let them know when we’re conducting a promotion or having a sale.

Then there are plug-ins. Plug-ins are modules a site-side publisher — like a blogger — can download and embed on their blog. Some of these plug-ins are “badges” or fixed spots that a blogger can grab as part of an affiliate program with say Amazon or Bass Pro Shops. The concept is simple — give the vendor some real estate, and any sales that result from a click from the affiliate badge will carry a unique identifier which yields the blogger/site owner a percentage of the sale.

Finally, if you want to see a site in action that uses a lot of plug-ins, widgets, gadgets, etc., you can’t do much better than Fred Wilson’s A VC. Fred is a venture capitalist at New York’s Union Square Ventures and he invests in a lot of the companies that produce these plug-ins. He’s also blogged smartly on the topic.

So, to recap:

Gidgets are the next wave in display advertising. They pose a challenge to creative teams who need to design a unit that can be easily updated, through a syndication pipe using RSS/XML principles to publish new content from a remote owner. They pose a challenge to publishers who are accustomed to a random, or roadblock model in ad tagging and serving. They probably will simplify the lives of the people running metrics as they aren’t subject to any randomness and probably will have a longer shelf life than other units served on a campaign basis. Will they perform better than banners? The Jury is out.

Ding dong, the page view is dead

Rob O’Regan at Magnosticism reports Nielsen’s decision to drop pageviews as the primary metric for site measurement. Good riddance say I.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.’s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo’s 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third.

I posted on this a while back, arguing that Ajax and other page-cache models were making the Web 1.0 model of page-by-page sessions irrelevant. Expect to see some sites rail against this decision, and don’t expect the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) to make a move anytime soon.  Here’s the pdf of the Nielsen-Netratings release.

Best Engineered Campaign – The Ultimate Spill Test

Inside the Box » Blog Archive » Best Engineered Campaign – The Ultimate Spill Test

Very interesting to look at comments on the Lenovo ad campaign and realize people are sometimes unwilling suspend belief on what they see — probably due to years of being conditioned by the PC industry to take the advertising at face value around Speeds and Feeds. One commenter on a popular blog said he felt this campaign was no more off-target than men being chased by frantic women in the Axe ads. I dunno about that.

Anyway, a lot of initial reaction was around disclaimers. Matt Kohut at Lenovo’s Inside the Box delivers a great one:

“They talked about dropping a system into a bathtub the night before to try it out, but no one wanted to stick their hand in the tub. They went back and forth saying You do it. No, YOU do it. I’m not sure that they ever did the test, but just went ahead and showed up at NASA and dropped the system into the tank. The result is what you see here.Oh, and the system lasted for 3 seconds. Longer than I think I would have expected it to.”

Case Study: Accelerade® 24-Hour Endurance Run

Accelerade® 24-Hour Endurance Run

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“To kick off the national launch of Accelerade, Dean Karnazes will aim high. On June 21, his goal will be to break the world record for a 24-hour distance run on a treadmill (currently set at 153.76 miles) as well as to raise awareness for Athletes for a Cure, an organization dedicated to finding a cure for prostate cancer. The treadmill will be located on a platform attached to the Reuters building in Times Square.”

A rich media ad on some random website caught my eye this morning. A long range view of a man running on a treadmill on a balcony overlooking New York’s Times Square. I clicked through and found this interesting combination of:

  • Live webcam technology tied to rich media banner/display advertising trafficked through multiple sites
  • Smart viral/public campaign strategy hinging on a “stunt”
  • One day stunt — will be interesting to see how Accelerade follows through with this as part of an ongoing campaign.

Pure imagination

I said in the prior post to beware of Lenovo’s Anthem video as the soundtrack — Gene Wilder singing “Pure Imagination” — is infectious. It is. My kids are walking around the house singing:

“If you want to view paradise,
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world?
There’s nothing to it”

A little background on the song is in order. One, Gene Wilder does not go down in history as a great crooner, yet he is definitely a musical talent. Second, the song, in its original setting, is sort of lost.

Here’s the YouTube link:

And here’s the Wikipedia entry on the song, which, to my surprise, has been covered many times. (interesting trivia, Wilder played the congas on The Talking Heads I Zimbra). When I showed the video to some people at Google last month, one person said it was one of their favorite bedtime lullabies. I can see why.

I want to acknowledge is the brilliance of the creative directors at Ogilvy — Greg Ketchum and Tom Godici — who insisted the ad be scored with this song.