The Open Agenda

As you have probably heard, the European Commission is to file suit against the UK after government officials failed to act against the controversial Phorm advertising system.

We already posted a few articles on this blog relating to behavioural targeting. Our stance remains unchanged. Behavioural targeting fails to address 2 fundamental issues:

1) It doesn’t not address true engagement. Just because I have visited a camera website doesn’t mean I am in the market for a new camera.

2) It dose zilch to address the underlying problem online advertising ineffectiveness: the display media formats themselves.

Rupert Neate, over at the Telegraph, posted an article in support of Phorm – Websites should back Phorm as it could be the answer to monetising the internet

Rupert, along with many other pundits such as Ben Kunz at Media Associates, drum up the excitement around behavioural. It seems to me to be a case of “At least it better than what we have now”. Well, I’m a big believer in the old adage that you can’t polish a turd. Instead of trying to make existing ads more tageted, we need to fundamentally re-design the online display media formats themselves.

The Open IMU display media format is a god start. On a recent 1 month campaign we delivered the following results:

Views (Impressions): 750,000+. This represents a 50%+ uplift on impressions bought.
Unique visitors: 200,000+
New installs: 2,500+ installs (The number of unique users who have ‘grabbed’ and installed the IMU
Average Interaction Rate (Interaction is counted each time a user mouses over the IMU for more than 1 second): 30.99%. Facebook 91.59%, Twitter 70%, Google Modules 66.67%, Blogspot 33.94%
Average Clicked View Rate (A unique count of the number of Views where the visitor clicked on the IMU) :11.29%. mydeco 31.94%, Facebook 53.27%, myspace 24.56%, Blogspot 13.20%
CPCV (the average number of Clicks per Clicked View): 8.76
Average time spent (the amount of time that the IMU was loaded on a page): 00:01:16. Goggle Modules 00:07:46, mydeco 00:00:60, Blogspot 00:00:31, Facebook 00:02:05
Average interaction time (the amount of time that the visitor spent interacting with the widget – mousing over or clicking): 00:00:12

We see the way forward as consumer’s opting-in to content and utilities – delivered by brands. Of course this won’t necessarily be the right approach for every brand and every campaign – but it’s one huge step forward.

Follow this and other ramblings on twitter.

For those of you that can’t recall Hans Christian Andersen “The Emperor’s New Clothes”…..video below. Why is it that adults tend to have to more learn from children’s stories that the children themselves?

Tags:   Behavioural Targeting · CPA · CPM · Online Media · Social media4 Comments