Yesterday MediaPost published article called “Bigger isn’t always better”.

The article cites a study conducted by web measurement firm Compete that compared standard 300 x 250 with a 300 x 600.. Both ads ran the same content. What the study found is that the bigger format had a higher CTR whilst the smaller format was more effective in driving poeple toward sales. Another of those studies that yields very little.

The inherent problem with display is rooted in 2 issues:

1) The formats: ‘print ads online’ – simply not built for the medium

2) The pricing models: ‘print pricing online’ – circulation morphed into impressions.

I have to almost laugh when pundits suggest the solution is to make the ads bigger. Of course bigger isn’t better. Aside to this, let’s try and remain somewhat pragmatic. Web publishers would need to completely reinvent how their sites and structured and bodies such as the IAB would have to get with it and put their weight behind new formats. Whilst I totally welcome this, and it will happen eventually – it aint happening any time soon. They still put a 40k limit of most rich media!

I think one of the possible solutions, as pointed out in the closing lines of the article, lies with ‘thinking inside the box’.

Here at Open we have created a number of new formats – within existing formats. The biggest demand is for our IMU format. Served as an MPU – that’s where the similarities begin and end. The IMU format delivers multiple utilities, goes full screen, is socially portable, optimises natural and is completely dynamic.

I think advertisers need to stop using display inventory in an effort to drive traffic – click through completely suck. As an industry we reward campaigns that drive a 1% CTR.

Display media should be seen as an opportunity to engage with an audience in an ongoing manner – not a slim chance to drive traffic. People have multiple digital locations and your content – wrapped in utility – should be made available everywhere appropriate.

Publishers need to lead the charge in the development of new formats. This includes new pricing models. Forget about diminishing CPMs. That’s a down spiral and with new technologies emerging daily that allow better targeting at a fraction of the cost, it’s a battle you’ll never win. Change the game and offer performance-based pricing models to your advertisers. You know it makes sense.

Interesting times ahead as online advertising comes of age.

This campaign simply goes from strength to strength. Hats off to VCCP for a brilliantly planned and executed campaign.

We eagerly await what’s to come!!

Who else loves this campaign?

Video Egg recently hosted a session entitled “7 minutes to reinvent the internet”. Just as you guessed, a range of speakers were given 7 minutes to spill their thoughts.

See Troy Young’s vision below:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPOf4fYi7NQ]

In line with our sentiments – the futures looks like new formats and new ways to price them. Out are impression-based models (CPM) and in are performance-based pricing models.

Read my comments below.

All I can say is – about time!

I have to disagree with Karen’s assessment. It’s absolutely right that marketers and advertisers only pay for engagement online. After all, it’s really only possible online (for now) and we should be using the medium for what it can deliver – transparency, measurement and accountability.

The model of buying impressions is antiquated and should be dispensed with. After the first wave of the internet when big brands rushed to build a web presence (with no real clue as to why other than they have one so we need one!) there was a mad rush to generate some ROI. In came ‘print models’ – impression based pricing models (circulation) and fixed ad placements. It’s definitely time to move on.

The reason why we should is simply because we can. We an create better ad formats that deliver deeper engagement and price them accordingly. Cost per action, cost per engagement are just a couple of the metrics that will replace inevitably CPM.

Let’s also keep in mind that as content shifts from singular destinations to be made available across multiple digital locations, the pressure to price online ads around agreed performance metrics will compound.

I take the point regarding billboards – but until there is a better alternative to price them – we’re stuck with the old methods. This to will undoubtedly change.

You also mention “that an ad is not a point of purchase sale and the website or other media upon which an ad sits is not a store that vends the ad’s products.” Why shouldn’t the ad be a point of purchase? Brand Awareness and DR needn’t be mutually exclusive.

Let’s move forward…

http://thisisopen.com/blog

In this article from Businessweek, Ben Kunz discusses the impact of behavioural targeting on CPMs.

As always, it is our absolute pleasure to retort:

“Sounds a lot like the Emperor’s new clothes to me! There’s no doubt that behavioural targeting has a useful role to play in refining online communications – but let’s first take a deep breath and a small step back. The CPM model is on the way out and rightly so. Impression-based pricing models are fine for delivering an audience but in order to make online advertising work it’s engagement that counts. Let’s not take all the mistakes, vagueness and baggage we collected over years of analogue media experimentation and repeat them verbatim online. So goodbye CPM pricing – hello CPE/A. If it’s engagement that really counts – behavioural targeting is about as effective as mass market omnibus studies – not very. Google may know that I have visited site x – but it doesn’t know WHY. I then find myself being followed around the net by a cluster of ads – kind of like a poor old dog that follows you down the road. If we are going to make engagement models work we need to create ads and content that are engaging. Shocker I know. At Open, we are delivering opt-in communications that delivers content based on genuine user preferences.”

Figures released today by the IAB show that the internet was the only marketing medium to experience growth in 2008, with online market share rising to 19.2% as advertisers seek greater accountability and return on investment.

The IAB’s bi-annual online advertising expenditure study – carried out in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) – shows that spending online increased by £540 million year-on-year. This was achieved against a challenging backdrop which has seen total UK advertising spend fall by 3.5% in 2008 to £17.5bn.

In the second half of 2008, the internet’s share of all advertising spend actually peaked at 19.8%, overtaking total press display. The UK is now the world’s most advanced market for internet advertising with £1 in every £5 of media budgets spent online.

Online display was the only display medium to grow in 2008, up 7.7% to £637.4m, accounting for 19% of all online advertising expenditure. The core embedded formats attracted an increasing number of advertisers, buoyed by sophisticated and measurable new formats such as TV-style rich media.

The continued growth of rich media embedded formats and video is accelerating the decline of interruptive formats, which only accounted for 0.4% of all online spend in 2008.

Paid-for search continues to lead the way online as marketers look for guaranteed accountability, measurability and fast results. Paid-for search grew by 22.7% to £1.987bn, a 59.3% share of all online advertising.

Classified growth remained healthy, up 22.2% to £715.2 millions, a share of 21.4%. Online classifieds across recruitment, property and automotive increased, as these sectors migrated from print to digital formats.

For the first time in 2008, the study broke out the online display figures by sector. Throughout the year the fastest-growing display sector was entertainment and media. In the first half of 2008 it accounted for 10.7% of all online display advertising, and in the second leapt almost six percentage points to 16.3%. Retail also increased its spend significantly, rising from 6.3% in the first half of 2008 to 9.1% in the second half.

When all formats are combined – search, classifieds and display – recruitment continues as the leading sector, accounting for 23.8% of all online advertising spend, followed by automotive (13.5%), technology (11.2%), property (9.7%) and finance (7.6%).

Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, says: “These are really tough times and advertising budgets are being slashed. More than ever, marketers have to demonstrate a clear return on their media investment – and accountability is online’s trump card. UK advertisers have become digital savvy and they’re now using rich media, ad networks and search in intelligent ways to achieve their sales and brand targets. This shift to digital has propelled online to become a 20% medium.”

Phil Stokes, UK head of entertainment & media at PricewaterhouseCoopers, adds: “As audiences continue to migrate to an online environment for commerce, information, social interaction and entertainment, advertisers are following in ever greater numbers. The growth in broadband household penetration is allowing a far richer mix of video entertainment and advertising to create a ‘near-TV’ feel for mass audiences online and advertisers can see new and innovative ways to build and sustain brands with targeted advertising.”

“Specifically, I wanted to get his take on why we aren’t seeing a seismic shift of budgets from TV to online. The online user base is highly engaged, and there is more premium content and measurement ability than even one year ago. My question centered around the marketers who are interested, but not at the level of going all-in.

“Simple,” my friend said. “Big brand advertisers want scale. TV delivers it, and cheaper. It’s hard not to justify just buying more TV rather than investing in online.”

That statement points to a supply/demand imbalance that online has been struggling with for the past few years. In mid-2008, Forrester pegged premium online video CPMs at $40-$70 (the latter being for a level of programming like NBC’s “The Office”) while TV averaged $25. Even in 2009, when CPMs are lower across the board, TV still wins because it has the critical mass to deliver pricing efficiency. Right now, the only online video format that has significant scale is user-generated video, which most brand advertisers shun for reasons discussed many times in Video Insider posts such as brand adjacency, length of content, quality of content and user experience.

So we wait for the big shift of more professional content creation and consumption to occur, while TV gets the lion’s share of marketer attention. And we wonder when the shift will begin.”

In my response to Eric, I argue that the shift will accelerate as we continue to move away for impression based pricing models to performance and engagement based models. This shift to is already well under way.

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as “epochal” by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter’s brief text messages, known as “tweets”, which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity “twitterers”, such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter’s profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.

“[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this – his well-known observation ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’ is only 36 characters long,” a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet.

For example, Martin Luther King’s legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian’s Twitterised archive as “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by”, eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.

At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays. “In the new media environment, readers want short and punchy coverage, while the interactive possibilities of Twitter promise to transform th,” the online media guru Jeff Jarvis said in a tweet yesterday, before reaching his 140-character limit, which includes spaces. According to subsequent reports, he is thinking about going to the theatre tonight, but it is raining .

A unique collaboration between The Guardian and Twitter will also see the launch of Gutter, an experimental service designed to filter noteworthy liberal opinion from the cacophony of Twitter updates. Gutter members will be able to use the service to comment on liberal blogs around the web via a new tool, specially developed with the blogging platform WordPress, entitled GutterPress.

Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry, whose reliably jolly tone, whether trapped in a lift or eating a scrumptious tart, has won him thousands of fans. A further 11% is made up of his 363,000 followers replying “@stephenfry LOL!”, “@stephenfry EXACTLY the same thing happened to me”, and “@stephenfry Meanwhile, I am making myself an omelette! Delicious!”

According to unconfirmed rumours, Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, will next month announce plans for a new system of telepathy-based social networking that is expected to render Twitter obsolete within weeks.

In case you haven’t seen the Apple Synched banner, check out the video below.

It’s nice creative – fit for form.

These are great examples of great online creative – it’s no surprise to see this work emanating from Lee’s shop.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – these creative exceptions – whilst contextual – are just the beginning. A brand as powerful as Apple has perhaps a better chance than most brands to opt people in to the story. These formats should be the doorway to ongoing narrative cross platforms.

So much more can and will be done.

6% interaction rate sounds impressive but let’s be clear on what counts as an interaction. We too work with Clearspring – where the definition of “An interaction is counted each time a visitor mouses over a widget for more than 0.5 seconds.” On that count 6% aint that great – our average is more than double that.

I have to admit I find this type of research kind of pointless in that it is very vague and subject to extremes of interpretation.

Am I suppose to deduce from this study that banners are more effective than ads with video, whilst on the other hand more people haven’t clicked on banners vis a vis ads that have video and sound?

And stone the bloody crows – who would have guessed that an ad that is relevant piques interest!

Which Online Ads Get Attention?
MARCH 31, 2009

Relevance, utility and discounts pique interest.

Certain ads always seem to get noticed.

The UK Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK), based on polling data from Lightspeed Research, has released information on how the content of digital advertisements affects viewer interest—as well as on the effectiveness of different online ad formats.

When UK users were asked when they paid attention to online ads, more than one-half answered when the ads were relevant. Forty-three percent said when the ads were useful, and 33% said money-off offers got their attention.

Reasons that UK Internet Users Pay Attention to an Online Ad, by Gender, November-December 2008 (% of respondents in each group)

Along with confirming the belief that people like to save money, the most popular answers showed an openness on the part of consumers to more targeted advertising.

The results varied in some cases by age. Younger audiences were more interested in special offers, exclusive information and entertainment value. For ads to resonate with younger baby boomers, they needed to be more relevant and useful.

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Certain ad formats had a higher rate of recall than others. Respondents remembered paid search, display, e-mail and pop-up ads more than social network or pop-under ads.

Types of Online Advertising Clicked on by UK Internet Users, November-December 2008 (% of respondents)

“The research has found that even though not all consumers click on ads, they are now fully acquainted with most forms of advertising online,” said Sorcha Proctor of the IAB UK.

“The data highlights what consumers want online: relevance, entertainment and value for money.”

While the findings may not be unexpected, it never hurts for marketers to keep what matters to consumers on top of their minds.