Inside this miracle of online display media you’ll find more utility than a hardware store. The features include:

• Hundreds of photos and videos
• Exclusive, dynamic news feeds
• Information on all the teams and drivers: Vodafone McLaren Mercedes, Ferrari, BMW Sauber, Renault, Toyota, Torro-Rosso Ferrari, Red Bull-Renault, Williams-Toyota, Force India-Mercedes and Brawn Mercedes
• Circuit guides
• Video circuit guides
• Driver and constructor standings
• Pre and post race interviews with Lewis, Heikki, Martin Whitmarsh and other key figures
• LIVE TELEMETRY during practice, qualifying and the race!
• And lots, lots more!

New content will be addd throughout the season.

Share and enjoy!

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.”

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.

Regardless of whether you are a media distributor, content owner or agency, profound change is upon us all.

Digital is perhaps finally coming of age. Direct Marketing/ROI driven communications and traditional brand advertising are no longer mutually exclusive. This will undoubtedly cause headaches for some and vast opportunities for others.  Whether you prosper or perish is up to you.

4 things to consider – seriously

MEDIA CENTRIC COMMUNICATIONS ARE DEAD. CROSS PLATFORM INTEGRATION IS THE WAY FORWARD

DISPARATE DATA IS DEAD. INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN DASHBOARDS ARE THE THE WAY FORWARD

PROPRIETARY MODELS ARE DEAD. OPEN COLLABORATION IS THE WAY FORWARD

IMPRESSION-BASED MEASUREMENT WILL DIE. ACTION-BASED MEASUREMENT IS THE WAY FORWARD

The below chart sums it up quite nicely…

Great in principle but really only possible with the right technology…speak to us!

Here is a an abstract from a recent study by IBM: “Beyond advertising: Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer.”

Yes, even the boffins at IBM have an extremely valuable point of view – more value perhaps that many industry commentators from directly within media and Entertainment.

Thanks to Michael Gass for bringing it to my attention.

Abstract

Digital formats such as social media, online video, mobile communications, gaming and advanced TV enable companies to simultaneously meet transactional and brand-building objectives. Four primary trends blur the boundaries between traditional brand advertising and direct marketing:

* Consumer adoption of new distribution formats – Consumer behavior has changed forever: They are more digital-savvy, willing to provide personal information in return for perceived value, and increasingly ready for permission-based advertising.
* A shift in advertiser spend – Spending is moving from traditional advertising toward measurable, interactive marketing. Combined with spending contraction in the new economic environment, this requires smarter advertising, and doing more with less.
* Digital migration of platforms – Traditional boundaries are fading, creating opportunities for innovative business models for content platforms.
* Emergence of new capabilities – Game-changing moves, by both new entrants and existing players, are driving new types of industry innovation, challenging existing business models and accelerating the pace of change.

In response, media and entertainment (M&E) companies need to move beyond traditional advertising: the scenario of the future is consumer centricity. Becoming consumer centric requires a combination of granularity – the ability to target desired consumers while measuring results – with cross-platform integration.

Yet content owners, media distributors and agencies have not sufficiently responded to these changes, partly due to significant hurdles. Investment decisions are being hindered by new format uncertainty; the lack of cross-industry standards across formats, processes and especially metrics; and significant internal challenges including siloed operating models that limit delivery of cross-platform campaigns and a “data glut” that fails to provide real insight.

Enabling consumer-centric marketing
No matter where M&E companies focus first as they move toward consumer-centric marketing, they must start now to test new models. By combining elements of granularity – from impressions to insight – and cross-platform integration, four distinct business models will continue to evolve over the next five years (see Figure 1).

Regardless of the chosen path, being competitive and overcoming substantial hurdles will require a fundamental change in capabilities. New capabilities across four areas hold paramount importance as traditional advertising gives way to consumer centricity: creative, insights, collaboration and workflow.

* Creative – From media-centric development to cross-platform innovation. This requires experimentation across platforms and consumer participation in the creative process.
* Insights – From disparate data to greater insights. The future requires insights to be seamless and more granular, leveraging tools such as integrated campaign dashboards to enable decision making.
* Collaboration – From proprietary models to open collaboration. A new set of partnerships – such as peer collaboration between cable companies or content collaboration with ad networks – is needed across the evolving ecosystem to exploit opportunities, enable scale benefits and deliver efficiencies.
* Workflow – From manual and analog to automated and digital processes. New tools and applications can deliver end-to-end processes, from automated micro-versioning to digital inventory optimization.

As the industry heads toward consumer centricity, participants are taking divergent evolutionary paths based on their legacy stronghold positions. How quickly any company reaches consumer centricity will depend on its starting point, business mix and its ability to innovate. Most will likely start by focusing either on deepening their ROI capabilities, or driving cross-platform integration, rather than both. But even companies picking a more deliberate, gradual strategy need to explore new models along both dimensions now to sustain and protect their revenue in the future.

What is outlined here is very much inline with most of the discussion in this area:

“These new advertising units reflect the publishers’ desire to achieve four key objectives that will guide the evolution of online display advertising into its next phase:

1) Inspire creativity and high-quality advertising: Develop display units that will inspire a creative renaissance in high-quality advertising by providing a larger canvas for creativity, content and functionality.

2) Provide a greater share of voice for the advertiser: Increase the relative proportion of advertising space (in a single unit) to editorial content and, where possible, run fewer but more captivating ads on the page.

3) Introduce a measurement to capture impact: Develop a metric that emphasizes the impact creative advertising can have on Web viewers while preserving the Internet’s well-established ability to engender response.

4) Enhance interactivity to build user engagement with brands: Offer a broad range of interactivity built into units such as video players, lead capture and advertiser content that will be sharable and have permalinks to spotlight and encourage the best in creativity, while weaving the advertisements deeper into the social fabric of the Web.”

You got to love Point 2. I KNOW, LET’S JUST MAKE THE ADS BIGGER! I’m sure we can do a lot better than that!

The Open IMUâ„¢ format addresses all of the above – in an intelligent way.

In a meeting with a major publisher yesterday we were asked how we compare to our competition. In a similar vein to the above post, our response was to show how we DON’T compare. The majority of agencies in our chosen space are focused on ‘dressing up’ display media with the same old intention – create a click through. Rich Media sexed up!

The Open IMU™ format was built from the ground up with very different intentions at heart.  It has been designed to seamlessly integrate utility into display, thereby generating a captive audience that opts-in to repeat interaction. Whilst we can and do drive to site at the appropriate moment of truth, this is a fundamentally unique approach.

On the latest campaign for mydeco we are achieving the following results:

Across all platforms: online media, blogs, social networks and Internet start pages, the format is delivering the following. The interaction rate is more than 21%. The average CTR is more than 10%. The average number of clicks per view is more than 8. The average time spent is more than 1 minute.

Pull consumers in rather than pushing them away is the future…

Combining Online Display Media and Search is what got us started – a kernel of an idea that could be a big one. The only part missing in the MediaPost article is the intrinsic consumer utility. The Open IMU wraps it all up: Display + Utility + Search + Social distribution.

No doubt we will be seeing more in this vein!