Google Lets Marketers Track Impact of TV Ads on Web Traffic June 6, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentBy Douglas Quenqua, The ClickZ Network, Jun 6, 2008
Original ClickZ content HERE
In its latest attempt to be the one-stop shop for all things advertising, Google has integrated Google Analytics with its Google TV Ads program, allowing marketers to track the impact their TV ads are having on site traffic.
The new system generates automatic reports that tell marketers when their TV ads ran, the number of impressions delivered, the cost they paid and the CPM. Those reports are integrated with other metrics already covered by Google Analytics, such as Web Site traffic, which allows marketers to see if their TV ads are impacting activity on their sites.
“We’re providing accountability to advertising on- and offline,” said Brett Crosby, a group manager with Google Analytics.
“One of the common complains with TV and all advertising is that it’s difficult to track success, and when you do get any sort of tracking information, it takes so long [to receive] that it’s difficult to act quickly on,” he said. But the Google TV analytics data “is updated throughout the day, so it allows people to make very quick decisions about what is working and what is not.”
The system can also provide information by region, which allows advertisers to track specific campaigns. For example, if an ad buy is localized entirely in San Francisco, Google Analytics can provide data for one’s Web site just in that city, allowing marketers to tell whether traffic in that region spiked after the commercial ran.
Crosby acknowledged that the system was most useful for marketers whose ads include “a specific call to action” that drove consumers to their Web site. “If they’re pushing viewers to go do something on their Web site, obviously it’s going to have a much higher impact,” he said.
Such analytics will appear automatically for customers who link their Google Analytics account with their AdWords account. The service is available immediately.
The search giant debuted a similar service earlier this year for its Audio Ads customers. Crosby said there were no current plans to unveil a tracking system for outdoor advertising, though he did not rule out print. He said both the print and TV tracking systems were a response to client demand.
This new service is just the latest attempt by Google to gain a foothold in the creation and placement of TV ad campaigns. The company recently launched a promotion in which it will pay marketers $2,000 toward the creation of their spots through its Ad Creation Marketplace program.
Will In-Game Ads Keep Delivering Brand Lift? June 6, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentIn-game advertising networks continue to conduct third-party research to assess ad effectiveness and deliver brand metrics to specific advertisers. Microsoft’s Massive recently commissioned Interpret to carry out such research for four brands advertising on its network of game ads, and the results indicate consumers like the ads and remember them.
The study evaluated separate campaigns for Adidas, a fast food restaurant brand, a global candy bar company, and an entertainment studio advertising a DVD release.
Massive continues to see lift across all client categories and game genres, said Alison Lange Engel, global marketing director at Massive. In cases where the ads are relevant to the game experience, gamers are inclined to view the integrations as a good thing, she said.
With Adidas, 73 percent of respondents agreed the ads enhanced the realism of the game “Major League Baseball 2K7″ from 2K Sports. In Electronic Arts’ “Need for Speed Carbon,” gamers agreed it made the environment feel more interactive.
Research reinforces the medium for advertisers. “We’re seeing that play out in key facets of the market. We have 270 global ad clients, and have seen clients increase the levels of investments following the research,” Lange Engel said.
Measured lift could be due to the nascent quality of the channel. “We’re seeing higher brand lift within [in-game ads] than other mediums. However it is hard to say whether these are higher than the brand lift [enjoyed] early in the development of other mediums,” said Ali Rana, an analyst at Dynamic Logic, a Millward Brown company.
The brand effectiveness of digital advertising has not fared well over time, according to Dynamic Logic data from earlier this year. In the space of three years, from Q4 2004 to Q3 2007, the lift in “brand message association” the company measured for all online ads fell from 4.3 percent to just 2.5 percent. The same downward trend has accompanied a more generalized metric: “brand awareness.”
Dynamic Logic is currently conducting research on in-game advertising, but was unable to provide an overall average for the brand effectiveness it’s measured for the category.
Massive has also had its impression count audited by Interactive Media Services group (ImServices), a move that aims to grant assurance to advertisers. The audit verifies the soundness of Massive’s process for measuring ad impressions. Impression counting in the in-game space has not been standardized, but a cumulative 10-second exposure to an ad at a viewable angle has become accepted among most ad networks.
The audit process took about a year. Massive granted ImServices access to its servers and data logs.
As Big Brands Embrace Digital, Digital's Branding Power Wanes January 17, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentMuch has been written about the eagerness of large brands to advertise online. Yet even as they increase their digital budgets, the Unilevers and Fords of the world are struggling to get their messages across.
That’s because the branding effectiveness of online advertising has declined over the past two years by nearly every measure, according to data provided to ClickZ by Dynamic Logic. Explanations for the decline include the rise of ad clutter, the desensitization of Internet users to display ads and other causes.
But the trend is clear.
For instance, consumers exposed to online ad campaigns between Q4 2004 and Q3 2005 exhibited “brand message association” that was 4.3 percent higher on average than a control group, according to the marketing research company. By 2006 that message association lift had fallen to 3.5 percent, and by last year it was down to 2.5 percent. The same downward trend has accompanied a more generalized metric: “brand awareness.” In 2005 online ads drove a 3 percent lift in brand awareness over a control group, but that boost fell to 2.2 percent over the course of the following two years.
Ken Mallon, Dynamic Logic’s VP Product Development and Custom Solutions, said one factor in the sagging brand impact of digital ads might simply be competition among large brands for share of mind.
“A few years ago there were less big brands online than there are now,” he said. “If you were a Pepsi or GM you were more likely to get noticed. Now everybody’s online. Every brand you can think of has a reasonable spend online.”
The data come from Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms brand impact database, which combines findings of the many brand impact studies the company conducts on behalf of marketers.
While all brand impact measures tracked by Dynamic Logic have declined over time, some have fared better than others. For instance, the boost in “purchase intent” provided by online campaigns has lost relatively little mojo, dropping from 1.6 percent in 2005 to 1.3 percent in 2007, according to MarketNorms. The average lift in “brand favorability” meanwhile actually rose for a year, from 1.8 percent in 2005 to 1.9 percent in 2006, before sliding to 1.4 percent last year. The award for the most drastically sagging lift goes to “online ad awareness,” a metric that offered online marketers a 7.3 percent leg-up over a control group in 2005. In 2006 that metric fell over a full percentage point to 6.4 percent, before dropping again to a mere 4.8 percent lift last year.
The question for marketers is what, if anything, to do about the declines.
One clear option is to pressure publishers to reduce the number of ads per page. Another is to place more emphasis on non-traditional ad formats and venues, such as “virals” — now officially a noun — and social marketing campaigns.
“The bar is higher and higher in terms of what consumers will pay attention to. The big challenge for brands is being invited in,” said Sarah Fay, CEO of Carat and Isobar USA. “A straight advertising message doesn’t cut it anymore. We’re at a point where we’re trying to meld the message with some form of content.”
Fay believes viral media and social marketing campaigns “can really kick up brand attributes,” but of course that only works with consumers who choose to engage with them.
From the point of view of marketing research companies like Dynamic Logic, measuring brand lift for original branded content and social marketing campaigns has baked in challenges. But Mallon said the company is working on it.
“We definitely work with all the different new things that are coming out,” he said. That includes establishing relationships with the new breed of widget ad networks and tracking original branded content. “The tricky part is getting your control group. How do you intercept people before they get exposed to it? But we have ways.”
FTC Proposes Self-Regulation Rules for Behavioral Ad Players December 21, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today released five proposed guidelines for self-regulation in the behavioral advertising industry.
The guidelines document suggests a general framework for how Web sites and other stakeholders in the behavioral ad space should communicate with Web users, gather data about their online activities and treat that data once they’ve collected it. With the release, the FTC opened a two-month comment period, after which the FTC may release formal guidelines.
The first and perhaps the most glaring of the proposals aims to make data collection more transparent to consumers, of whom “few appear to understand the role that data collection plays” in subsidizing free content, the FTC says. The suggested rule also calls for an opt-out mechanism on all sites engaged in behavioral targeting.
According to the proposed guideline, “Every Web site where data is collected for behavioral advertising should provide a clear, concise, consumer-friendly, and prominent statement noting that (1) data about consumers’ activities online is being collected… and (2) consumers can choose whether or not to have their information collected for such purpose.”
The would-be rule also indicates such sites should provide “a clear, easy-to-use, and accessible method for exercising this option.”
Other principles include one requiring “reasonable security” of consumer data; one proposing companies keep data only long enough to fill a “legitimate business need;” and another insisting data collectors only gather sensitive data such as information on a consumer’s health or children’s activities if they’ve obtained express consent.
If the language seems exceedingly non-specific, there’s a reason, said Eileen Harrington, the FTC’s deputy director for consumer protection.
“We are proposing broad principles and self-regulation… precisely because of the rapidly changing and evolving nature of these practices, including the parties and the nature of the parties that participate in them,” Harrington told ClickZ News. “These principles are intended to be broad enough and flexible enough to encompass anyone who is operating in that space.”
Two additional guidelines cover the use of data tracking for purposes other than behavioral advertising, and notifying consumers of policy changes regarding the use of behavioral data.
The complete proposed guidelines document is available on the FTC’s Web site.
ClickZ reports Casual Gamers Prefer Ad Exposure to Gaming Expenses November 12, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentWeb-based game publishers are finding higher revenue potential with an ad-supported model over an e-commerce one. Game developers are beginning to build games with advertising opportunities in mind.
“On a revenue basis, probably about 60 to 65 percent is advertising,” said Dave Williams, SVP and GM of MTV’s Shockwave and AddictingGames properties, about the Shockwave.com site. “Well north of 90 percent of users are participating in free, ad-supported content, a much bigger audience of players.”
Shockwave.com boasts a broad demographic, contrary to the belief casual game sites are mainly visited by women over 30. “Casual games skew just a little bit more female than male, but it depends on the content,” said Ezra Kucharz, EVP of North American online operations and global online platforms at Oberon, in a recent interview with ClickZ News. “Everybody plays casual games, it’s a mindset and not a specific demographic.”
Oberon recently announced a deal with MySpace to create a games portal to serve the social networking site.
In an in-game advertising-focused session at ad:tech last week, Williams said, “We earn more money from sponsorships from in-game advertising than selling games on our site.”
Read More of the ClickZ Article by Clicking HERE
As Yahoo Paper Partners Increase, Hearst Builds Sales Center for HotJobs June 7, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a comment As Yahoo Paper Partners Increase, Hearst Builds Sales Center for HotJobs
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By Kate Kaye | June 6, 2007
Progress is being made in the Yahoo newspaper partnership project. As noted during yesterday’s Deutsche Bank Media and Telecommunications Conference in New York, Yahoo has signed 17 paper publishers, and plans on training thousands of newspaper reps this year on its HotJobs system. In addition, key publisher partner Hearst Newspapers plans to build a sales center in Houston to push Yahoo’s HotJobs products.
Instead of simply taking calls from potential HotJobs customers as they trickle in, Hearst is making a concerted effort to promote the service to advertisers, said Lincoln Millstein, SVP digital media for Hearst Newspapers. “We haven’t even begun to sell HotJobs,” he said, adding, “We’re building an outbound center in Houston. We’re hiring up to 30 outbound salespeople in Houston alone just to prosecute the HotJobs online-only sales. “
Hearst was among the original handful of large newspaper publishers, commonly dubbed “The Seven Amigos,” which agreed to integrate Yahoo’s HotJobs recruitment classifieds across their more than 150 newspaper sites, and distribute their own job ads in the HotJobs database. The other six founding partners that joined in November 2006 were Belo, Cox Enterprises, E. W. Scripps, the Journal Register Company, Lee Enterprises and MediaNews Group.
According to Yahoo, more recent members of its expanding newspaper network are Herald Media, GateHouse Media, Calkins Media, The McClatchy Company, Media General, Morris Communications, Paddock Publications, Paxton Media Group, Times Shamrock Communications and Tribune Review Publishing Co.
Hearst’s newspaper division began seeing revenue streams flowing in through the deal as soon as the end of December, Millstein told the audience of investors and analysts yesterday. “The newspaper division is already for the first six months of this year realizing revenues well into the seven digits… and remember, most of this revenue has extremely high profitability,” he said.
Despite some fluctuations among Yahoo executives handling the so-called newspaper consortium, the project appears to be plowing ahead. By last month, the company had signed 15 paper publishers, SVP of Yahoo’s Marketplaces unit Hilary Schneider told an audience at the annual Newspaper Association of America Conference in May. Since then, the group has sprouted two additional publisher partners and Schneider has sprouted a new title, Executive VP of Local Markets and Commerce and Yahoo Publisher Network.
Yesterday Yahoo announced it has hired Jeff Kinder to replace GM of Yahoo HotJobs Dan Finnegan, the catalyst at Yahoo behind the newspaper project who decided to part ways with the company a few weeks ago. Kinder is charged with heading up all Yahoo HotJobs business, including sales, product, marketing and engineering.
Speaking at yesterday’s conference, Schneider said the newspaper network currently encompasses 17 partners with 400 daily and weekly paper sites. Between Q2 and Q4 of this year, Yahoo will host 51 training sessions for 3,000 newspaper reps, and will roll out full HotJobs implementation starting now through the end of the year.
Also beginning this year is the integration of partner news content and headlines across Yahoo, within Local, Autos, MyYahoo, Mail, and other sections of the portal. The search monetization piece will roll out “in the back half of this year,” said Schneider, who is prone to making hockey analogies about things like keeping one’s eye on the puck.
Further down the road in 2008, Yahoo expects to use its Panama platform to serve display ads on the paper sites. The partners are in “phase one,” according to Schneider, who said processes for sales and inventory management are being worked out.
Hearst’s Millstein stressed the Yahoo alignment will provide the newspapers with a greater understanding of their site audiences. “Newspapers have not had a history of doing that,” he stated during yesterday’s conference. For instance, he suggested the publishers will now be able to track user behavior to find more qualified leads for real estate advertisers. Rather than serving ads to voyeurs with no buying intent, the paper sites could employ Yahoo’s system to serve ads only to users who also have viewed information on local school districts or applied for a mortgage online.
The deals with Yahoo also will allow for newspaper inventory to be consolidated, packaged and sold in a way that better serves the paper publishers, Millstein believes. Instead of being lumped in with lower quality or irrelevant sites through networks, which Millstein referred to as the “real bottom feeders of the industry, selling our collective inventory at a very low CPM,” Yahoo, through its national brand advertiser connections, could package all high school sports content across the paper sites for a national advertiser such as Nike or McDonald’s.
“I don’t think the market has truly appreciated the depth and the breadth of this partnership yet,” continued Millstein.
Yahoo! Launches Dynamic Branding Campaign May 3, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentY! Launches Dynamic Branding Campaign
Yahoo gets playful with properties
Yahoo! has launched a million-dollar branding campaign tagged “Be a better…”, using multiple properties as a launchpad for creative execution, reports ClickZ.
An ad entitled “Be a Better Handyman” ties creative to Yahoo Answers by demonstrating what happens when a man buys a laser level both with and without the use of Answers. (Without it, he buys the wrong laser and vaporizes his wife.)
The online version of the ad invites users to choose the handyman’s fate with craftily-synched skyscraper and banner ads.
In “Be a Better Explorer,” an ad introduces users to mobile oneSearch. And in “Be a Better Director,” users can remix ads with alternate beginnings and endings using a tool on better.yahoo.com. The “Director” spot also invites users to try Yahoo’s Jumpcut video-editing tools.
The campaign will include a B2B component introducing advertisers to Yahoo’s Panama search marketing and mobile search marketing systems.
Various departments at Ogilvy managed the campaign.
Forecast: Major Mobile Ad Growth, Mad Ave Not Yet Biting April 12, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentForecast: Major Mobile Ad Growth, Mad Ave Not Yet Biting
By Fred Aun | April 11, 2007
The bad news for mobile marketing boosters in the United States is that major ad agencies are reluctant to give it a try. The good news is that opens up opportunities for the less fearful.
Those are two of the findings in a new “Mobile Marketing and Advertising” report from ABI Research that shows an area with tons of potential for those willing and able to take the plunge.
“Mobile advertising and marketing is a risky — albeit enticing and potentially lucrative — business,” ABI Research Principal Analyst Judith Rosall told ClickZ.
The company has determined advertisers will spend about $3 billion on mobile advertising by the end of this year. Those expenditures could include ad-supported entertainment content such as videos, music and games, as well as search ads, said Rosall.
By 2011, ABI said, the market’s value will reach $19 billion, including mobile search and video advertising. It predicted marketing spending related to video would surpass SMS by then, and that spending on “broadcast mobile video” ads alone will hit $9 billion.
Rosall said SMS is not going away. “However, with the eventual build-out of broadcast mobile networks, along with higher penetration and usage of multi-media mobile phones, we anticipate the distribution and consumption of a much wider variety of broadcast (multi-media) video content to occur,” she explained.
When it comes to offering advertisers the opportunity to make their messages personal, mobile devices have the potential to blow personal computers out of the water. However, much of the consumer data needed to accomplish that level of personalization is kept under lock and key by wireless carriers.
Rosall stressed the mobile market is “not just a smaller version of the general media” market. “The highly personalized nature of mobile phones and their increasing multi-media capabilities make these ideal devices for reaching out to consumers to extend brand marketing and to advertise products and services,” she said. Obviously, she said, exploiting that opportunity could easily backfire on “companies who do not respect consumers’ interests and privacy or do not conform to generally accepted codes of conduct for mobile marketing and advertising.”
ABI said “early-adopting brands in the US are still in the process of testing the water. They don’t typically allocate a set percentage of their annual budgets to mobile.”
Additionally, major ad agencies are not only “relatively inexperienced” with mobile marketing but also “reluctant to utilize location-based services and technologies such as MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and mobile search that are still in the early stages of deployment.”
Here, by the way, is where early adopters with more guts can score, according to ABI. It said the big guns’ “slow pace in exploiting opportunities in mobile marketing and advertising… has opened the door for a number of specialized agencies, aggregators, and other enablers.”
WPP's Sorrell: Mobile and New Media to Lead Ad Spend April 3, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentWPP’s Sorrell: Mobile and New Media to Lead Ad Spend
By Enid Burns | April 2, 2007
“Start experimenting with mobile, test, refine, repeat,” was the advice offered by Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive at WPP, at the Mobile Entertainment and Advertising Summit held by the GSM Association.
Sorrell reported about half of WPP-owned media buying agency GroupM’s business in advertising is spent on traditional media, while the other half is spent on outdoor, new media, market research and public relations. “Those other areas are growing by and large faster than those traditional media,” he said.
Newspaper is the media most threatened by new media, followed by radio and TV, though “cable and satellite give more flexibility,” he said. “Probably the least affected is outdoor and cinema, though the question is raised as to how we’re all going to consume films [in the future].”
New media, and especially emerging channels like mobile, must define standards and reporting practices. “For good or evil, clients are going to not make big decisions in media unless they have measurable data to back it,” Sir Martin said.
A forecast released by GroupM late last year places mobile ad spending in the U.K. at £30 million, or $59 million, for 2007. Mobile is becoming a priority for the larger Internet companies like Yahoo, Google and eBay. “Today there are twice as many mobile phones as Internet connections,” said Sir Martin.
He added growth will be driven by the decline of mobile data costs, adoption of mobile search, and higher data speeds enabled by 3G networks. The opportunity for marketers lies in finding ways to lower the cost of data services through advertising.
On a global scale, growth in the ad spend will come from developing countries, Sorrell said, adding that he prefers to classify the identified countries as quickly-growing markets. He said to look beyond the “BRIC” nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — to “neo-BRIC” countries like Pakistan, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. “We’ve seen mobile developments in Africa and elsewhere,” he said. “Latin America and Africa, those two will become not just politically important, but economically important.”
DoubleClick Sale Could Risk Publisher Exodus March 29, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentDoubleClick Sale Could Risk Publisher Exodus
By Kate Kaye | March 29, 2007
The stale world of online ad serving just got interesting again, as a possible acquisition of ad management firm DoubleClick was floated yesterday. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft or another buyer may grab the ad serving colossus soon. If a deal with Microsoft does become reality, it would boost the firm’s online ad capabilities and make for readymade relationships with advertisers and agencies. However, it could put DoubleClick in hot water with its publisher clients, including AOL, which would be loathe to let the company access user data flowing through DoubleClick’s DART ad serving system, and which compete directly with Microsoft’s MSN for ad dollars. Indeed, AOL could be a potential buyer, some believe.
“It could mean a lot of things,” said Forrester Research Senior Analyst Shar VanBoskirk, “like potentially AOL is going to consider buying DoubleClick, or AOL leaves DoubleClick.” DoubleClick extended its ad management partnership with AOL in April 2005, scoring business across all AOL Media Networks properties including AOL.com, AOL Instant Messenger, Mapquest, Moviefone and CNN. AOL did not respond to a call from ClickZ News for this story.
DoubleClick would not comment on the Wall Street Journal report, a spokesperson for DoubleClick said, adding “They believe it’s speculation and rumor.” Investment bank Morgan Stanley is working with DoubleClick to explore strategic alternatives, according to someone familiar with the situation. While the prospect of an acquisition by a large online publisher like Microsoft appears likely, a DoubleClick IPO may not be.
Since purchasing the company in July 2005, private equity firm Hellman & Friedman trimmed DoubleClick of its e-mail marketing management business, toning the company into a leaner online ad-focused outfit. The company has since homed in on its ad management offerings and its rich media products developed through a relationship with Flash maker Macromedia. It also squelched competition from European ad serving rival Falk by buying it about a year ago.
“The end goal of Hellman & Friedman was to clean up the pieces and make some money off of [DoubleClick],” said VanBoskirk. “If there’s a concern with Microsoft potentially competing with [DoubleClick's publisher clients], that’s a Microsoft concern to figure out before they buy the company,” she continued.
Under a large online ad seller such as AOL, Google, Microsoft or, perhaps less likely, Yahoo, not only might DoubleClick end up competing with current publisher clients for advertisers; those publishers could be threatened by potential access on the part of the new parent to the data gleaned from their sites for ad serving by DoubleClick.
“DoubleClick has cookie data on everyone, everywhere,” said Tim Vanderhook, CEO of ad network Specific Media. He believes the main appeal for any new DoubleClick owner is the data it can tap into.
“The bigger publishers are very sensitive when it comes to their data,” said Nils Winkler, managing director of AdTech, a European ad management firm that’s recently entered the U.S. market and is aiming to go head to head against DoubleClick for publisher clients.
Because of the potential conflict over data, Winkler is pleased at the prospect of wooing publishers away from DoubleClick if a large ad seller snaps it up. “It might cause a number of customers to reconsider,” Winkler said. “Microsoft would want to utilize that knowledge and let others benefit as little as possible,” he added.
Forrester’s VanBoskirk isn’t so sure data is the draw. Instead, she thinks an acquisition by Microsoft would allow for “one more set of tools for them to create a holistic capability in the online space.” Indeed, the online ad market is at the point where big online ad sellers are moving at breakneck pace to be the end all be all for advertisers, even beyond the Web.
The threat of total domination by Google could be enough for a competitor to eye a DoubleClick buy. “Google has an ad server, and I think they will continue to build more capabilities about where can use that,” said VanBoskirk. “A lot of Microsoft’s decisions have to do with what Google’s doing and what they can do first.”
In order for Google to truly be a force to be reckoned with when it comes to selling to big brand advertisers, however, the firm must allow advertisers and agencies to deliver and track ads using third party management firms like DoubleClick and competitors, aQuantive’s Atlas and ValueClick’s Mediaplex. This has some speculating Google could also be interested in a DoubleClick grab.
Either way, if the company is sold, many agree the time is right. “The timing is great for this sale,” said VanBoskirk, noting the bright outlook and steady growth for the online advertising market. Hellman & Friedman reportedly wants $2 billion for DoubleClick. That would nearly double what the equity firm paid for it two years ago, even before selling off its e-mail business for around $90 million.
