Form and function fistfight in heaven.
Soon, you’ll be able to decorate your avatar’s home with furniture from a virtual Ikea.
No word yet on whether you’ll have to spend several hours moving your mouse back and forth while your avatar puts it together.
photo by Leslie Duss
The latest asshattery in the world of media planning news comes in the form of a study from Datran Media suggesting that email ads perform better than search or display.
It’s convenient to look at data like this, and to conclude that email ads are a better investment than, say, Google Adwords or banner ads…anywhere. (God forbid you consider some kind of integrated marketing effort; the sky will fall.)
But this is an apples/oranges comparison. (more…)
One of Media Mandible’s countless readers wrote in with helpful feedback suggesting that I use a “more
inside” feature to break up the posts a bit, to avoid the “sea of text” feeling. Fortunately, the Wordpress text editor comes with a button that does this for you (”Insert More tag”).
As you can see (scroll down), it does make the blog appear more readable. What’s interesting, though, is that it actually makes each entry take longer to read. Now you have to click to get the rest of the article. Previously, you didn’t.
This is exactly the way that (effective) interactive advertising works. Instead of giving you the hard, obvious sell up front (”Click here and get $5 off now!”), a good banner will give you a soft sell on something that’s less of a commitment, and more entertaining (”Mouse over the box to see what’s inside!”). If the stakes are low, and your curiosity is aroused, (more…)
This house ad is displayed at the New York Sports Club on 9th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It’s the first thing you see as you walk in, just at the top of a flight of steps.
Presumably, the placement is for prospective members. You struggle with yourself, decide to take the plunge, and go in the door, ready to deal with obnoxious intake people trained to hard-sell you on a personal training package. Will you make it all the way up the steps, you fat wannabe?
Of course you will. Don’t you want to ___ better?
Speaking as someone who has been a member for a long time, though, I find it obnoxious, condescending, and needlessly coy. And I have to imagine that some of the women who see it find it creepy. That guy looks like Bizarro Joey.
photo by miconian
Seth Godin has written a horrifying post in which he delights in the fact that most business books are only about 5% substance and 95% “motivation.” He also knocks other types of how-to literature for their frivolity:
The gap is motivation. Gardening books don’t push you to actually do something. Cookbooks don’t spend a lot of time trying to sell you on why making a roast chicken isn’t as risky as you might think. The stakes are a lot higher when it comes to business. Wreck a roast chicken and it’s $12 down the drain. Wreck a product launch and there goes your career…Computer books, of course, are nothing but bullet points. Programmers get amazing value because for $30 they are presented with everything they need to program a certain tool. Yet most programmers are not world class, precisely because the bullet points aren’t enough to get them to see things the way the author does, and not enough to get them motivated enough to actually program great code.
The difference, Seth, is that sometimes people are motivated to do something without being pushed to it by pap. (more…)
I’m disappointed to see that Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has made another post in which he completely misinterprets industry data to justify his ideas about the way online CPMs work. (See also Chris’ last post on this subject, and here’s my comment on it.)
Chris references some PubMatic survey results indicating that large websites are getting lower CPMs these days than smaller websites.
Unfortunately, he chose not to address a note from the PubMatic page: “The pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks’ share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers.”
Here’s what that means: (more…)
Adland has posted an article about Pizza Hut’s recent “fake restaurant” campaign, in which they serve their pasta in a fine dining environment, and then shock satisfied customers by revealing where the food actually came from.
There are really two implications here, one much more interesting than the other. The first is that Pizza Hut pasta is just as good as pasta you’d find at an expensive restaurant. This, of course, is the implication that consumers are expected to focus on.
The second implication is that consumers can’t tell the difference between a product and a brand. And while most people don’t have the vocabulary to describe the difference, I would argue that they can still tell. The product is the pasta itself. The brand is the idea of Pizza Hut Pasta. By definition (and by design), the brand is more complex and nuanced than the product. The brand ensures that when you think of Pizza Hut, you think of the shingled pyramid roof, the dining room with Parmesan and hot pepper shakers on all the tables, the selection of soft drinks (all Pepsi products, of course), the salad bar heavy on garbanzos, the uniforms…
Fox recently announced that they will be showing fewer commercials than usual during two of their upcoming dramas. Said Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori: “We’re going to have less commercials, less promotional time and less reason for viewers to use the remote. We’re going to have more character, more content, more value.”
What’s not clear is whether this shift in policy merely means fewer commercials, or fewer commercial breaks. There’s a huge difference. One way simply means more content per hour. The other way means a major paradigm shift in the way that television is written.
The plots of TV shows, both dramas and comedies, are structured according to acts, just as plays are. It’s easy to tell where one act ends and another begins: at the commercial break. Commercials are used instead of, say, curtains closing in front of a stage.
Each show has a formula for what happens in each of the acts (in the case of drama, there are usually four acts per episode). If you start to pay attention to your favorite show in terms of these acts, you’ll see the structure emerge pretty quickly. In the first act, the villain of the week often emerges. In the second act, the heroes go about fighting the villain, and fail. In the third act, (more…)
So, you know what the client wants, you have explored what happened before you got involved, and you’ve established clear KPIs. Now you’ve got to solidify the budget.
The budget might come to you in any of the following ways:
Each scenario has its advantages and disadvantages, but it comes down to this. If you’re coming up with the budget yourself, base it on the goals and the KPIs that you’ve already established. Assume an average CPM, an average CTR, a success according to your KPIs (say, a lift in client site traffic of over 10%), and then back into your budget.
Say, for example, that you’re going to run on premium sites those in the CondeNet network (disclaimer: I used to work for Conde), so you need to assume a CPM of about $25. And let’s say that to get the lift, you’re going to need a million new pageviews to the site over the course of a month. And let’s say that, based on a similar campaign, you estimate that, if you get a typical CTR of 0.3%, you’re going to get a conversion of about 1%. (Meaning: Three out of every thousand users will click. One out of every hundred clicking users will buy.) So, given the lowball results you’re predicting, how many impressions will you need to get the results you want? And given the (high) CPM you’re predicting, how much money will it take to buy those impressions?
Of course, this is all somewhat arbitrary. You don’t know the publishers for sure yet, and you don’t know the CPMs until you start negotiating with the publishers. And there’s no sense negotiating until you know how much you have to spend. It’s easy to see the situation as a moebius strip, but it’s frustrating and not productive. At some point, you have to start estimating prices and/or performance in advance, and then fill in the blanks. Make your price estimates high and your performance estimates low, and then do your best to negotiate lower prices and drive better performance than what you predicted.
photo by Jeff Keen on Flickr
An article on Online Media Daily extols cell-phone banners as more clickworthy than banners appearing
elsewhere, and equally as conducive to recall as TV advertising:
“The banner ads work really well, and that’s where you have the greatest reach,” [mobile advertising leader for Verizon Wireless Stephanie Bauer] Marshall said, adding that she “was blown away” by IAG data showing they were on par with TV spots in terms of brand recall. (IAG used the same method for measuring brand recall that it does with TV ads.) Mobile banner ads also produce click-through rates that are “exponentially higher than online” banner ads, where CTR has fallen to about 0.3%; mobile banners produce an overall click-through rate of 2%, even “slightly higher for entertainment brands.”
I’m blown away too..by the lack of insight. The high CTR isn’t runoff from some magical quality inherent in cell phones. Interactive, phone-friendly WEP pages are still relatively new in the American mainstream, and so are ads that are designed (both visually and technically) for the mobile screen. Advertising (along with porn) is always going to be at the forefront of new technology, and users - especially users who are regularly surfing the web on their phones in 2008 - want to see what those crazy kids have come up with this time. I click on all sorts of things in my iPhones’s “Safari” browser that I wouldn’t click on otherwise - including -ads - because I want to see how they display, especially if I’m looking at something that was obviously designed for phone browsers.
As for TV-level recall. We’ll see how that pans out when mobile banners are so common that users stop noticing them, or start blocking them. Mobile bandwidth is precious, and ads can slow page load. And when the iPhone API is unlocked, some of the countless free applications available from hackers around the world are bound to be ad blockers.
photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr.
