Recently in Online media planning Category
Yahoo's announcement comes as part of its response to the request from the House of Representatives committee early last week for information from thirty major internet companies about their ad targeting plans.Looks like this is becoming a hot issue on the other side of the Atlantic - don't expect any political developments in the UK though, as parliament is well into its long summer holiday right now. I wonder if any prominent UK brands will start offering a similar opt-out to targeted advertising.
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This is a really encouraging development. Without services like this, consumers trying to protect their personal privacy are often forced to delete all their cookies - which will also remove saved settings on many websites, like login information.
Rooting around, it turns out that this service is being run on behalf of Google by the Network Advertising Initiative, which offers consumers a route to opt out of a whole host of advertising networks including Advertising.com, Yahoo and Atlas.
Of the 17 networks listed, I have active cookies from 9 (not that I am particularly obsessed with deleting cookies - working for a media agency, that would be a tad hypocritical of me!).
The opt out page for the Network Advertising Initiative sits at http://networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.
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The committee is particularly interested in 'deep packet inspection'. Deep packet inspection is a technique that basically looks at the content of data - like a request for a web page - as it whizzes around the internet, reads the data and in this case looks for opportunities to serve up relevant advertising. It's exactly the same technique that Phorm in the UK is planning to use.
In the US, the concern is whether consumers have been made aware that deep packet inspection is in operation. At least one of the committee members feels that consumers should give their permission prior to these techniques being deployed - which frankly would be one hell of a sell to consumers.
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Anita Elberse looked at data for online purchases of music and video rentals and then compared the data with offline purchase data. In spite of the vast back catalogue of options available online, it seems that online consumers are pretty much like their offline equivalent. Purchases hugely favour a few 'hit' titles - and if anything people online are more likely to focus their spending on popular choices than offline shoppers.
It seems that what we really value is not choice, but the social aspects of consuming the same media as everyone else.
Can't say I'm sorry to see the back of this particular theory - it seemed to me that the same two businesses were always trotted out in support of it (eBay and Amazon) which didn't seem to me to be a conclusive sample.
On the other hand, if the Long Tail is a lie, the online world is a somewhat bleaker place where almost all the micro-publishers, bloggers, video artists and musicians are doomed to a life of obscurity - including me!!!
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To mark the day, Firefox is aiming to go into the Guinness Book of Records for the most software downloads in a day. In fact, since the record doesn't currently exist, they shouldn't have too much problem in getting into the record books.
A poll by the Marketing Society of leading UK marketers came out today, looking at attitudes to social media. It's clear that most marketers in the survey have a pretty cautious, wait-and-see attitude to social media. But it's also clear that most marketers associate social media mostly with blogging, either at an individual level or around corporate blogs aimed at journalists.
As Firefox shows, social media is much much more than that. In fact social media is one powerful ingredient in a larger picture - social, or community marketing.
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As I have previously blogged, that could threaten the surprisingly high proportion of branded search traffic through search engines which represents repeat visits to sites - almost 37% of all search traffic according to research last year from Atlas.
But Atlas also reports that 22% of traffic via search engines is first-time visits to sites from branded searches - people searching for 'dell' or 'dell.com'. I think it would be quite simple to offer a version of Firefox with a database of brands and URLs pre-populated into its SQL Lite database.
That way, a search for 'tesco insurance' would create a dropdown like this...
I populated the database in this instance by browsing through to the relevant sites.
I'd say that this is easier for the user than bothering to do a search for the brand - and is clearly better for the brands who would no longer need to pay a handful of pence to Google for each click on a trademarked search term.
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Data, data, data. Everyone in digital marketing loves data. All those beautiful ones and zeros, streaming in realtime from websites, banner campaigns, email and all the rest.
Sadly some of that data isn't quite as solid as we might hope.
"Take something as simple as a visitor to your website. No two analytics companies have precisely the same definitions for a visitor, or a unique visitor, or a repeat visitor. So it is pretty much impossible to run two different sets of analysis on your website, and to get the figures to agree.
Avinash Kaushik, Google's analytics evangelist, writes about customer pathway analysis: "What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing." He is equally scathing about one of the most quoted online metrics, the website conversion rate.
When it comes to allocating sales to online activity, the standard rules for calculating cost per acquisition are just plain silly. To use a fight analogy, the last punch wins - which means that the last recorded click on a banner or text link gets all the credit for the sale. In truth, the 'fight' was won by a long and random combination of editorial, online advertising, Web searches and any amount of offline activity.
I suggest that once in a while the digital industry ignores its mountains of precious data, and instead bases its decisions on nothing more scientific than hunches and instincts.
We might just start thinking that eye-catching display campaigns on leading portals have more brand value than text links on dozens of affiliate sites. We might believe that search marketing is about as good for building brands as a small classified ad or that online advertising which is fun, involving and relevant is also more likely to build positive brand attributes.
As an experiment, ask your agency or web team to report on digital activity without touching Excel or Powerpoint. Ask them to tell you a story about how your customers felt before your campaign, how they were moved by it, and how it made them feel afterwards.
You just might discover more insight in that story than in the next million cells of Excel.
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Phew!
This is my chosen topic for a talk at Internet World this afternoon - what was I thinking!
Anyway, I'm going to turn my talk into a blog entry just to get my thoughts in order... here goes.
The starting point for this came from a piece of academic research I stumbled upon - it's a paper on 'Narrative Processing: Building Consumer Connections to Brands' by Jennifer Escalas at the University of Arizona.
To quote from the abstract:
"Narrative processing creates or enhances self-brand connections (SBC) because people generally interpret the meaning of their experiences by fitting them into a story. Similarly, in response to an ad that tells a story, narrative processing may create a link between a brand and the self when consumers attempt to map incoming narrative information onto stories in memory. Our approach rests on the notion that a brand becomes more meaningful the more closely it is linked to the self. We conceptualize this linkage at an aggregate level in terms of SBCs, that is, the extent to which consumers have incorporated the brand into their self-concepts. The results of an experiment show that narrative processing in response to a narratively structured ad is positively related to SBCs, which in turn have a positive relation with brand attitudes and behavioral intentions."
This feels pretty fair to me. When we engage with a story, we subconsciously put ourselves into the story: if the story involves a brand, we imagine ourselves engaging with the brand.
However - and here comes a pretty broad brush statement - whilst above the line advertising intuitively understands this, I wonder whether digital agencies really focus enough on narrative structures.
Here's a classic commercial for Hamlet cigars which I still find funny no matter how many times I've seen it. And yet it isn't just humour for humour's sake - the payoff is that Hamlet makes the frustrations of everyday life somehow a little more bearable.
Set against this, an awful lot of digital advertising is really very utilitarian.
This banner for airport parking is actually not exceptionally bad - it's just representative of the kind of droning offer-based creative that we see online all the time.
OK, that isn't really a fair fight! Of course there are some great examples of narratives appearing online. For instance, the About Us page on the Innocent site tells the familiar story of how Innocent was founded:
"In the summer of 1998 when we had developed our first smoothie recipes but were still nervous about giving up our proper jobs, we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO' and asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned."
Great stuff!
Stories are particularly important online because we know that people have a myriad of ways to pass on good content to their friends: through blogs, email, social networking sites, user reviews, forums and chat.
So the viral impact of the web is one key factor. Another is the amazing rise in broadband access speeds, which have on average trebled in the UK over the past two years.
That makes video content an increasingly important part of the mix. But that doesn't mean that the web will become a channel for 30 second commercials. In fact there are some fascinating new formats developing that could never have evolved in the more rigid environment of TV.
Take for example, the bizarre case of 'Cheddarvision' - a 24 hour live webcam pointed at, you've guessed it, a cheese. Cheddarvision, which attracted 1.7 million viewers, has now helpfully compressed 9 months of video into a 60 second film on YouTube.
Even the dullest of marketing devices, the product demonstration, can work spectacularly well online, as the brilliant series of videos for Blendtec proves.
At time of writing, this particular film has had 2.7 million views on YouTube.
That's great, but I'm a bit worried by the fact that both these examples are coming from clients rather than agencies. Of course, everyone can have a good idea, but the trouble is that when agencies get involved in this space, the results sometimes backfire spectacularly.
The Cillit Bang incident, where a PR agency writing as the brand spokesman Barry Scott added a comment to a blog written by Tom Coates is still rippling around the Internet. This all happened two and a half years ago, and the Guardian wrote a story on it at the time: "Cleaner caught playing dirty on the net". And all these months later, the Guardian story is still ranking on the first page of Google results for searches on the Cillit Bang brand - and the Wikipedia entry for Cillit Bang retells the story.
I'm worried that many digital agencies are stuck into a direct response, results driven mentality and simply aren't thinking about creating strong narratives that will build brands. I saw a presentation from a major online retailer where they described the steps in the life-stage strategy they followed as:
1) Relationship starts
2) Honeymoon period
3) Ongoing relationship
4) Frustration
5) Disillusionment
6) Abandonment
Of course, this describes a classic story arc, which makes me wonder whether email couldn't be used within part of a narrative structure. Years ago, this was exactly the pretext of the interactive drama Online Caroline, where emails from the lead character knitted together short video episodes.
Online Caroline - which was created by XPT and bought by Freeserve - is the direct precursor of the fascinating soap operas being developed by Bebo.
These kicked off with Kate Modern - which was created by the team behind the YouTube hit lonelygirl15.
Gap Year is currently in development, and will be a fantastically ambitious project - especially since the characters are real people who will be filming themselves as they play within a loosely plotted narrative as they travel around the world.
And my current favourite is Sofia's Diary (not that I'm especially the target audience!) With its snappy 3 minute webisode format and integrated pre-roll advertising, I think that Bebo has really stumbled upon a format that will work incredibly well online. It's well worth checking out an episode or two.
So where is this all going. I think that stories and brands are natural bed-fellows and have been for a long time. I think that digital can be an incredibly exciting environment to deliver stories and see their impact really multiply. And sadly, I don't see agencies making a lot of the running here, as opposed to clients and media owners.
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Will Cooper at NMA has a story about a new working group at Google looking to develop a more complete picture of how the entire online journey impacts on sales.
Clearly this is a hot area right now - I was at a buy.at event last week, and even people within affiliate marketing are looking for alternative metrics to CPA.
Getting a more accurate picture of how everything works together is very much in Google's interests as it gives them a powerful argument to cross-sell customers into their content network.
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Just as I was starting to despair of how cluttered my Facebook page was getting, I've been invited to unclutter my profile page. So I've moved 7 applications to my 'extended profile', leaving a mere 14 content boxes to be getting on with.
Will I ever look at my extended profile? Shouldn't think so. I wonder how many of the thousands of Facebook apps being coded up right now will end up languising in this digital purgatory?
This is my issue with a lot of this frantically trendy activity around apps and widgets: there is only so much screen estate available. You'll need to put something really very fab together to get a prominent position on someone's Facebook profile - otherwise you'll be sitting in the 'extended profile' with a bunch of zombies and pirates!
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