Dean Dawe, Designer, Feref

Your idea about the perfect working day:    Any perfect day would begin with a solid injection of coffee and croissants. Anything after that is a bonus. I most enjoy working on fairly open briefs where then the client has a clear aim but is open to create routes to achieve their goals. It’s being given the creative freedom on briefs that we all get the most satisfaction from and I believe the clients get a better end product.

Your muse best comes when:  I wake up, take a little stretch, take a deep breath of that London air and make my way to the Monday London underground Crush ! Mmm Re-freshing! Nothing says creative quite like the Central Line!   Looking at other creative showcases when you see the best of the best.  That is the most interesting – how they get off the starting block.

Favorite Brand Experience:  One of my favorite campaigns to date would be the Disturbia campaign.  Disturbia is about a bored teenager – stuck at home after being grounded – who starts spying on his neighbor and becomes convinced that he’s a serial killer. I wanted the creative to reflect these themes of horror and voyeurism, and came up with the idea of the blind you have to raise in order to see what’s happening. When you do this, you witness someone being murdered in a suburban house across the street before being directed to the movie website, further info and a competition. It’s a great banner because not only is it interactive and suspenseful, it also puts you right into the environment of the movie and plays to exactly the same voyeuristic impulses that motivate the main character in the film. The fit between the creative idea, the theme of the movie and the mindset of the audience is seamless.  We had a lot of positive feedback.  The client actually loved it – it was also great for the guys in the studio – and we were all thrilled with the outcome.

Let’s face it, rather than merely intruding into a conversation uninvited, being able to join in with the dialogue and stimulating further discussion has got to be the essence of embracing social media, especially from an advertising perspective

Advertisers are desperate to converse within social media, but despite the appeal, sticking ads against personal pages is not going to cut it, we need to grass roots infiltrate and then measure the effect.

Web 2.0 is all about conversation – two-way – and from a brand’s perspective this can be a daunting prospect when they are not used to such succinct feedback. What started with Amazon’s customer’s reviews has given rise to questions about merely placing ads on social networking sites. Intrusion online in this environment can be the equivalent to ear-wigging in a restaurant, with anticipated equally unfavorable results.

But people do love to talk. If people feel passionate about something, they will not only comment but become advocates – the essence of viral marketing. And viral is not merely the power of conversation between friends, but also the greatest form of advertising – namely, word-of-mouth.

Being able to track the viral effect is something long been hoped for. Despite the chain emails leading us to believe otherwise, for the most part, viral is unqualified and blind.

Word-of-mouth is both powerful and most often, free. Beyond blind network buys to gain supposed cost-effective reach, complementing paid for advertising by free media and a more qualified reach is at the heart of Eyeblaster’s new Widget Ads. From within an online advert people can now become advocates who ‘wear the brands tee-shirt’ and in turn convincing their friends to join suit.

The Eyeblaster platform is becoming an open power house to complementary technology vendors. With one in every two rich media adverts now carrying video, linking adverts with Gigya’s widget tool behind the scenes is an incredible way of capitalizing on a simple to use distribution platform to free media channels.

The concept is upon viewing an advert a user has the option to post the viral content, such as the humorous or raunchy video, to Facebook or MySpace or any other popular social networking site they are a part of by simply selecting their destination of choice from within the ad itself. This in turn allows them to not only display it on their own page, but to forward it to their friends, who in turn display the content on their own social pages too.

Try it for yourself here.

But the real beauty is that all of this viral effect is no longer blind, but displaying the data gleaned from opportunity direct within Eyeblaster’s reports right alongside the paid for advertising, giving advertisers and agencies alike insights into the world of word-of-mouth marketing. This is an industry first. With impressions more powerful than the click, being able to demonstrate conclusively the viral effect will completely revolutionise the way we collect and interpret user behaviour towards advertisers, ultimately proving the case for extending advertiser reach from paid through earned channels in a single consolidated report for the agency.

This brings me onto measurement. Brand effectiveness should not be measured by a response metric (i.e. click) and ROI should be seen more in terms of qualified reach as opposed to conversions (i.e. purchase) – and in social networks, remember this is potential free media space. Conversion can be seen here as switching someone on to identify with the brand by placing their stamp in their personal space. Where this could lead to on subsequently is where the fun begins, especially when we see the placed viral video as the first part of a sequenced behavioral message, which in turn will help funnel a user towards an actual conversion when the user next encounters a brand’s adverts – anywhere online.

Make no mistake; this is a key turning point for Web 2.0. Widget Ads are the opt-in advertising model of social media that will ethically readdress the balance of targeted advertising alongside social networks.

Perhaps Widget Ads will become the equivalent of organic search to complement paid for listings?

After all, “there’s oil in them thar hills…”

Dean Donaldson, Digital Experience Strategist, Eyeblaster

Pete Hotchkiss, Partner, Substance

(Periodically, we will post interviews with prominent creative and media executives who are instrumental in bringing breakthrough advertising ideas to the Web.)

My perfect working day: “I’m actually an early riser – I like to get into the office early to get on top of emails.  We work in the States as well as London, so things come in during the night – and it helps to get the emails out of the way.  That way, I can prepare the schedules for the creative guys, put briefing materials together where necessary and get up to speed on what is happening in the market.

I catch up on my Google reader and all of my blogs – industry focused, iFilm, and those related to the wider sphere of digital creativity.”

My muse best comes when… 

“Sometimes an idea can come in the middle of a brainstorming session or on the tube when my nose is packed into someone’s armpit…  You can’t force it…  The most important thing is to be in a creative environment.  No magic formula.”

My favorite brand experience:

“My favorite campaign recently has got to be Jumper – the movie.  There were some really great materials created for MSN by an Australian agency which used a lot of video compositing.  We ran sync ads with specifically-shot green screen footage – very high impact.  We had characters jumping from format to format – breaking up the page into different units and then dancing around and jumping up to the Leaderboard, creating synchronization and synergy.  We tried to achieve high impact.  The goal wasn’t necessarily high click-through – it was about engagement and exposure and the title that we were trying to push. 

The users loved it.  Interaction rate across the campaign was 85-88% – we saw the time they were exposed to those expandable units – and how many watched through to the end.  That is as valuable to us as a click-through.   The campaign was unique because we had specific chrome-key footage.  There were a couple hours of footage, so we were able to use it and repackage it, compress it down into a set of assets that could be delivered within a reasonable size.  We could deliver something that was really engaging. 

Big campaign, big spend.  Lots of media everywhere.    It was the nature of the content and the impact that we could deliver.  It drove home the message and underpinned the brand.  If you try to use a technique or tool that isn’t related to the message, you’re just diluting your tool.  So we waited to use these types of formats until we had the right content for the tools.”

From garage start-up to global brand, the now monolith of Internet dominance is no stranger to scrutiny, and none more so then since acquiring leading ad serving company Doubleclick last year for $3.1Bn. The tactical move was to seek to control the lion’s share of online display as well as search advertising in order to build a single platform for inventory management. However, the backlash of media attention over antitrust concerns was rife, especially as privacy groups pushed the issue of data retention and ownership to reach the heights of the European Commission.

Now just over a year later, in what will be seen once more as incredible turn about face strategy, Google has decided to open up their Content Network to accept online display advertising served by third-party ad servers; companies who could very much be competitors in this space to DoubleClick.

Expert data analysis is a key aspect for most advertisers and their respective agencies, affording unique insights into building more effective and relevant advertising messages to their audiences. This makes media agencies irreplaceable in the advertising making process. Google’s previous policy had sparked concerns over how they viewed the future for agencies. Agencies feared that existing models were in jeopardy, with their role as media planners and buyers being potentially downplayed in favour of ease of entry and to advanced optimisation afforded by the merger. This latest move seeks to address this head-on.

The industry has remained decidedly inventory-agnostic from an agency perspective, with independence in ad serving often a key aspect for choosing a potential vendor, brought about partially by having a comparison for delivery outside of a publisher’s control. The additional outlay for ad serving is outweighed by potential overall media costs saved – it is an external checkpoint for actual delivered inventory. That is to say nothing of the additional benefits competitive vendors bring to this space from service to innovation. All this has been a hard position for Google to find themselves in, as it was their very openness that helped them build up their search dominance in the first place.

In truth, the move by Google to open up its network is not just to address agencies concerns, but fuelled in part by a desire to capitalise on revenue streams that are currently blocked. Many advertisers would have overlooked the benefits of reach afforded by Google’s Content Network due to existing preferential relationships with ad serving companies other than DoubleClick, especially with providers who service the more interactive formats that rich media offers. A potential Microsoft-Yahoo relationship – both of whom are open to external ad serving suppliers – will also have prompted a rethink in strategy within the Google camp.

Just as Google could foresee the fall outs over data retention and quickly moved to limit the length of time it would store data, so once again we see an incredibly tactical decision to compete against Microsoft’s competition in the advertising space by too opening up their network. With Eyeblaster, the largest global supplier of rich media online now approved by Google, we can expect to see more interactive ads driving actual conversions within banners running across their network, which will continue to help monetise the long tail. The result is good for the entire industry.

Google has always been very effective at reducing the barriers to entry in online advertising and simplifying the buying process. This latest move today ensures such continued openness will no doubt be seen as a welcome addition to the media mix as well as an incredible confidence boost by most agencies that no longer need to fear for their lives.