Inquirer.net has posted an article entitled “Video creates better brand impact for Web ads”. What is interesting is that there in the heart of Asia, the penny seems to be dropping quicker than elsewhere that true brand impact cannot be measured soley by a response-based metric such as the “click”. When you consider this is a publisher’s take on an industry problem, their commercial model is often justified in delivering results for clients – results that for the last decade have been based around a single point of justification – the Click Through Rate (CTR).

They are not alone, many publishers who are adept at attracting users to their content are adopting ways of delivering brand impact in situ as opposed to seeing all adverts a traffic driving vehicle elsewhere. The recent flurry of MSN homepage skins seek to do just that, and again Asia has led the charge, and has caused their western counterparts to look for the wisdom contained therein.

It is great to see Rich Media maturing and finally being seen as immersive and not just intrusive for users to deliver true brand potential for advertisers.

A new dawn for digital advertising really is rising in the East…

David Pugh-Jones | Creative Strategist EMEA
Microsoft Advertising  

David Pugh Jones is known for helping redefine Microsoft’s ability to push brand experiences in situ, such as MSN Skins.   

When asked for thoughts on clever digital campaigns that really got his juices flowing beyond banners and buttons, David comments on an ongoing assault of the digital senses in relation to a chocolate campaign and one recent movie release…
Your perfect working day:   I am an early bird and I do my best work in the morning.  Not just because the office is quiet.  I do my best thinking before the other teams pour in.   The perfect day would be if an agency came with a nice healthy client and said ‘we want to push the creative boundaries on-line… we want to do something that is going to show us an innovator.

What needs to be changed/improved in order to achieve ultimate engagement with users?  For on-line advertising improve several things need to happen.  First, to build up engagement with users, we need to build two-way interaction with the consumer – by creating questions and getting users to respond to products and information.  If users become part of that brand and if they enjoy getting more information, they will start sharing it with their friends – that is why social marketing is so amazing.  On YouTube and MSN Video – you see so much content being shared – if it is quirky, clever, informative, We can no longer run advertising that doesn’t give anything back to the user.  The fundamental key is the brand experience.  Digital is where it’s at.  This is the environment where consumers are starting to tell us what they want.

Favorite Brand Experience:  One was a campaign that we worked on closely with Eyeblaster called Mars Planets.  It was a great campaign for a number of reasons - primarily because it wasn’t us just responding to a brief.  We were involved as early as possible in all aspects of the campaign -  TV advertising, outdoor – they came to us right away.  We came up with the idea of ‘consumers responding to Mars.’  In a one day home page takeover of the MSN-UK Home Page, 35,000 people signed up to enter the competition to win the chocolate.  The priority was getting people to see the brand – it wasn’t about the click rate – I don’t even know what it was.  The idea was engaging users to share with the brand.  The great thing about it was that it wasn’t one mass TV spend and then online was an afterthought; online was paramount to it working.

Interview with Maurizio Mazzanti, creative director and co-owner of E3

My muse best comes when: My muse comes either when we are brainstorming (preferably in the late afternoon when the phones ring less) or when I am not stressed about the brief. Usually the latter happens when I am really relaxed, so quite often I write notes on my smartphone before going to sleep or on Sunday afternoon at home.

But brainstorming is an important and useful work tool thanks to the “stream of consciousness” that comes from the group: just a suggestion from a copywriter, an art director or a project manager could give the inspiration for another idea or for a better idea.

When the ideas come is important, but imho the key point is where ideas come from! And ideas comes from contamination, from other a movie or a song but mostly from ‘that funny game we played when we were kids.’ People want to interact and anything that is connected with gaming, interaction, playing, helps to achive a good idea on the net.

Your idea about the perfect working day: Wake up before the clock alarm starts to ring, view good results of our works, either a high click through rate from advertising campaigns or user interaction with sites, receive positive feedback from customers about ongoing projects and sometimes receive a brief for a mass market product: I like to work on something that I can touch, see on supermarket shelf or at a retail store, and talk about with people.The perfect working day should finish with nothing remaining to be done the day after!

Your favorite interactive campaign:  Recently, we developed two great campaigns through Eyeblaster, one was a full home page customization on MSN for Fanta, which was impressive to see.  But my favorite interactive campaign, again on the MSN home page, was for Pringles.  In order to promote the Pringles’ soccer Dream Team we developed a penalty game playable from a box, where the user could set the power of the kick and the ball moved through an overlayer and lands in the leaderboard, where the goalkeeper was.

As our own Dean Donaldson recently wrote, “Word-of-mouth is both powerful and most often, free…. 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.”

Following is an excerpt from an article, which originally appeared in The ClickZ Network, Jun 30, 2008 by Fred Aun,  describing the Nike widget campaign, one of the most innovative widget ads we’ve seen thus far.

“Mike Cookson, Nike’s content and media director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is quick to acknowledge his company doesn’t exactly have a tough time when it comes to marketing. A brand like Nike, he concedes, is already a household name.

“At Nike, we are fortunate,” he said. “We are in a high interest category and we have a lot of heritage, over the last 25 years, telling great stories in fantastic ways. When it comes to our access to commercial channels, we’re lucky as well.”

Nevertheless, Cookson said a recently launched, video widget-based campaign for Nike football [as in soccer] is a sign that the company isn’t resting on its traditional ad laurels.

“Youth audiences consume and edit media in ways that a lot of people who have been in the business a long time have a hard time relating to,” said Cookson. “These young people grew up in a world where the Internet and mobile phones have always been there. The way the young consumer operates is very different to previous generations.”

The campaign, created by AKQA, distributed by Mindshare and using widget technology from Eyeblaster, is supposedly the largest global video widget campaign ever attempted….

Click here to read the full article.

Danny Jiang, Partner, Development at JVST

My muse best comes when:  Everyone in the office is gone for the day.  It’s so much easier to concentrate on something when you have a quiet environment.

The secret to creating effective engagement online:  Good visual presentation is the most important element for creating engagement online.  As more and more advertisers are moving into online advertising, people grow accustomed to seeing banner ads everyday and they stop paying attention to them.  Your ads need to stand out from the crowd.  The more refreshing your ad looks, the easier it will be to catch visitors’ attention.  Call-to-action messaging is also crucial to driving traffic.  A strong call to action can improve click-through rate of a standard Flash banner, but a subtle call to action could harm the performance of any ad – even a Rich Media banner.

Future of Interactive Advertising:  Flash has always been the standard platform for online advertising, due to its compact file size and cross-platform compatibility. With the arrival of ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9, developers are able to really push the envelope in Flash development.   Open source projects such as Papervision3D and FFilmation has made it possible for the community to create much more complex 3D animation and 3D games in Flash, without relying on videos or series of PNGs. Also, with all the cool new features in ActionScript 3.0 and MXML, it opens the door to all kinds of possibilities from dynamically drawing complex bitmap images at runtime, to tracking user motion with webcam. I think we’ll see some dramatic evolution in the next several years, and 2008 will be a very exciting year for the industry.

My favorite brand experience:  I did a Rich Media launch banner campaign for “Kane & Lynch: Dead Men”, and that’s my favorite one so far.  It was a very successful marketing campaign.