A digital evangelist friend of mine, just alerted me to an article that popped into his inbox this morning and knew I would appreciate it: The Most Sarcastic Column You Will Ever Read. Hey, it’s pure classic. One of the best articles online I have read recently and I sheer loved it… and agreed with it!

How about this for an opening paragraph:

“I want to take a moment to write about a topic that gets little to no coverage anymore… I want to write about non-rich media. I want to write a column this week that tells you all how great a campaign can be when you run old-fashioned, three-frame GIF ads and you measure them based on click-through…”

Not one to mince my words, of course I had to respond.

Eyeblaster’s Campaign Monitor has been selected as one of the 10 Best Application UIs of 2008!  The contest was held by the ‘Nielsen Norman Group’ the world’s leading user experience consultancy group.  In an analogy to the film industry –  if the Campaign Monitor was a movie, then this is like winning the Oscars!

The Nielsen group explained why Eyeblaster’s Campaign Monitor was chosen:  “Showing the fourth dimension-time in computer applications is not always easy.  Eyeblaster stays with a relatively traditional Gantt view of the campaigns they track, but through the clever application of status information they reduce the need to drill down into other views of the information.  Because of the clear visual coding and good dashboard view, this is the kind of application where a regular user could easily start to see beyond the UI and visualize their campaigns directly. Timely and accurate customer communication is important in any industry, but the cost of underperforming campaigns makes quick data access essential in this market. Providing customers with an immediate overview of their investment and return allows these customers to quickly react to a changing market.”

The Campaign Monitor team’s design motto of “keep it simple” was elaborated somewhat in a quote by jazz composer Charles Mingus: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

Amihay Rotter
User Experience Design Manager

In a key milestone for the digital industry, Ofcom UK Communications Market Review 2008, has just revealed that online advertising spend has finally outpaced advertising on mainstream TV. A whopping growth of 40 percent sees £2.8 billion in spend online against £2.4 billion of the combined revenues of ITV1, Channel 4, S4C and Five as well as six times the size of spend on radio and as much revenue as all outdoor and magazine advertising combined. However, online is still in second place behind press advertising, which still commands a hefty £4.7 billion of the £14.9 billion total UK ad spend.

“The success of the internet remains a particularly UK-focused phenomenon; accounting for a higher proportion (18.9%) of total 2007 advertising spend than in the USA, France, Germany or Italy for example. Paid-for search makes up the majority of UK internet advertising revenue, accounting for £1.6bn of the total £2.8bn,” says Ofcom, with online display advertising revenues coming in at £600 million, growing by 29 percent.

This is more pertinent in the fact that the growth of advertising is outstripping inflation for the first time in the UK since 2005.

In a stark contrast, TV advertising has remained flat, though in the case of the three commercial public service broadcasters, has fallen 16 percent, ITV1 being the hit the hardest. Losses were offset in gains in their digital-only channels (10% in 2007 up from 3% in 2004). Yet with 23% of homes now owning a digital video recorder (DVR), it makes no surprise that 88% of those regularly fast-forward through commercial breaks when watching recorded programmes. This follows a McKinsey study who claim that ‘traditional TV advertising is set to be a third as effective in 2010 when compared to 1990′.

With confidence riding high in digital advertising right now, it can only be a great help in shifting the dark cloud of the doom-and-gloom talks of recession and credit-crunch, which is not only good news for advertisers, but timely as we move towards the seasonal Q4 rush of the Christmas holiday spend.

HP TouchSmart

Media: Zenith Optimedia, US
Creative: Goodby Silverstein, US
Format: Expandable banner
Vertical: Electronics

View demo

Goodby Silverstein and Zenith recently created a fascinating campaign for HP TouchSmart. Tavish, the campaign’s Art Director, shared with Eyeblaster his enthusiasm for pushing the envelope with the campaign.

“For the HP TouchSmart PC campaign we wanted to do something a little different with the space. The product is so unique we could let it speak for itself as much as possible, so we incorporated a lot of content normally reserved for a landing page, like the TV spot and the specs.

Visually we needed to generate excitement, and with a lot of cutting-edge Flash sites being created with Papervision code we thought we’d try our hand at creating something that quite literally pops out from the page. The 3D effect of the banner is such that every time I see it on a page, I can’t resist spending some time playing with it myself. It was challenging to create and distribute something so advanced, but we worked with the best, and the end result is fantastic.”
Tavish, Art Director, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, US

Tavish is an internationally recognized artist and art director. He currently splits his time between San Francisco and Montreal, but grew up in the snow filled parking lots of central Canada before heading South. His cultural background includes both Scotland and Taiwan, an unusual combination that may explain the mix of European and Asian influences in his style.

For inspiration from more of Tavish’s work, visit his blog.

This campaign was recently highlighted in Eyeblaster’s Newsletter: The Blast.  To subscribe to the monthly newsletter, click here.

Eyeblaster Digital Experience Strategist Dean Donaldson recently shared his insight into effectively measuring user paths to conversion in this article published in iMedia Connection:

So Google for the second quarter running is unable to hit predicted analyst targets, which is something I find saddening on one hand, but positive on another. Sad because I think it heralds an end of an era of how online advertising has come to be justified as effective, but positive in that it also signals a new phase of development for what lies ahead.

Seeing the web as a merely direct response medium as opposed to its true branding potential (especially when you evaluate the shift towards entertainment content over mere information) is something I feel must be addressed to ensure longevity for the industry. Online branding is still being justified by a response based metric, i.e., the ‘click’ for the most part. We would not measure TV by the number of people making phone-calls unless the creative said specifically ‘phone this number now’. It is therefore creative-dependent, and related to the required call-to-action. I would argue the same is also true of online video. New metrics need to be identified — and by that I am talking about user time spent with a brand — as opposed to anything relating to a response from clicks or interactions.

For the full article, click here.