These last few days I have been presenting some new global data findings to various members of the industry press in New York; namely do people “see” and “like” ads online – and is there a way of measuring this in better ways then the archaic concept of ‘click thru’ in relation to display advertising.

I mentioned that I think offline there is a key distinction between “advertising” and “design” agencies – the former focusing on strategy over function. Digital often gets a rough ride in my opinion with agency folk supposed to know everything from e-commerce to brand building. FAIL! A good designer does not equal a good art director or copywriter – these are wildly different skill sets. I for one therefore am championing the call to see Madison Avenue marketing moguls fully embrace digital media and bring a much needed maturity and wisdom on how to better develop consumer relationships in the 21st Century, alongside all our technical know-how. I really do believe over the next few years we are going to see more and more the growing distinction between digital design agencies and digital ad agencies, and in truth you already can with a lot more strategic concepts beginning to be discussed.

Brian Morrissey from Ad Week just picked this up on his own blog “Are designers to blame for bad Web ads?”

So here’s my thinking based on ad strategy over creative execution; rather than utilise budgets for microsites, we spend time, energy and budgets building better ads. A concept I have could name several global advertisers already shifting towards. The bottom line is all advertising exists where users are and brings the message to them – TV to sofa, etc. Most advertising actually enhances content – people buy magazines to discover cars/clothes, etc shown off in glossy double-spread ads. Ads in most media are both physically large and plentiful, yet all are enhancing stories that create desire. None of them expect you to go elsewhere…

Online has perpetuated the misconceived notion that you need to “change the channel” to see the ad, i.e. go to a microsite, and we measure this by CTR. Can you imagine doing that on TV? “Click here to watch the TV ad”… good luck!

Now that CTR is failing, to those who suggest display advertising will die to widgets is suggesting all TV, Print, Outdoor is ineffective and will die also. Hogwash. Display advertising hasn’t even evolved into what it could or should yet… I wrote about this before following a high profile argument on whether advertising online would fail?

I am convinced, it’s not the format or channel that’s failing, it’s the metric that is floored. Clicks work great for search, appalling for display. Interaction Rate tries to compare a video ad with a single interaction point, to a game ad with tens of interaction points – you cannot. Period. It’s creative dependent, so all benchmarks for Interaction Rate are floored.In fact I just wish Interaction rate would be erased from any discussions surrounding benchmarks. That is why there is huge need to move towards measuring online display ads the same way as we measure web visits – in terms of numbers of arrivals, and amount of time they spend there. Hence “Dwell Time”.

It’s a fallacy in people’s thinking that digital is purely constrained to websites; that “online” means web-browser… especially when I spend half my life checking online from my iPhone or seeing more and more digital outdoor panels. Similarly it’s a fallacy to think that the golden age of advertising is over and the maturity of those who tread the path for many years before and understand how to build a brand no longer matters; worse, they are being bad mouthed by code-junkies. Look, consumers are media-neutral, clients are media-neutral – and TV, Print, Outdoor works and will ALWAYS work – it’s just that they will evolve as they embrace an element of audio-visual interactivity following receiving an internet connection. Dwell Time in turn offers a potential way to port across media channels as they become interactive, thereby offering advertisers a genuine way to measure display advertising and answer “yes the consumer SAW your ad” in a way TV or Print currently cannot.

So my argument is that if we created better ads where people are, better engaging stories – utilizing what we have learned offline and entwined it with the potential of online – people would not be annoyed so much, but rather enjoy ads. We discussed the other night at dinner how many times TV ads are searched on YouTube and then posted on Facebook, for example. But we DO need to justify online advertising, as we have created a rod for our own back. We need a metric. We need some way of convincing clients, as that is what they have come to expect from online; it’s measurable. This is what we have been doing for the last couple of years in trying to develop “Dwell Time” on the back of some discussions with agency folk a couple of years back – a simple catch-all metric that works across all display formats and gives us something positive to say against declining clicks. Dwell Time measures the number of people who touch an ad (rate) and for how long in seconds (duration) discounting all those who leave the ad before one second. It also only tracks user behavior, so as soon as you mouse out, counter is stopped and restarted if you mouse back in – all per impression/exposure.

Having monitored well over a billion impressions globally over last few months, and spliced data from all formats, to time of day, to publisher environments, and by industry verticals, to global regions – comparing to click-thru and monitoring effect of video in relation to creative impact – I have been utterly blown away by what I have learned as I have poured over the data. A lot of misconceptions I had thought have been corrected especially in regards to the most effective formats.

When we look at all data, we find some startling truths. Nearly 10% of all ads are “touched” and those that are, are actively played with for about 1 minute – slightly less for ads without video. Compared to your 0.5% CTR is saying that for every 5 people who click on an ad, 100 will play for one whole minute! That means consumers are 20x more likely to explore a brand next to content, than click thru to advertiser’s site. Not only that, but they will spend twice the length of average 30 sec TV ad, with the potential to actively explore the product and strike deeper emotional connections that result in greater brand recall. It also means that with a shift to pre-roll 15 second ad formats, in Banner video is doing the exact opposite – it’s driving more interactions and creating longer periods of time to hold their attention as they are done on user request, not forced upon. Afterall, if user is not interested, they leave the ad and hence ‘zero’ Dwell Time, not a 60 second Dwell Time.

That alone is a HUGE incentive for advertisers who want to engage with consumers. It also suggests that people do not dislike advertising online at all, any more then they dislike ads in print – in fact the opposite – and should be the confidence we all need to discuss ways of better engaging with consumers, and demanding bigger creative budgets from clients.

That is not all; desktop ads outperform all other ad formats with the exception of floating ads. Yes that is right – floating ads both attract consumers to interact and hold their attention – not for as long as other formats, but enough to prove to me that people are prepared to accept, interact and respond to the format – 3x more than ANY other format. How many times have I stood up and said that high CTR on floating ads was driven by people trying to close the ads? How wrong I have been…

I am going to hold other findings till we publish the research in a few weeks time in the next Eyeblaster Analytics Bulletin.

Or of course you can still build microsites and just hope people “change the channel” and try and justify to clients the dwindling CTR and dwindling budgets with demands for greater ROI, whilst the rest of us realize post-impression is more powerful then click-thru, that huge amounts of search is driven by display ads, that offline sales are drive by online display, and people online both like ads and play with them – for a whole minute – and they would do so a LOT more if we could just build bigger, better ads that actually enhance the consumer experience.

Dean Donaldson | Digital Experience Strategist

 Marc-Antoine Vallée ( Mark Val ) is currently the Interactive Developer at Marketel.

Your idea about the perfect working day:
Good planning is the key to any good working day. From the briefs to the wire frames, Agile, UML, backlogs, bug tracking or others will make the constraints and development process available to push the creativity in the timeline making at the same time a more successful project.
 
Your muse best comes when:�
When I am using a new coding language. After 10 years of interactive programming the boundaries are always expanding. From the iPhone, C#, Unity and the new Flash 10 Hydra, the sky is the limit. Having good music and a good team of creative that knows the web from 3D, behaviors to cloud computing makes a magic potion ready to spawn new ideas.

What needs to be changed in order to achieve ultimate engagement with users:
People are spending less and less time with the page they are visiting so content-rich banners are delivering superb value to their visitors. Analytics, tracking the behaviors, knowing what’s on the page, learning about your visitor and giving specific choices will improve your ROI. Videos where the user is the hero, more human-to-human contact and information that can be shared on many screens (mobile, TV, computer) will eventually boost any campaign.

Favorite Brand Experience:

Recently, it has got to be the latest Chanel Banner takeover. The production and quality is really good and I love to see video banners like those. It pushes the brand where it should be.

The impact of the recession on online advertising:

It’s been more than a year that the recession is in marketing and advertising. Some are cutting their spending but I think this is not what to do in the long term for when the customers will come back. Recessions are the ideal time to renovate your techniques and approach. Figure out what is working, what isn’t? Eliminate what isn’t good and analyze your efforts. Think long term. Strategies must be integrated and measurable. Be people-focused, not products and services focused, be the brand not a seller. Build great experience that understand what each customer’s wants and needs. Put your brand in front of buyers with networking, talks, congratulate community’s heroes and of course collaborate with smart resources are always an excellent way to learn and share.

The importance of display and search is best seen as a conversation that happens between a consumer and the brand – you become aware of something and seek information, often from 3rd party independent reviews. Consumers and brands are media neutral; a TV ad drives online search drives in store purchase… So with this in mind we cannot lock all consumer experiences into simple robotic conversions, like click-thru to site. Less than 0.5% display clicks followed by a 70% onsite abandonment rate is grossly inefficient. Whereas at least 5x conversions happen as a result of post-view compared to post-click, the art as all advertising is in that striking emotional connections that push a consumer through a conversion cycle – just not always seen immediately. 995 out of 1,000 ads are not clicked, yet 30% of all paid searches can be attributed to happening after being exposed to a display ad first. Think TV driving laptop searches, for example.

Online goes deeper than mere exposure; at least 10% of all ads are touched – and this sees 5x conversion in banner over on site conversion if you include such functionality as you are hitting a wider target group and facilitating them to respond where they are. Taking this further, understanding if the consumer has been exposed to the brand message or is already a “client” facilitates different messaging to be shown to them that is more relevant – but the real sequencing effects happen with display and search. “That’s a great phone, where did you get it… is it available as pay as you go… how does it compare to contract” we see a consumer exposed to a message (display), the desire is investigation (search) which is targeted in sequence (comparison site) which all drives a consumer through a conversion life-cycle towards conversion. Allowing the system a degree of auto-optimization, sequencing messaging, adapting to each individual and allowing conversion in banner, on site or in store is the heart of the channel connect strategy.

It’s about taking knowledge from video content streams, frequency of standard display, enhancement of interactive creative’s, consumer desire to research before purchase, as well as discovering prior exposure and as a result of this more targeted message, being able to claw back greater ROI and reduce those inefficiencies – on a macro global cross-agency level, down to a micro campaign exposure per consumer.

Eyeblaster Channel Connect for Search (CC4S) is open source connectivity to “any” paid search provider to consolidate conversion data across all display and search exposure.

Capitalizing on the open-source nature of the development of the web, Eyeblaster’s CC4S means you are not locked down into having to serve display and search through the same vendor. This means it allows advertisers and agencies the flexibility to work with multiple partner relationships in existence whilst monitoring the consumer life-cycle. It works alongside a global campaign management system to allow multiple agency relationships across territories, so being able to consolidate disparate sources of data and assist analysis by language or region. It is a totally independent solution away from publisher ownership to give you a unique perspective, whilst confidence in the only ad server to achieve compliance for IAB’s Media ratings council across the breadth of online display. Integrated into live campaign dashboard, simple customizable reports, Excel interfaces and PowerPoint summaries to give you and your agencies the insights you need.

Will it change things? I think we are just scraping the surface of linking all display and search media, such as TV to PC search or Outdoor to mobile search – all delivering the next sequenced message across channels. Search and display is what online marketers have been waiting for since pay-per-click went mainstream 10 years ago – a real value proposition linked to actual consumer behavior, and places click effectiveness in its natural environment – i.e. search. I think we are only just entering a whole new phase of consumer understanding to deliver advertiser benefits.

Dean Donaldson | Digital Experience Strategist

http://tinyurl.com/cc4s-conversion-analysis

http://tinyurl.com/imedia-value-of-display

Take a look at the insightful Brandweek interview with Pepsi’s Bonin Bough, who oversees all things tweet, blog and YouTube-related.  He discusses why the Dear Mr. President Campaign was so effective.

Here’s an excerpt from the full article:

“BW: The “Dear Mr. President, Refresh Everything” social media campaign (where consumers could upload a video through an ad banner)-how big of a success was that for PepsiCo? Why did it work so effectively?�
 

BB: It speaks again to giving people a platform to share their thoughts. And that’s really important. Just look at YouTube. If you really think about it, it’s the largest broadcast network in the world, and in such a short amount of time, too. People are willing to share if they are given a structured opportunity to do so. That was a change mindset we tapped into. It was phenomenal program that drove a ton of interest. It spoke worlds to the fact that Pepsi is about enabling experiences via the music platform.”

Original May 7th Post:

Congratulations to all Webby winners, including R/GA and Pepsi for the revolutionary Dear Mr. President Campaign, which enabled viewers to send a personal message to the President via webcam in banner.

We previously wrote about this groundbreaking campaign here in the blog

For the second year in a row, Eyeblaster has been selected as the ‘best technology’ by the Spanish digital marketing industry.

The voting for the awards, organized by Interactiva magazine, is a mixture of public votes and a monthly jury vote. Voting takes place throughout the year and is followed by the entire Spanish digital marketing industry. The development of the results is published on a monthly basis in the Magazine and it is considered a very prestigious acknowledgement.

I am personally thrilled with this award, especially in a year where we saw many very cool technologies competing for the best technology award. And of course, a second time win is even sweeter.

I am grateful to our clients and to the professionals in the industry, who demonstrated such confidence in Eyeblaster. The show of support was also for the hard work given by our service and support teams who strive to ensure that technology is not a cold interface, but that it is delivered with a human touch by a company who is there, always, in order to make sure everything is done the best way possible.

¡felicidades! to all
Oded Lida, Latin Region Manager