Join Eyeblaster as we celebrate the best digital campaigns of 2009 at the 8th Annual Eyeblaster Awards. The polls are officially open to the digital media industry at large, so cast your vote for the People’s Choice Award here. This year’s awards feature new ways brands effectively connect with consumers across multiple channels in a variety of formats via Twitter, user-generated content, homepage takeovers, in-stream video and cross channel synergy.
The Eyeblaster Awards are among the most prestigious and longest running celebrations of digital excellence in online advertising, focusing on the work of creative and media agencies, advertisers and publishers worldwide. Winners will be announced at the Eyeblaster Awards bash at New York City’s Providence night club on November 4th, 2009.

And, the nominees for this year’s People’s Choice Awards are:
North America Nominees:

MTVW 2009, Volkswagen: Media Agency: MediaCom; Creative Agency: Crispin Porter Bogusky
Fedex Paper Crumble: Media Agency: OMD; Creative Agency: Atmosphere
Pringles Can Hands: Media Agency: Starcom P&G; Creative Agency: Bridge Worldwide
Pepsi – Dear Mr. President: Media & Creative Agency: R/GA
The Flaming Lips: Media Agency: Gary Group; Creative Agency: Pixel Hustler
International Nominees:

Odyssey Channel – Titanic: Media & Creative Agency: Remo
IKEA, Set the Table: Creative Agency: Mediafront, Media Agency: Mediacom NO
Chanel No5: Creative Agencies: Feed-London & Hi-Res!-London, Media Agency: MEC Global
O2 Joggler UK: Media Agency: Zed Media; Creative Agency: Agency Republic
Barclay Card: Media Agency: Walker Media UK; Creative Agency: Dare UK
This year’s international panel of judges includes Benjamin J. Weisman, Digital Director and Lead Strategist with Iris, Joshua Rowe, Digital Creative Group Head at M&C Saatchi (Australia), Adam Kleinberg, CEO of Traction, Sean X Cummings, Principal SXC marketing and Marcel.lÍ Zuazua, Herraiz Soto & Co (Spain).
Visit here to submit your ballot and click here to register for the November 4th party. Voting ends October 30, 2009.

Overall, people spend more time on Instant Messaging (IM) and on content sections of web pages, such as news, finance and sports, as compared to email and social networks. Furthermore, the longer people spend on a web page, the higher the likelihood that they will interact or engage with your ad.

The more time users spend with an ad displayed on the web page that they are viewing, the higher the likelihood that they will touch it, interact with it and engage with it. An analysis by Eyeblaster Research indicates that news, finance, sports and homepages have the highest Average Ad Duration. They are also among the highest in Dwell Rate.

Apart from instant messaging, communications and social networks tend to be low on Average Ad Duration and Dwell Rate. As a typically desktop application based environment rather than a browser based environment, instant messaging is an odd bird; it is an outlier in Average Ad Duration, and relatively midway in terms of Dwell Rate. Mail and especially social networks have lower than average ad duration and a low Dwell Rate.

Average Ad Duration measures the average amount of time that the ad was displayed on the browser or the application, in seconds. In browser based environments, the ad duration can also be used as a proxy for the time spent with the site displayed. It does not, however, indicate that the user was looking at the site the whole time.

Dwell Rate measures the proportion of impressions that were actively touched or engaged with out of served impressions. Unintentional touches and interactions are excluded. Higher Dwell Rate means that users have not only seen the ad, but also have showed interest by touching it, expanding the panel, playing the video or interacting.

Eyeblaster Research’s study results on time spent by environment/section concur with a study published last month by the Online Publishers Association (OPA). The OPA tracked how users spend their aggregate time on websites. While at Eyeblaster we measured the Average Ad Duration as a proxy for the duration that a web page was viewed, the OPA has aggregated the time that an average user spends with Web pages and IM applications across environments.

The OPA’s Internet Activity Index indicates that consumers spend more time with content rather than community sites and communications. The study indicates that the proportion of time spent on content sites increased from 34% of total time spent in 2003 to 42% in 2009—a 24% increase.

Based on the analysis, the OPA found that the percentage of time spent online with Web sites providing news, information and entertainment, like NYTimes.com, ESPN.com and Edmunds.com (Content sites), has grown even in the rise of community sites such as Facebook. Moreover, communication sites offering email and IM have decreased in their share of online time spent due to the ability to conduct these activities elsewhere.


Ariel Geifman | Research Analyst

Eyeblaster CEO and Co-Founder Gal Trifon was recently interviewed by Laurie Sullivan in OMMA Magazine. He describes the significant investment made to develop MediaMind by Eyeblaster and bring it to market. Click here to read the full interview in MediaPost.

As part of our Favorite Brand Experience series, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Beth McKnight, Interactive Programmer at McKinney.

Your idea about the perfect working day:
I love working at McKinney, so coming to work is never “work”. A perfect day would involve brainstorming technical and visual ideas for a cool new website with our awesome Creative Directors. Then I would spend the rest of the day writing code and working with graphics to create some really great work for our clients.

What needs to be changed/improved in order to achieve ultimate engagement with users?
We need to move beyond the keyboard and monitor to provide interactive experiences where people can interact in an intuitive way as they go about their daily lives.

Favorite Brand Experience:
I love the France Up expandable banner and background takeover. The background takeover is so eye-catching. Changing the whole background of the site draws attention and conveys a message, without getting in the way of why the user initially went to the site.

How did you start working in digital advertising?
I started out as a Marketing Assistant where I was asked to do some work on the company website. I enjoyed the work so much, I went back to school for a degree in Digital Technology. I’ve enjoyed programming ever since.

Who do you admire?
I follow a lot of people in the Flash/ActionScript world, but I particularly enjoy the work of Grant Skinner , who pushes the limits of ActionScript, and Erik Natzke , who creates beautiful works of art with code.

Or that is at least the conclusion of the new Eyeblaster Research study: Global Benchmarks. With publishers pushing bigger and bigger ad sizes on their websites, we at Eyeblaster Research wanted to examine if size can actually assist advertisers to reach consumers more effectively.   This is a topic that involves industry heavy-weights such as IAB, that has added a new giant ad—720×300—its largest so far, and The Online Publishers Association (OPA) that has also introduced new giant sizes:  The 336×700 (Fixed Panel), 468×648 (XXL Box) and 970×418 (Pushdown).

It actually sounds intuitive:  As in a museum, the bigger canvases are harder to miss.  Our study shows that this makes sense for Standard Banners, where height and width are the only two major variables of visibility.  The analysis shows that on average, larger Standard Banners perform better than smaller ones in terms of CTR, the only applicable metric that measures this format.

However, the story is not as simple for Rich Media—where there is more to attract the eye than just size.  The study found no link between size and performance in Rich Media both when measured in Dwell metrics and when measured in CTR.

This makes sense—Expandable Banners, for example, inflate their size when a user rolls over his mouse or clicks on them; once a user has engaged with them, the original size is no longer relevant.  The human eye’s tendency to be attracted to movement makes lavish flash and video attract the eye more than size.  Our research confirms that adding video increases effectiveness measured in Total Dwell more than switching to a larger size.

This study is one of the most comprehensive of its kind, comprising more than a quarter of a million ads worldwide.  Ads participating in this analysis are from all sizes, formats and markets, and were served between Q3 ’08 and Q2 ’09. 

This research accompanies the new edition of the Eyeblaster Benchmarks, and is a part of our commitment to transform the data gathered by Eyeblaster to industry knowledge.  In addition to providing insights, this new format of the Eyeblaster Benchmarks covers more markets and countries; breaks-down formats to unit sizes, and provides more comprehensive definitions for the verticals and metrics.

Click here to download the Eyeblaster Global Benchmarks 2009 research.


Ariel Geifman | Research Analyst