von Roland Hachmann | Nov 19, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Online Advertising
Jason Calacanis writes about the „real story“ of Advertising 2.0:
The real story of Web 2.0 has little to do with the bells and whistles and everything to do with the stunning growth of online advertising.
He provides a graph with online ad spent per year since 1997 and puts a straight line from ’97 until today, which is, of course, a steep, straight line. (I hope he doesn’t analyse his real money investments the same way!)
He also doesn’t think that the spike over the past year is another bubble, but instead says that the curve is just getting steeper in future, for the following reasons:
a) there are more advertisers online today.
b) it’s getting easier to spend money online
c) Google Adsense/Adwords (a huge part of part B above)
d) Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Google reaching scale, which in turn allows major advertisers to reach comparable audience sizes to TV
e) audiences shifting from TV, radio, and magazines to the Internet.
All of these seem plausible. Of course one might say: „we thought the same back then in 2000, just for different reasons“, but Jason also shows a second graph with a line ca. 15% less steep, which still is impressive. He suggests to believe the long-term hype and I agree.
Growth rates are probably going to be huge for while. Not necessarily because the medium is more attactive than others (though I think it is at least for some purposes), but purely because there still is a long way to go, until the medium is an everyday medium like the other media – both for the broad audience and for marketers.
(via)
von Roland Hachmann | Nov 14, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News
Logic+Emotion points me to the WOMMA Releases Blog Ethics Guidelines:
This document is a public draft of guidelines for marketers to follow when doing outreach within the blogosphere. It is neither a „how to blog“ nor a „what to blog“ document. Rather, its intent is to give clarity and guidance to marketers who are working and corresponding with bloggers, and to ensure that their efforts adhere to the standards set by the WOMMA Ethics Code.
1. I will always be truthful and will never knowingly relay false information. I will never ask someone else to deceive bloggers for me.
2. I will fully disclose who I am and who I work for (my identity and affiliations) from the very first encounter when communicating with bloggers or commenting on blogs.
3. I will never take action contrary to the boundaries set by bloggers. I will respect all community guidelines regarding posting messages and comments.
4. I will never ask bloggers to lie for me.
5. I will use extreme care when communicating with minors or blogs intended to be read by minors.
6. I will not manipulate advertising or affiliate programs to impact blogger income.
7. I will not use automated systems for posting comments or distributing information.
8. I understand that compensating bloggers may give the appearance of a conflict of interest, and I will therefore fully disclose any and all compensation or incentives.
9. I understand that if I send bloggers products for review, they are not obligated to comment on them. Bloggers can return products at their own discretion.
10. If bloggers write about products I send them, I will proactively ask them to disclose the products’ source.
Good to have this summary, even though this really should be common sense, since it means: act honestly and transparently. A basic prerequisite when dealing with people. (In theory.)
von Roland Hachmann | Nov 11, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News
At Reuters there is a story of IBM moving into virtual worlds such as Second Life – with a considerable budget:
IBM is ramping up its push into virtual worlds with an investment of roughly $10 million over the next 12 months, including an expanded presence within the popular 3D online universe Second Life.
Now that is scary. Considering the still relatively small size of SecondLife, such an investment seems enormous. On the other hand, people already spend almost $1 mio. per day. (I had to check twice, coz I couldn’t believe it!) And who knows how much they’ll really spend in Second Life?
Apparently they have been active in this space already:
IBM has already established the biggest Second Life presence of any Fortune 500 company. It uses the world primarily for training and meetings but has also built a simulation of the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
One thing I found interesting, as further on they write about the adoption of VR within the regular internet user base:
„The essence of e-commerce today is built around the idea of catalogs. That’s very useful, it fits with the idea of Web pages and catalog pages, but most people don’t think of shopping in terms of catalogs and pages, but in terms of stores that they go into,“ said IBM chief technology strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger.
Well, I don’t necessarily agree with what Irving is hinting at. Switching on the computer and logging on to a virtual world still isn’t the same as visiting a real store to go shopping. Not with todays user interfaces anyway, which lack 3D presentation and have no haptic sensation at all.
But I am sure we will get there. It’s just a matter of T&T (time&technology), as always. And most likely we’ll someday smile when we look back at the days when we had to surf the net with screens, mice and keyboards, moving in a two-dimensional space with most of the content displayed in writing. I hope I will remember to link back to this post, once this has become reality.
(via PSFK)
von Roland Hachmann | Nov 11, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Online Advertising
Marketing.fm wants to revise a famous quote by John Wanamaker:
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. -John Wanamaker, US department store merchant (1838 – 1922)
I know the quote, of course, as I suppose everyone in advertising does. But I didn’t know it was of someone as unknown as this chap. On the contrary, I was almost tempted to assign the quote to Mark Twain, purely because lately if feels like most thoughtful quotes come from Mark Twain, as if he is some sort of a quote-goat anytime people don’t know the real source.
In the same blog post, they write:
The advent of interactive media and online measurement has allowed marketers to target advertising messages much more precisely. Morover, it is possible to access comprehensive data on the viewers of your campagin: page views, geographic location, clicks, links, etc.
Is it time that we revised the 50/50 Wanamaker quote? Should it be more like 70/30 now?
I ain’t sure that the hard measurements that the web provides, should redefine investments alone. This might sound strange coming from someone working in digital marketing. But if you think about it: applying these measurements, you de-value the web to a purely interactional medium (which it is, most of the time, admittingly). However, by that you omitt all the effects of the contacts people have with your brand that cannot be exactly measured:
- The impression an ad made with that one page view, even if the user didn’t click on it.
- time spent interacting with the ad piece all together
- triggered purchase consideration, fulfilled in brick&mortar store
Online Advertising can be measured and therefore it should be. Always.
But we should not forget, that there are so called key performance indicators that can help us understand the effect of advertising, and that can’t be measured by interaction, but purely by qualitative research. Asking the target audience about their perception of the brand, the channel interaction, etc.
Classical Advertising has been working with this kind of research all the time. And while it never helped to solve the puzzle of where the 50% of investments „got lost“, I think, purely relying on data measured through interaction, will not help either. It sounds more like a quick fix of Marketeers trying to answer tough questions by providing hard results – irrespectively of context.
von Roland Hachmann | Okt 12, 2006 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising
Joseph Jaffe is asking us to take part in his „exercise in futility“.
He asks us to leisurely watch television and then answer a few apparently easy questions:
- how many commercials in totality do you think you watched?
- how many commercials did you remember?
- of these commercials, how many brands did you remember (as opposed to „the one with the bunnies“
- of these commercials, how many do you think told you something you didn’t know, offered up something of value, made you think differently about the brand and/or made you want to buy (or consider to buy) that particular brand/product/service
- Bonus assignment: did any one or more commercials strike you as being particularly original, progressive, innovative in terms of message, call-to-action etc.?
I can see his point. But do take into account: if there was a similar questionnaire about regular online advertising, the result would be similarly bad (or even worse). If I read his book right, then his point is more about the irrelevance of this kind of advertising. Push advertising, unasked for, without any engaging element to it…
von Roland Hachmann | Okt 12, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing
Jakob Nielsen has some interesting views about the downsides of the 1% rule that I blogged about. In his article
Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities he lists those „Downsides of Participation Inequality“
The problem is that the overall system is not representative of Web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from. This can cause trouble for several reasons:
Customer feedback. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.
Reviews. Similarly, if you’re a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services.
Politics. If a party nominates a candidate supported by the „netroots,“ it will almost certainly lose because such candidates‘ positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).
Search. Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what’s useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building Internet access services.
Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don’t have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.
In addition, he also lists some point on „How to Overcome Participation Inequality“.
But the main point still is: you can’t overcome participation inequality. You can only optimise the way content is produced an sorted, trying to make it more suitable and/or relevant for the average users.
Wo ich sonst so bin...