Why advertisement?

The first ad in the US was printed in 1704 - an announcement seeking a buyer for an Oyster Bay, Long Island, estate, was published in the Boston News-Letter.
Since then advertisement in the US was born and grow a lot.
The USA's first television advertisement was broadcast July 1, 1941. The watchmaker Bulova paid $4 for a placement on New York station WNBT before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. The 10-second spot displayed a picture of a clock superimposed on a map of the United States, accompanied by the voice-over "America runs on Bulova time."
Ads had always two main targets. Either to build a brand awareness or to attract the consumer with a call to action. Till 1994 the action CTA was a phone number a consumer could call or some coupon in the ad to cut out and to redeem at the store.

But then came the internet.
When HotWired decided to make money from their website in 1994, they set in motion events that would come back to haunt us all: The creation of banner ads.

AT&T was the first to dish over some money to HotWired to display the beast they created, a 468 x 60 banner that came to life on October 25 1994 (source the longest domain name)

The world's first banner was quite the ugly thing as seen below, it directed the consumer to an ATT website.




Internet display advertisement changed a lot since then and gave brands much better statistics about the effects of the ads. Before then, brands had to hire companies like Nielsen to get some statistics about their TV or Radio ads. The method is simple. Take 2000 test consumers and watch them or ask questions.
But with internet it changed and the term CTR was created. Brands could instantly see how many people clicked on their ads.
Yahoo and Google figured out that a click is more important than just showing an Internet ad, because it is easier to measure how many people did click than how many people did recognize the ads.
Therefore brands only pay per click at google, which can cost as much as $200 dollars.
Almost the rest of the world is charging by reach (cost per 1000 views) and marketer then calculate the effective costs by clicks.

At the end Internet is not much different than radio, TV or newspaper.
If a product is promoted on every page the consumer surfs, then this product will burn in the consumer brain and the consumer will eventually buy the product

Trying to think in CTR only would be a very disappointing exercise. In average a click through rate is maybe around 0.12%. And then out of these people 1% might buy a product online directly.

Display ads are building brand awareness not only CTR. For Goggle it is different, they have on their search engine only text ads, it is hard to build brand awareness without logo and visual message.

Soon companies did understand that just having ads is not enough. The ads needed to be targeted to either consumer type and behavior or to content.
They learned that consumers are recognizing brands more if they are in context to the information on the website.
But internet advertisement is in the most part much more difficult and complex than radio or TV advertisement. The reason is that internet users are pro active. They search for something, they read or they communicate.
TV or radio users are just consuming. They listen and watch as a part of getting entertained or to relax. We click commercials away but we are used to them. In the Internet we feel disturbed by ads. This is the big advantage for google text ads we don't recognize them always as ads and click many times on them because we believe that behind the link is the answer of our search.

I believe brands are going to sponsor more and more articles or recipes instead of having display ads. Imagine we print a recipe we like and one of the items is named as Hershey chocolate, would we buy a different chocolate?

Facebook is a good chance for companies to reach many consumers, but being one of the ads on the right rail is not the answer. People in Facebook want to communicate or learn about friends, ads have no space for this. But brand pages within Facebook are important but only if the brands understand to communicate with their consumers. I see Facebook as an important part of advertisement. Similar like complains hotlines, they helped to get consumers trust. In the 90es was a study that companies without a hotline for complains had less consumer trust and more negative news than companies with hotlines.

Facebook is able to allow brands to rebuild trust and to let consumers be a part of a product. However brands should not concentrate on trying to sell something through Facebook. Consumers would not like this, if they get the feeling it is all about selling.

Just having a brand page in Facebook and Facebook connect on their websites is not the answer neither. Maybe now, because it is new, but not in the long run.

The Facebook page needs to be update frequently, and more important, it should not be censored what fans are writing. The Facebook page needs to have personality, spelling errors or uncommon entries are desired. Trying to run each entry through a QA and management sign off will take the personality out of the page.

The same for other social networks and Twitter and blogs. Companies need to jump over their shadow and trust their employees. No tweet will be read when it sounds like advertisement. No blog will be tagged if it is just about selling to consumer.

Biggest success for brands will come from consumer trust and believe.
It is not about how many users did click on an ad and buy a product. It is about how many consumers will remember a brand when they go shopping and it is about how many users will buy a product they would never have bought before.

Display ads can help to build the awareness and Facebook and Twitter can help to transport the message inside and outside of the digital world.

Display ads will not go away but their measurement will be different. A big reason for this are social networks like Facebook.
Internet is still young and we are still trying to figure out how advertisement should and could work the best. What will be the right format?

To be honest i have no idea, i am still trying to figure it out. If somebody has an idea please write it here, i would like to hear it, I mean read it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Did you see, the Twitter ads?

As i wrote last week, Twitter is starting to have advertisement on their page. Twitter will more than double their advertisers till end of the year. An advertiser has to pay up $100k for a day lockout (means exclusive advertisement).
Twitter will have three types of advertisement revenue streams.
Search results ads (as shown in screenshot which I finally could snag), banner ads in their mobile applications and ads in featured tweets.



All ads are clearly defined as ads (as "promoted by XYZ")

Twitter is serious with their ad business, they went from 3 sales people to 30 and still hiring (http://twitter.com/jobs). Chicago seems to need still a few Sales people.
Coca Cola and other twitter advertisers are reporting much higher click rate from over 5% in comparison of 0.12% market average.
Twitter ads are like google ads, no money necessary for creative in the ads which keeps the production costs low.
But new Twitter webpage allows now prevue of videos and images in the text tweets which give advertisers new great platform to be creative. When you click on a tweet, you can see in the right rail the video for the embedded link.


Twitter will eventually extend their ad system for small companies that they can book local tweet ads through a website and pay with credit cards.

I believe the click rate is right now so high because it is new, not many ads displayed and user don't know what to expect. But even if the click rate goes down to normal it could be a good revenue stream. Twitter has over 160 million users, there must be a way to make a lot of money. Even if Twitter does only generate a revenue of $1 per user, it would be $160 million with a staff of 300 people. This is over $533K per employee which is more than Adobe does per employee (click to see source). Twitter would be in top 30% of NASDAQ companies per revenue by employee.

But Twitter must get their offline problems under control. Half of my tweets (and i don't tweet a lot) are not getting through because of technical issues at Twitter.
Twitter has nevertheless improved its uptime in the last 12 months. The site was up 99.30% (down around 61 hours) in the last 12 months, according to Web monitoring firm, Pingdom. In 2008, according to Pingdom, Twitter was down for 84 hours, worst of 15 major social networking sites. 61 hours down can cost a lot of money and confidence.
Most people might not like if they can't tweet but more important users will stop using the twitter website if the downtime does not get better.

In comparison, Facebook was up 99.85% with a much bigger and complex system.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Sound is the new click and touch

The world is changing and smart phones are helping a lot to change the world.
More and more applications for the iPhone and Androids are using sound for interaction instead of touching or clicking on banners.

Last night I watched one of my favorite shows "Eureka". During the show an ad came up to tell the audience to start their Shazam application to get exclusive videos from the show.
Shazam is an app which listen usually to music and gives the user the name of the song and author back. It is a pretty nice app, for people like me, who never know any songs. It is easy to use, you start the app hold the phone in front of a speaker and hit the button. 10 seconds later the info is on the phone screen.
This time, with Eureka, it gave me much more info back and worked perfect.







Pretty amazing how advertising is combining TV and smart phones and using sound for this.

If would have to put in a code or scan an image on the TV it would have been too much work, but starting an app without leaving the bed is perfect.

This is not the first time that an app is using sound to tricker certain things on your phone. The first time i saw, was with the Best Buy movie mode app. The app will translate the hilarious minions talking, when you run this app in selected 3D cinemas. The translation is text only that other movie visitors don't get disturbed.

Sony has for their 51 blue ray video an app which will give the user specials when watching the movie.

And then there is kickbucks. An app to collect points in stores. You can either get points by scanning barcodes or through sound.
The idea is that certain stores have multiple speakers installed in different places of store. The app will collect points, whenever the user is close to one of the speakers. The person might go to the dressing room and gets 50 points. These points can be redeemed through the app at the offered stores.



The idea with sound is great because it has better proximity than GPS. GPS is only as good as 20 meters and not working well in buildings. With sound you can get better results.
The application works impressive well, however you can fake the system if you have two iPhones. One is using iAnalyzer to record and play sound and the the other is running kickbucks. However it only works if you are in or close to the store.
But I was able to collect 1200 points instead of only 50 points.

Bottom line is, that companies are understanding that there is much more possibilities than just clicking on a screen or typing with keyboard to interact with customer or target audience.

The next iPhone will have a RFID reader which opens much more for the world, especially for retail stores.

The Internet stores started to take consumers away from brick and mortar stores. Smart phones and their apps will take the consumer away from the Internet stores but bring them back again to the b&m stores.

Smart phones are helping to combine online and offline into one new type of shopping experience.


- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

YouTube gets mature

If nobody did notice but YouTube is doing a lot more advertising on their website. The most obvious is the above the fold 960x250px ad on the landing page, which is ad served by doubleClick which got acquired from Google in 2008 for $1 billion.
Further more there are some banner ads on the right side of the page.




But the most interesting advertising approach is a perfect approach.
Whenever somebody is uploading a video which has copyright content, YouTube will ask the copyright owner if they should take the video down or instead leave it on. If the video stays on, YouTube will serve ads on the video (pre roll, post roll and localized banner ads)

The content and copyright owner will get a revenue share from google. This is a great idea, instead of deleting unwanted content YouTube will use it to make money. It is like making your enemy to your friend and make money out of it.

The strategic head behind is Salar Kamangar, YouTube’s co-head, who also co-founded Google’s AdWords search advertising program.

Remarkably, more than one-third of the two billion views of YouTube videos with ads each week are like TomR35’s “Mad Men” clip (see image below) — uploaded without the copyright owner’s permission but left up by the owner’s choice. They are automatically recognized by YouTube, using a system called Content ID that scans videos and compares them to material provided by copyright owners.


Those two billion views, a 50 percent increase over last year, according to the company, are just 14 percent of the videos viewed each week on the Google-owned site. But that’s enough to turn YouTube profitable this year, analysts say.

“YouTube is a big component of our display revenue, and display is our next big business,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in an interview.

In the last year, the video site has become a significant contributor to the family business at a time when Google, which makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from text search ads, is seeking a second act. Though Google does not report YouTube’s earnings, it has hinted that it is hovering near profitability. Analysts say YouTube will bring in around $450 million in revenue this year and earn a profit. Revenue at YouTube has more than doubled each year for the last three years, according to the company.


- Posted using My iPad

Location:W Laurel St,Tampa,United States